The Ariane 6 lower stage in the assembly hall at Kourou
Photo by: ESA
The European Space Agency (ESA) announced on Friday that the lower stage of its new Ariane 6 launch rocket had reached the launch vehicle assembly hall at Europe’s Spaceport, at Kourou, in French Guiana, on the Caribbean coast of South America. The Ariane 6 is ESA’s next generation space launch rocket.
The Ariane 6 upper stage was already in the assembly hall (both were transported on the same ship). The two stages are both in horizontal positions, and the next step, while they are still horizontal, will be to join them, to form the central core of the Ariane 6.
ESA described this development as “a major milestone and an exciting step forward”. While the Ariane 6 upper stage was built by the ArianeGroup factory in Bremen, Germany, the rocket’s lower stage was constructed by the company’s facility at Les Mureaux, in France.
After the stages are joined, the central core will be erected on the launchpad, where it will undergo tests, culminating in ‘hot-firing’ tests of its rocket motors. This test programme will also verify all the interfaces and operations between the new rocket and the ground systems in the Spaceport’s also new Ariane 6 launch complex.
“From arrival to hot-firing tests on the launch pad, operational procedures will mimic an Ariane 6 launch campaign,” stated ESA. The process will culminate with the first flight of the new launch vehicle.
The Ariane 6 lower stage is powered by a liquid-fuelled Vulcain 2.1 rocket motor. This is an upgraded derivative of the Vulcain 2 used by the Ariane 5. In addition to the Vulcain 2.1, the lower stage can have two or four solid rocket boosters attached to it. Altogether, this combination of liquid-fuelled rocket and solid fuel boosters can produce 135 t of thrust, in a vacuum.
The combination of the lower and upper stages will allow the Ariane 6 to reach a number of orbits on a single mission, and thereby to deliver more payloads into space. The point now reached in the programme, the agency affirmed, “is the result of intense preparation by ESA and its partners in Europe and at Europe’s Spaceport”. ESA is not an agency of the European Union.