The long recovery from a launcher crisisby Jeff Foust
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| Arianespace plans five launches of the Ariane 6 this year, but only one has taken place so far. |
At the time, the European space industry and key officials hailed the successful test flight for restoring European access to space after a gap caused by delays in the Ariane 6, retirement of the Ariane 5, the loss of access to the Soyuz rocket after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the grounding of the smaller Vega C rocket after a failure in late 2022 (the Vega C did return to flight late last year.) The launcher crisis had forced ESA and the European Commission to, reluctantly, turn to SpaceX to launch science and navigation satellites on the Falcon 9.
“You can imagine,” Josef Aschbacher, director general of ESA, said of the first Ariane 6 launch at the Farnborough International Airshow a couple weeks later, “how important this success was for all of us. For ESA, for space in Europe, it was really huge.”
That success now appears to be not as huge as it was then. The Ariane 6 has flown only once since then and its ramp-up to its full flight rate appears to be taking longer than expected. Meanwhile, an effort to help diversify Europe’s launch industry by supporting new entrants has reached a critical stage ahead of funding decisions later this year.
Achieving cadence ten
Since Ariane 6’s debut, the rocket had made just one other launch. In March, an Ariane 6 launched a French spysat, CSO-3, into low Earth orbit. Like the first two satellites in the series, CSO-3 was originally manifested to launch on a Soyuz but shifted to the Ariane 6 after Russia halted Soyuz launches from French Guiana in 2022.
The launch was the first of five that Arianespace, the operator of the Ariane 6, has planned for 2025. That manifest, though, is backloaded to the second half of the year, with the next launch, of a Eumetsat weather satellite, scheduled for no earlier than August.
David Cavaillolès, who became CEO of Arianespace in January after the departure of longtime CEO Stéphane Israël, reaffirmed those plans in a panel discussion at the Paris Air Show last month, although he did not give a firm schedule of launches and their payloads.
That manifest includes the first flight of the Ariane 64, the version of the Ariane 6 with four strap-on solid rocket boosters; the first flights have been of the two-booster version, Ariane 62. Getting the Ariane 64 flying is critical for Arianespace’s largest customer, Amazon, which has booked 18 flights of that rocket for deploying part of its Project Kuiper broadband constellation.
“We are preparing this launch based on the lessons learned from the Ariane 62 launch,” Martin Sion, CEO of Ariane 6 prime contractor ArianeGroup, said of the upcoming debut of the Ariane 64 during the same panel. “All the teams here and in Kourou, and everywhere in the supply chain, are doing the maximum to make this happen.”
Executives, though, offered mixed messages about how they will scale up Ariane 6 launches. The goal is to get to a flight rate of ten per year, a level fixed by manufacturing capacity of various vehicle components.
“We need to go to ten launches per year for Ariane 6 as soon as possible,” Cavaillolès said during the panel. “It’s twice as more as for Ariane 5, so it’s a big industrial change.”
| “In ’29, when we start deploying IRIS², which is a milestone program, we’ll be more than for sure at cadence ten,” Cavaillolès said. |
He did not, though, offer a more precise schedule for reaching what he called “cadence ten,” or ten launches a year. “Everybody is extremely motivated, but we want to do it step by step,” he said. “First we have to deliver on ’25 and this is a big challenge, so we focus on that.”
He went so far as to suggest that ramp-up could be relatively gradual. Asked what “as soon as possible” meant in terms of a year, he said only that Arianespace planned more than five Ariane 6 launches in 2026. “In ’29, when we start deploying IRIS², which is a milestone program, we’ll be more than for sure at cadence ten.”
IRIS² is the secure connectivity constellation that the European Commission, ESA, and private industry are developing to avoid another dependency on American (specifically, SpaceX) systems. Arianespace plans to conduct 13 launches of IRIS² satellites in 2029 and 2030.
It’s not clear what that means for Project Kuiper and its 18 launches, as Amazon faces regulatory deadlines to deploy its constellation. Cavaillolès noted the overall backlog of 30 Ariane 6 launches, which includes other commercial and government customers, “means that we have years and years of activity in front of us.”
He added that there is strong government, or institutional, interest in Ariane 6 that has only grown since the start of the Trump Administration and the close relationship the president had, at the time, with SpaceX founder Elon Musk. Notably, after the CSO-3 launch in March, the Arianespace webcast included comments by Philippe Baptiste, former head of the French space agency CNES who is currently minister for higher education and research in the French government.
“Ariane 6, carrying the CSO-3 satellite, is proof of our space sovereignty,” he said in the prerecorded comments, after thanking all involved in the success of the mission. “We are facing a new global reality in the space sector. The return of Donald Trump to the White House, with Elon Musk at his side, already has significant consequences.”
“If we want to maintain our independence, ensure our security and preserve our sovereignty, we must equip ourselves with the means for strategic autonomy,” he argued.
Speaking at the Satellite 2025 conference less than a week after the CSO-3 launch, Cavaillolès said his company was seeing stronger interest from European governments in Ariane 6. “We should see an increase an institutional demand,” he said. “Clearly, today we see that the market, especially the institutional market, is growing faster than the supply.”
He appeared then to leave the door open for increasing the Ariane 6 launch rate beyond its current projected maximum of ten a year. That would require investments in manufacturing to enable production of more vehicles.
“For sure it will require investment. I’m quite convinced that we can deliver a stronger return on investment,” he said then.
 Isar Aerospace’s Spectrum lifts off on its inaugural flight March 30. (credit: Brady Kenniston/Isar Aerospace) |
European Launcher Challenge ramps up
At the Paris Air Show, one other topic of discussion about European launch capacity involved efforts to support emerging companies. Earlier in the year, ESA formally kicked off the European Launcher Challenge, a program that will offer funding for companies developing smaller vehicles to conduct launches of institutional payloads and to develop upgraded vehicles (see “Europe’s launch challenge,” The Space Review, March 31, 2025.) Selected companies could receive up to €169 million ($198 million) each.
| “Quite a few member states are preparing their decisions in case their candidates are selected as being brought forward for funding at the ministerial conference,” Ashcbacher said of the European Launcher Challenge. |
Proposals were due to ESA in May for an evaluation of their technical and business feasibility. The agency initially said little about that effort. At the Paris Air Forum conference just before the Paris Air Show, Lucia Linares, head of space transportation strategy and institutional launches at ESA, said she could not disclose details about that evaluation because it was ongoing.
“We’ve had a lot of interest coming, and we are happy to see that the companies that we know about have made their bids,” she said. “I will not go into how many exactly.”
Her boss, though, could. “How many proposals have been submitted for the launcher challenge?” said Aschbacher at the Paris Air Show panel when asked. “I can give you the answer: it was 12.”
The European Launcher Challenge is structured differently than other ESA programs, which have followed the “georeturn” approach where countries are guaranteed contracts in proportion to the amount of funding they provide. Instead, ESA would select a group of eligible companies, and countries could then decide which to support at the upcoming ministerial conference in late November, where ESA member states will decide on funding levels for various programs for the next three years.
Thus, the ongoing evaluation at the time of the Paris Air Show was a downselect. “It will be that not all 12 of these proposals will go the ministerial,” Aschbacher said. “I cannot predict how many will be left after this evaluation period and therefore how many will go to the ministerial.”
“Quite a few member states are preparing their decisions in case their candidates are selected as being brought forward for funding at the ministerial conference,” he said.
He did not identify which companies submitted proposals, but the number indicated that nearly all the European startups working on launch vehicles had done so.
Aschbacher said that ESA would announce which of the 12 would go forward in a “couple of weeks,” while Toni Tolker-Nielsen, ESA’s director of space transportation, offered after the panel a specific date: July 7.
And indeed, on July 7 ESA announced that five companies would go forward: Isar Aerospace, MaiaSpace, Orbex, PLD Space, and Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA).
The five are among the leading launch startups in Europe, although none has yet made it to orbit yet and only Isar has attempted an orbital launch: the inaugural flight of its Spectrum rocket, from Norway in March, suffered a loss of attitude control about 30 seconds after liftoff, with the rocket falling into waters adjacent to the launch pad moments later. PLD Space successfully launched its Miura 1 suborbital rocket in 2023, while RFA suffered the loss of the first stage of its first RFA ONE during a static-fire test last August.
The selected companies provided limited details about what they proposed to ESA for the challenge. RFA said its submission included both launches of its RFA ONE rocket and development of an upgraded Block 2 version of the vehicle with increased payload capacity. “This is a major milestone for us - and a strong vote of confidence in our technical roadmap, commercial strength, and long-term vision,” the company stated.
PLD Space said its proposal “perfectly aligns” with the plans the company laid out last October to both offer services using the Miura 5 small launch vehicle in development and work on a family of larger reusable rockets called Miura Next. “The European Launcher Challenge marks a milestone for Europe’s space industry, but it is also a unique national opportunity to have a Spanish prime leading launcher development,” Ezequiel Sánchez, executive president of the Spanish company, said in a statement.
Orbex, based in the UK, offered few specifics about its plans, although the company continues to work on its Prime small launch vehicle and has proposed a larger vehicle, Proxima. The company has argued that development of Proxima is important for the company to be competitive on the global market.
“Microlaunchers can never compete in price per kilo” against larger vehicles, said Miguel Bello Mora, chairman of the board of Orbex, at the Paris Air Forum panel. “Medium size is where we target.”
Neither Isar Aerospace nor MaiaSpace, a spinoff of ArianeGroup, have disclosed details about their plans for the European Launcher Challenge. Isar Aerospace announced last month it raised an additional €150 million from an American investor, Eldridge Industries, that it will use to scale up production of Spectrum, with the near-term goal of performing a second Spectrum test flight before the end of this year.
| “It’s a pretty weird program,” Maximin said of the challenge. “In my opinion, it will be used by some countries to subsidize companies that don’t need subsidizing, like MaiaSpace or Isar.” |
MaiaSpace is working on a small launcher whose first stage is reusable. “The market for microlaunchers exist. There are a lot of people who are interested in a taxi, provided the taxi can be the price of the bus,” Yohann Leroy, CEO of MaiaSpace, said at the Paris Air Forum panel, discussing how reusability could help the company’s vehicle compete with less expensive rideshare options like SpaceX’s Transporter.
Right after the panel, Leroy headed to the company’s facilities outside Paris, where he hosted a delegation of several French government ministers. There, Leroy said the company planned to construct a new factory at the site for producing the vehicle, with support from the French government.
Among the companies not selected for the next phase of the European Launcher Challenge was Latitude, another French company, which is working on its Zephyr rocket. That small launch vehicle, capable of putting up to 200 kilograms into orbit, could be ready for its first launch as soon as the third quarter of next year, said the company’s executive chairman, Stanislas Maximin, in an interview during the Paris Air Show.
While Latitude submitted a proposal to support work such as upgrading the payload capacity of Zephyr, he was skeptical about how useful the competition would be. “It’s a pretty weird program,” he said, noting it appeared aimed to help companies that have already raised a lot of money.
“In my opinion, it will be used by some countries to subsidize companies that don’t need subsidizing, like MaiaSpace or Isar,” he said. “That doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
He was still hopeful, though, that Latitude would make the cut in the competition, noting that preparing for it had helped the company, based in the French city of Reims, build relationships with European partners.
Around the time of the Paris Air Show, Latitude made several announcements, including plans for a larger facility in Reims for mass production of Zephyr—up to 50 per year by the end of the decade—as well as use of a launch site in French Guiana and contracts with new customers. None of that was dependent on willing the European Launcher Challenge, he said, but added that “we feel like we are in a good position to win it.”
One other event reminded Europe that it had not completely shaken off its launcher crisis a year after the Ariane 6 debut. Last Tuesday, a Falcon 9 lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center, placing into orbit the MTG-S1 weather satellite for Eumetsat.
The launch came a year after Eumetsat said it was moving the MTG-S1 launch from the Ariane 6 to Falcon 9 to ensure the spacecraft would launch in 2025. At the time, other European officials criticized Eumetsat for the decision, saying it showed a lack of confidence in the Ariane 6 and undermined the European launch sector.
The decision, though, appears to have been the right one for Eumetsat. Had it stuck with Ariane 6, the satellite might still be on the ground, although Eumetsat agreed to use Ariane 6 for future satellite launches.
The Falcon 9 launch was the first of a doubleheader that included a second launch from neighboring Cape Canaveral Space Force Station less than ten hours later carrying a batch of Starlink satellites. With those two missions, SpaceX has performed 83 Falcon 9 launches so far in 2025, more than eight times the projected peak annual launch rate for the Ariane 6.
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