WASHINGTON — Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket has completed a fuel test and countdown test, the last major milestone before its inaugural launch in July.
The European Space Agency said on June 21 that the agency and its partners completed a wetsuit test at the launch site in French Guiana the previous day. In the test, the rocket was loaded with liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen and went through a countdown that stopped just before the engine ignited.
“The wet suit test is the final milestone before launch,” Guy Pilchen, ESA’s Ariane 6 launch vehicle project manager, said in a statement. The test, common with new launch vehicles, allows vehicle teams to “fine-tune the delicate operations required up until liftoff using the actual flight hardware and software of the actual rocket,” he noted.
The test was originally scheduled for June 18, but was delayed two days. ESA officials said at a June 19 briefing after the ESA Board meeting that the slip was not related to any major problems and would not delay the vehicle’s inaugural launch, announced earlier in the month for July 9.
“Preparations for the inaugural flight are going really, really well,” ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said at the briefing. This included closing the remaining issues from the vehicle’s qualification review, completed on June 14, and installing the payload and fairing on the rocket’s upper stage the same day.
“There is no stopwatch, so everything is running nominally, but of course there is still a lot of work to be done on the inaugural flight,” he said.
ESA’s statement on the completion of the wetsuit test added that analysis of data from it would continue until June 26. ESA has also scheduled a series of media briefings on June 25 to discuss pre-launch preparations.
Ariane 6 is crucial to ESA’s efforts to end the “launch crisis” that has temporarily deprived Europe of independent access to space. The crisis was caused by several factors, such as delays in Ariane 6 development that pushed its launch until after Ariane 5’s final launch nearly a year ago, problems with the Vega C rocket that grounded the vehicle since the failure a year and a half ago, and the loss of access to the Soyuz rocket after the Russian invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago.
In November 2023, ESA announced an agreement for the “stabilized use” of Ariane 6 and Vega C, which included the provision of 340 million euros ($364 million) a year in financial support for Ariane 6. The agreement requires the companies developing Ariane 6 to reduce their costs by 11% .
“We’re well on our way to that,” Aschbacher said of that reduction at the briefing. “A lot of discussions have taken place with some key suppliers,” he added, with “good progress over the last few days.”
“We’re making steady progress,” said Toni Tolker-Nielsen, ESA’s director of space transportation, about this cost reduction. He said the unnamed German vehicle partner had agreed to implement this price cut, “so it’s a big step forward.”
The November 2023 agreement also called for the transfer of responsibility for Vega C launch services from Arianespace to Avio, the rocket’s main supplier. Avio management said last month that discussions about the transfer were still ongoing.
Aschbacher said ESA had been called in to mediate negotiations between the two companies in recent weeks on an agreement to hand over Vega C operations at the request of one of the companies. “The conditions for the transfer of Vega C from Arianespace to Avio are clear,” he said. “We’ve made tremendous progress and we’re very close, I would say, to closing the open items.” He did not elaborate on the issues that required mediation by ESA.
The ESA board was supposed to pass a resolution approving the transfer at a meeting that ended on June 19, but Aschbacher said the board would instead hold a separate meeting by the end of the month to finalize the transfer.