The most important space launches have taken place in the USA, but Europe also has a pride, a symbol when it comes to space missions: the Ariane 5 rocket, which has proven to be extremely reliable and still has no replacement. Why does Ariane 5 deserve a special place in history?

Europe’s Ariane 5 rocket, which first took off in 1996 and was built by 12 countries, will make its final flight, number 117. It will take place on Wednesday and will launch two satellites. into orbit: one French military connection and the other experimental, German.

When the Ariane 5 made its first flights, the moment when a certain Elon Musk was going to launch reusable rockets that could reduce the cost of a launch below 100 million dollars was still far away.

Ariane 5 was a model of precision and reliability with a supplier network set up like a Swiss watch. In 27 years, there were only two failures, and the number of successes exceeded 100.

Several launches will go down in history, and the ultimate proof of Ariane 5’s reliability is the fact that NASA entrusted it with the launch of the James Webb Telescope, which was sent into space on Christmas Day 2021. The project worth 10 billion US dollars is entrusted to the Europeans.

Also, with the help of the Ariane 5 rocket, the JUICE probe was sent to Jupiter and its natural moons in April 2023, the journey there lasted more than seven years.

In March 2004, the Rosetta probe and the Philae lander were also launched on the Ariane 5 rocket, which will spend ten years near comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The Philae robot made history when it successfully landed on the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko and sent back images from there, although there were problems at first and the harpoons did not attach properly.

In addition, in the fall of 2018, the BepiColombo mission (prepared by ESA and the Japanese Space Agency) was launched using an Ariane 5 rocket to send a probe to the planet Mercury, where few probes have come close, requiring very difficult gravitational maneuvers. In 2025, we should see the most interesting pictures of Mercury.

Europe is in trouble again because it no longer has a single orbital rocket at its disposal: the Ariane 6 project is behind schedule and the rocket will make its first flight in 5-6 months, and the flights of the Vega-C rocket are ending. suspended for some time, after a series of failures of the small-caliber launcher.

This moment is a balancing act for the European space industry, as Soyuz rockets could no longer be used due to the ban imposed on Russia, which led to a reduction in the activity of the base in Kourou (French Guiana) from 15 launches in 2021 to six in 2022 .

190 of the 1,600 jobs at the space base have been eliminated because the new rocket requires less maintenance and less manpower.

Sources: AFP, space.com, ESA, SpaceNews.