PARIS: Europe's workhorse Ariane 5 rocket blasted off for a final time on Wednesday, with its farewell flight after 27 years of launches coming at a difficult time for European space efforts.
Faced with soaring global competition, the continent has unexpectedly found itself without a way to independently launch heavy missions into space due to delays to the next-generation Ariane 6 and Russia withdrawing its rockets.
The 117th and final flight of the Ariane 5 rocket took place around 22:00 GMT on Wednesday from Europe's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
The launch had been postponed twice. It was originally scheduled on June 16, but was called off because of problems with pyrotechnical lines in the rocket's booster, which have since been replaced. Then Tuesday's launch was delayed by bad weather.
The Wednesday night flight went off without a hitch, watched by hundreds of spectators, including former French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira, and was greeted with applause.
Marie-Anne Clair, the director of the Guiana Space Centre, said that the final flight of Ariane 5 was "charged with emotion" for the teams in Kourou, where the rocket's launches have punctuated life for nearly three decades.
The final payload on Ariane 5 is a French military communications satellite and a German communications satellite.
The satellite "marks a major turning point for our armed forces: better performance and greater resistance to jamming," French Minister of the Armed Forces Sebastien Lecornu tweeted.
Though it would become a reliable rocket, Ariane 5 had a difficult start. Its maiden flight exploded moments after lift-off in 1996. Its only other such failure came in 2002.
Herve Gilibert, an engineer who was working on Ariane 5 at the time, said the 2002 explosion was a "traumatic experience" that "left a deep impression on us".
But the rocket would embark on what was ultimately a long string of successful launches. The initial stumbles had "the positive effect of keeping us absolutely vigilant," Gilibert said.— AFP
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