The French government is investing €25m to upgrade the Ariane 5 launcher and add up to two meters in payload height for Arianespace’s customers.
More volume under the rocket’s fairing will help address the trend of geostationary telecoms satellites…
The French government is investing €25m to upgrade the Ariane 5 launcher and add up to two meters in payload height for Arianespace‘s customers.
More volume under the rocket’s fairing will help address the trend of geostationary telecoms satellites getting larger as they become more powerful and complex.
Arianespace chairman and CEO Stéphane Israël said the upgrade will be ready by 2015 and will come with no performance penalty.
“Through this upgrade, whose cost has been kept to a minimum, Arianespace will be able to keep pace with market requirements and continue to meet our customers’ expectations,” he said.
“There is a tremendous amount at stake for the launcher industry, which counts over 10,000 employees in France and in Europe. I would also like to thank ESA and CNES for immediately supporting this programme, for which Arianespace recently expressed a need. And I would also like to emphasise the commitment of the European space industry, in particular our prime Astrium and Ruag, the fairing supplier, to deliver this upgrade in 2015, while keeping costs under control.”
The funding will come from France’s Investment Program for the Future, or Programme d’Investissements d’Avenir (PIA).
As Russia climbs back following a series of Proton rocket failures, Arianespace has been enjoying a string of launch successes, adding weight to its claims that the Ariane 5 is currently the most reliable launcher on the market. As of 4 September, the French company had completed 57 consecutive launch successes. In all, the Ariane-series rockets have undertaken 215 missions, 71 of which have been with the Ariane 5.
With a backlog of 19 Ariane 5, 10 Soyuz and four Vega rocket missions, the group said it had about three years of business in the pipeline.
Earlier this year prime contractor Astrium received €108m of contracts to upgrade the Ariane 5 once again, as well as cover feasibility studies for a new heavy-lift rocket called Ariane 6.
The next upgrade for Ariane 5 will be a more complicated procedure that will ultimately boost its launch capacity by a fifth for the same cost. The company aims to launch the maiden flight of this revamped vehicle, dubbed Ariane 5 ME, in 2017-2018.
