The European Space Agency announced on Thursday that it will use SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets to launch two science missions due to delays to its own Ariane 6 rocket and canceled flights on Russia’s Soyuz launch vehicles.
ESA’s Euclid space telescope was due to launch next year on a Soyuz rocket, but in February Russia pulled out in response to European sanctions over Moscow’s war in Ukraine.
Euclid, which aims to better understand the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter, will now take a ride into space on the Falcon 9 rocket from billionaire Elon Musk’s American company SpaceX.
ESA’s Hera mission, which will probe the asteroid Didymos that NASA managed to deflect off course in September by crashing the DART spacecraft into it, will launch on a Falcon 9 in late 2024, the director general of ESA said. ESA, Josef Aschbacher.
The use of other launchers was “a temporary measure” for the ESA due to “the abandonment of Soyuz in particular”, but also the delay of Ariane 6, Aschbacher said during a press conference.
ESA previously used a Falcon 9 to launch the European-developed Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich radar altimeter satellite in 2020.
Euro-Japanese observation satellite EarthCARE had also planned to reach space on a Soyuz rocket, but will instead take ESA’s new, lighter Vega-C launch vehicle in early 2024, Aschbacher said.
Tensions over the war in Ukraine have also led to a long postponement of the once joint Euro-Russian ExoMars mission. It was due to launch last month using a Soyuz rocket to put the European rover Rosalind Franklin on Mars to drill for signs of life.
David Parker, director of human and robotic exploration at ESA, said a 2028 launch date for ExoMars would be proposed to the agency’s 22 member states at a ministerial council in late November.
“It’s been exactly a month since we would have been at the launch, which was scheduled for September 20,” he said at the press conference.
“But now we will have to wait – if ministers wish to go ahead with the project – until the launch in 2028, with a landing in 2030,” he said.
Ariane 6 still delayed
Thursday’s announcement came a day after ESA revealed that Ariane 6’s maiden flight had been delayed again and will launch in the last quarter of next year.
Initially scheduled for 2020, Ariane 6’s maiden flight was previously pushed back by the Covid-19 pandemic as well as development difficulties.
It is hoped that the highly successful Ariane 5 replacement will eventually support ESA’s Soyuz missions. Once in service, it is likely to compete with SpaceX rockets, especially when it comes to sending small satellites into the sky.
Some 18,500 satellites weighing less than 500 kilograms are expected to be launched into space over the next decade, according to consultancy Euroconsult.
Progress has been made in recent days on Ariane 6, including a test of the new upper stage of the rocket engine at a German space site in Lampoldshausen.
Aschbacher said the first 45-second test shot was “extremely successful”, calling it a “significant milestone”.
A test model of Ariane 6 was also recently successfully assembled on the European Spaceport’s launch pad in Kourou, French Guiana.
Video: Ariane 6 launch pad tests
© 2022 AFP
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