Europe lifts off from its launcher crisis

For the European space industry, the deafening rumble of the ascending rocket was a sigh of relief.

On the afternoon of July 9, an Ariane 6 lifted off on a long-delayed inaugural flight from French Guiana. The successful (or, more accurately, mostly successful) launch placed several smallsats into low Earth orbit, but the real payload was European confidence in its launch industry.

The liftoff took place just over a year after the final flight of the Ariane 5, which once reigned as the leading commercial launch vehicle. The retirement of the Ariane 5 marked a nadir in Europe’s “launcher crisis,” as Josef Aschbacher, director general of the European Space Agency, called the situation. With the Ariane 5 retired before the Ariane 6 was ready, along with the loss of the Soyuz rocket after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the grounding of the Vega C after a December 2022 launch failure, Europe effectively had no independent access to space.

“You can imagine,” Aschbacher said a couple weeks after Ariane 6’s debut, “how important this success was for all of us. For ESA, for space in Europe, it was really huge.”

Getting Ariane 6 off the launch pad was a major challenge for Europe’s space industry. Now it faces another: doing it again and again by ramping up production and operations of the rocket over the next few years. At the same time, the Vega C is preparing to return to flight to partially fill the gap from the loss, while a cluster of European startups are trying to get into the small end of the launch market despite limited demand.

Accelerating launch rates

In his comments at the Farnborough International Airshow in late July, Aschbacher called the launch a “100% success.” That excluded, though, a problem late in the flight, when an auxiliary propulsion unit (APU) malfunctioned, preventing a final burn of the upper stage’s Vinci engine that would have deorbited the stage. That stranded the stage, and two reentry capsules attached to it as technology demonstrations, in low Earth orbit.

Correcting the APU problem was not critical to the next Ariane 6 launch, carrying the French CSO-3 reconnaissance satellite, since that launch will not require multiple burns of the upper stage. However, it would be needed for later missions that do exercise the upper stage, such as the 18 launches under contract for Amazon’s Project Kuiper constellation.

“We could have done the second flight without correcting it,” Stéphane Israël, chief executive of Arianespace, said Sept. 16 during a briefing in Paris held in conjunction with World Space Business Week. “But we want to deorbit the second stage during this second flight, and to deorbit the upper stage we need to correct what has happened.”

The briefing took place the same day that the Ariane 6 task force, which includes ESA, French space agency CNES, prime contractor ArianeGroup and Arianespace, reported the outcome of the investigation into the APU problem. That review found one temperature reading in the APU exceeded preset limits, triggering a shutdown. The task force said that the problem can be corrected with software changes that will be incorporated ahead of the second Ariane 6 launch, scheduled for December.

Arianespace is then planning what Israël called a “progressive ramp-up” of Ariane 6 launches. The company expects to perform six launches next year and 9 to 10 launches annually by 2027, a steady state it proposes to maintain for the foreseeable future.

Arianespace needs that increase in launch rates to fulfill a backlog of nearly 30 launches for Amazon, European governments and other customers. “We are very busy up until ’28,” he said, with only a handful of slots available in the manifest until then. By 2028, he added, Arianespace may be lining up launches for the European Commission’s IRIS² constellation, depending on what form that communications network takes.

ArianeGroup is already working to scale up production. During a mid-September visit to an ArianeGroup factory in Les Mureaux, west of Paris, the core stage of the next Ariane 6 was nearly complete, with workers preparing to install the final section that includes the Vulcain engine. Components of several more Ariane 6 core stages were also under construction.

Company officials said there that they were planning a steady increase in production rates of the core stages, going from a current capacity of three a year to six next year and nine a year thereafter. The factory is designed to accommodate a high production rate, with a smooth flow of components from one phase of assembly to the next as well as the use of horizontal integration, which makes it easier for workers to access the vehicle.

Despite high demand for launch services, though, Israël said Arianespace does not contemplate launching more than 10 Ariane 6 vehicles a year. The bottleneck to higher flight rates is the production of the solid boosters, two or four of which are needed for each Ariane 6 launch.

“If we were to increase the cadence, we would have to invest a lot” in producing additional boosters, he said. “We can only do it if there is a sustainable business case.”

He suggested the company wasn’t convinced there was a business case for now. “We are not going to introduce on the market more than 9 to 10 in the coming years.”

Vega C transition

The second Ariane 6 flight is slated to take place just after the return to flight of the Vega C, which has been grounded since a launch failure in December 2022. That failure was blamed on a flawed nozzle in the Zefiro-40 motor used in the rocket’s second stage, requiring a redesign of the motor and new tests.

Both ESA and Avio, the prime contractor for Vega C, remain confident that the rocket could return to flight before the end of the year. Toni Tolker-Nielsen, ESA’s director of space transportation, said at a late August briefing that a schedule that supported a late November launch had held firm for more than a year.

“We’ve been following a plan that was set out in the middle of last year, and I’m very confident that we will be able to make it with Vega C’s return in the end of November,” he said.

He said then he was confident that the redesigned Zefiro-40 motor would successfully perform a second and final static-fire test in early October after a first successful test in May. That second firing took place Oct. 3, with ESA stating that initial assessments showed the motor operated as planned.

If that return-to-flight mission, carrying the Sentinel-1C Earth observation satellite, is successful, ESA expects Vega C to perform four launches in 2025 and five per year thereafter. That ramp-up will take place while Arianespace, which has been the launch services provider for Vega, transfers that responsibility to Avio.

The transition will be a gradual one. Israël said at World Space Business Week that Avio had now taken over the sales and marketing of Vega C, although Arianespace will remain responsible for operations of the next five launches, through a mission designated VV29 slated for late 2025.

“We will not be in charge anymore of the Vega launcher after the five coming launches, what has been called by some people as ‘Vexit,’” he said.

One complication with “Vexit” is the transfer of launch contracts that Arianespace had signed for Vega C launches beyond VV29. “We cannot make a forced transfer,” he said. Instead, Arianespace must instead propose to each customer a transfer, with the risk that the customer could instead jump to a competitor. But, he said, “we are very confident they will accept.”

Avio is also working to make that a smooth transition. The company announced in September it hired Marino Fragnito as its chief commercial officer and launch services director to oversee that transition. Fragnito was previously head of the Vega business unit at Arianespace.

Small launchers

The ramp-up of the Ariane 6 and Vega C comes as other companies seek a footing at the small end of the launch market in Europe, pressing ahead despite major technical and business challenges.

Those technical challenges were on full display Aug. 19, when German company Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) attempted a static-fire test of the first stage of its RFA ONE rocket. An oxygen pump in one of the nine Helix engines in the rocket caught fire, which spread and culminated in an explosion that destroyed the stage.

The setback took place just weeks before the company planned to perform its first launch, based on comments by operators of SaxaVord Spaceport in the Shetland Islands, where the test took place, and by executives with OHB, which owns nearly 65% of RFA.

“We wanted to launch within the next few weeks and months,” Stefan Brieschenk, co-founder and chief operating officer of RFA, said in a video posted a few days after the accident. That launch is now on indefinite hold as the company investigates the incident and builds a new stage, and the company confirmed it would not be ready to launch again until some time next year.

All eyes now are on Isar Aerospace and its Spectrum rocket. The company is testing the stages of the first Spectrum at Andøya Spaceport in Norway. “We have the entire vehicle already at the launch site,” said Stella Guillen, chief commercial officer of Isar Aerospace, during a panel at World Space Business Week Sept. 18.

If the stage tests are successful, she said all the company will need a license from Norwegian regulators for its launch. “We’re targeting for sure this year” for the launch, she said.

The conference showed there remained no lack of interest in small launch vehicles despite the technical difficulties and a market that has not grown as fast as predicted. Companies from France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom all discussed how they are pressing ahead with vehicles to serve small satellites.

Perhaps the most ambitious company is MaiaSpace, a spinoff of ArianeGroup that is working on a small launch vehicle whose booster is intended to be reusable. The vehicle can place 1,500 kilograms in sun-synchronous orbit in expendable mode and 500 kilograms if the booster is landed on a barge for reuse. The company is leveraging technologies like the ESA-backed Prometheus engine as well as the Themis project to test vertical landing technologies.

MaiaSpace announced Sept. 26 it won access to the former Soyuz pad in French Guiana and will spend several tens of millions of euros to refurbish it for use by its rocket. Launches could begin in 2026, although Yohann Leroy, chief executive of MaiaSpace, said during a visit to the company’s facilities outside Paris in September that the company would start with expendable launches and gradually test the systems needed for reusability over several launches.

It was clear at the conference, though, that the number of companies proposing small launch vehicle is far more than what the market can support, even with modest support planned by European governments. That’s particularly true given the launch rates some companies say they need to break even: Sirius Space Services, one French startup, said it needed to perform at least six launches a year of its Sirius line of rockets, while Latitude, another French startup, estimated it needed to do up to 20 launches of its Zephyr rocket.

The small size of European government demand for small launches will limit how many companies it can support. “Europe is one-fifth or one-sixth of the U.S.,” Leroy said of the size of the market, “and it is not anticipated that will change.”

That makes a shakeout in the European small launcher market inevitable. “I think there are a few conversations going on about consolidation. It’s a possibility,” said Guillen.

Some companies hope to win business from outside Europe despite strong competition from American companies like Rocket Lab, whose Electron dominates the commercial small launcher market. “Is there enough of a market in Europe? Probably not enough to sustain Orbex and me, but there is the whole world,” said Stanislas Maximin, chief executive of Latitude, appearing on a conference panel with U.K.-based Orbex, which is developing the Prime small launch vehicle.

Miguel Belló Mora, executive chairman of Orbex, shared his optimism. “I think there could be two or three companies in Europe easily.”

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