It has been more than 5 years since we started working on the Ariane 6 control banks contract. Taking into account that it is a family consisting of 8 main benches (the CBLP for CNES and CBREP-CBUL-CBP52-CBSR1-CBSR2-CBLL1-CBLL2 for ArianeGroup) plus some that have emerged during the project (the 3 VADOR), and that the development logic has been iterative (we started with Core 0, which has been followed by Core 1, Core 2 and the complete Core 3), there have already been many milestones passed since that distant month of July 2016. Core 3 is the last version that completes all the functionalities foreseen on the Ariane 6 control benches and will be the one used for the technical and operational qualification tests, in which they will communicate with the other base systems will be real allowing to advance on the way to the first FM1 launch, currently planned at the end of 2022. The last weeks of the year have been intense finishing the Core 3 validation tests on the different benches and achieving customer acceptance with a high level of satisfaction, especially for having achieved a real family of benches based on a common core, a goal that was not achieved in A5 . In November it was the turn of CBLP 3.2 and this last week of December it was the turn of ArianeGroup's AIT banks, for which the transfer of ownership from the industrialist to the customer has already been made. We still have a few months of work to do with the latest modifications and new functionalities to be added to the CBF, but we are now facing the final stretch before moving on to the maintenance and operation phase of the system, which we hope will keep us almost as busy as in development.
