ESA's Heavy-Lift Rocket Carries Out Final Launch

The final launch of an Ariane 5 rocket was carried out from Kourou, French Guiana, on Wednesday, July 5, the European Space Agency said.

The final flight placed the German aerospace agency DLR’s Heinrich Hertz experimental communications satellite and the French communications satellite Syracuse 4b into their planned orbits.

The rocket launched at 7 pm local time on Wednesday, the ESA said, with the mission taking 33 minutes from lift-off to release of final payload.

The Ariane 5 series launches began in 1996. The rocket system has been used 117 times in its lifetime, the ESA said.

The heavy launcher more than doubled the mass-to-orbit capacity of its predecessor, Ariane 4, the ESA said. Ariane 5’s capacity enabled it to orbit two large telecommunications satellites on a single launch, or to push very large payloads into deep space.

Development of Ariane 5’s successor, the Ariane 6, began in late 2014. However, the rocket still faces “a number of technical challenges,” ESA director Josef Aschbacher told Politico. Credit: ESA – European Space Agency via Storyful

Video transcript

[NO AUDIO]