FLUG REVUE March 2003: Arianespace in dire situation

ARIANESPACE FACES CRISIS

By Matthias Gründer

The misfortunes of the European Ariane 5 launch vehicle, its operating company Arianespace and its sponsor ESA had already begun long before the fatal failed launch of 11 December 2002 when, after an earlier launch had had to be aborted, failure of the Swedish engine nozzle in the first stage ended in an explosion far above the southern Atlantic. Some 600 million Euros of actual damage was caused by the loss of the new 10 tonne Ariane 5+ and the two telecommunications satellites it was carrying.

Even more serious, however, was the loss of image, the harm done to customer confidence which there is little prospect of restoring under present market conditions. The reaction of the ESA head office was delayed until mid-January, when a halt to further development of the Ariane 5, including the 12 tonne version that was already planned, was announced. But according to ESA Director General Antonio Rodotà, speaking at a press conference in Paris, the Kourou catastrophe was not the reason for this decision, only the occasion.

Quite apart from this incident, he said, in the stagnant market for commercial telecommunications satellites there was no need for heavy-duty launch vehicles in the next few years, and the existing basic Ariane 5 model could satisfy all the expected orders for some years. The financial resources earmarked for Ariane development could be more sensibly used elsewhere, given the general need to make cost savings. Yet those responsible in the European Space Agency, especially its Director General, the representatives in the Council at Ministerial Level and all the experts, must now be asking, if they have not already done so before, whether it really required such a catastrophe to arrive at this recognition.

Even though it was evident from the collapse of the once highly praised mobile communications programmes that the market would not follow the rosy growth path that was still being forecast ten years ago, the decision was taken in Europe to terminate the flexible Ariane 4 family and to build a heavy-duty class of launch vehicles that was not needed. Are we to believe that no one in the whole of Europe foresaw this fiasco? Even if mission V-157 had succeeded, a glance at the orderbooks would have shown that Ariane 5 had hardly any customers. The last Ariane 4 has been delivered, and an extensive shedding of labour, euphemistically described as a "structural adjustment”, is already under way in the European space industry. The result is that not only is the ambitious Rosetta mission a victim of a mistaken policy decision, but with it has gone Europe's reputation in the space community.

From page 38 of FLUG REVUE 3/2003

Last updated 15 February 2003

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