The fight for commercial dominance above planet Earth moves up a level this evening when the European space flight programme launches its most ambitious craft yet.
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The Ariane Ariane 5-ESCA, whcich is due to blast off from French Guyana tonight. Photo: Arianespace
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The Ariane 5-ESCA plans to blast off from the European Space Agency (ESA) launch base in Kourou, French Guyana. The launch window time is 22.21 to 23.04 (Irish time).
It will take up two satellites, Hotbird TM7 for the European telecoms consortium Eutelsat, and Stentor, an experimental communications satellite for the French space research institute CNRS.
The scheduled launch follows those of two US rivals: Boeing's Delta 4, which was launched on November 20th, and Lockheed Martin's Atlas 5, which made its maiden flight on August 21st.
The trio form the vanguard of the most powerful generation of rockets to go into space since the mighty Saturn V blasted the Apollo astronauts to the Moon.
The ESA hope a successful mission will put them ahead of US companies in the battle to build a new generation of ultra-powerful space rockets for the fiercely competitive satellite launch market.
In their biggest planned design, the Ariane rockets will tower over 227 feet above the launch pad and boast a capacity to place more than 13 tonnes of cargo into geostationary orbit.
The system also opens the possibility of modules being launched into space and clipped together, to provide a spaceship for an interplanetary manned mission.
New launchers take up to a decade to develop, and when the Ariane, Delta and Atlas giants were conceived, the market for satellite launches looked bright and its potential unlimited.
Today, though, the market has shrunk, partially as a result of the bursting of the telecoms bubble, which has left huge amounts of cheap capacity in fibre-optic cable, the alternative to satellites for transmitted big data streams.
AFP