In less than a week, on Tuesday, July 9, the first Ariane-6 will take off from Guyana. It will be 3 p.m. in Kourou and 8 p.m. in Paris. This moment has been awaited for ten years, since Europeans, in 2014, realized that SpaceX, Elon Musk’s company, with its Falcon-9 rocket, was shaking up the rules of the sector by slashing launch prices. They had to react to this disruptor to avoid being crushed.
But the response was not as quick as hoped. The reasons were organizational constraints and hesitations over technological choices, against a backdrop of tension between the French and the Germans. “Let’s not hide it, the European space industry is at risk todaywarned Philippe Baptiste, president of the National Center for Space Studies (CNES), on June 13, during the Paris Air Forum. We need to have strong answers and challenges. This concerns both agencies and manufacturers, we need to be able to work differently, to bring out new players to move faster, because we have sometimes been too slow and we have missed technological developments.
The situation is all the more critical as the entire sector is now shaken by the Elon Musk shockwave, from launchers to satellite operators and manufacturers. When SpaceX weakened Ariane, it was France that seemed to be the most affected. Today, as this concerns the entire value chain, the whole of Europe is targeted., says Stéphane Israël, executive chairman of Arianespace. No one can accept this over-domination, and I am convinced that the actors will organize themselves to find alternatives.”
“Impressed and depressed”
In the meantime, Elon Musk never misses an opportunity to display his hegemony. In mid-March, on the eve of Satellite 2024, which brings together the entire space world every year in Washington, the billionaire invited around twenty of his clients to his Texan site in Boca Chica, where his giant Starship rockets are assembled and launched. That day, five of them were lined up in the assembly hall, their 120-metre height reinforcing the impression of gigantism. On the return flight to the American capital, he offered his guests, most of whom were satellite operators, to test the Internet connection provided by his Starlink constellation. « We are impressed and distressed », This was the general feeling as they left the plane. Impressed by the technical prowess of the future launcher, but depressed by the lead taken in telecommunications.
You have 78.83% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
