The European Space Agency’s 22 member states agreed past April 17 to a workaround to get Ariane 6 production in full swing despite a dearth of public sector launch contracts. ArianeGroup had reached an impasse with ESA, which is paying the Franco-German company to design and build the Ariane 6 rocket, after the number of expected government missions fell short of what was agreed upon early on in the program. ESA and ArianeGroup plan 14 missions with Ariane 6 during the transition from the Ariane 5, slated to take place from 2020 to 2023. Seven of those missions are expected to be public sector customers, but as the inaugural flight of Ariane 6 approaches in July 2020, European government customers have ordered only three launches. In an April 18 interview, Daniel Neuenschwander, ESA’s director of space transportation, said the agency’s member states agreed unanimously during a council session yesterday on the “founding conditions and the way we start the exploitation of Ariane 6.” “We came up with a certain point of what type of missions we are going to need to launch on Ariane 6 … [now] industry has to make sure that we have a number of Ariane 6s available to us for our European institutional use,” he said. André-Hubert Roussel, ArianeGroup’s CEO, told SpaceNews ESA’s decision assuaged the company’s concerns about not having enough demand to commence with full-scale production. “The resolution that they adopted provides us not the orders, but the guaranteed equivalent that we will be covered if these orders will not materialize in a reasonable time,” Roussel said of the seven missions. Ramping production With ESA’s new backing, Roussel said ArianeGroup should be able to have its next launcher built just in time for Arianespace’s first government customer: the European Commission. Roussel said Ariane 6 rockets are projected to take around two years to build, meaning ESA’s new resolutions concluded just in time to keep the launcher on track. “If you make a very simple calculation, starting from April 2019 means a second flight in April 2021,” he said. “This is exactly the time frame where the first [government] customer, the European Commission, wants to launch Galileo satellites. It was super important for us to be able to start to produce, otherwise we would have had to tell European Commission that we would not be on time.” Roussel said he is confident other government contracts will materialize to eventually fill the four expected public-sector missions. The German government has some Earth observation satellites that will need launch services, he said, along with future ESA and European Commission satellites. Roussel said there are several prospects for the first commercial launch of the Ariane 64, which is planned for 2021. Neuenschwander said ESA wants to have Ariane 64 as an option for its Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or JUICE, mission, but would only consider launching the science mission on the new rocket after seeing a commercial launch. JUICE is currently scheduled to launch in 2022 on an Ariane 5.
