What happens at the European spaceport in French Guiana with Russian rockets?
While Europe has finally regained access to space with the debut of the Ariane 6 launcher, there is an issue to be resolved with the Russian Soyuz rockets at Europe's Kourou spaceport
Russian Soyuz rockets clog the European spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
This is what Politico reveals, underlining the urgency of making a decision on what to do with the launchers, stuck there for two years, to make room for new European-made rockets in the space center of the European Space Agency (ESA).
On February 26, 2022, the Russian space agency Roskosmos suspended cooperation with Europe on space launches from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana in response to Western sanctions on Ukraine. At the time the European Union had downplayed the repercussions from the interruption of launches by the Russian Soyuz rocket from Kourou. In reality it didn't go that way at all.
For the first time in decades, the Old Continent did not have a launcher to bring its satellites into orbit. Beyond the retirement of Ariane 5 after its last flight in July 2023, Ariane 6 has been delayed and with its debut constantly postponed (from the initial launch forecast in 2020), while Vega remained stuck on the launch pad following the failure on 20 December 2022 of the first commercial flight of Vega C (the European light launcher designed and produced by the Italian Avio). Since then, European satellites have been sent to SpaceX or put in the hangar, waiting for the new Ariane.
This situation was finally interrupted on 9 July when ESA launched the Ariane 6 for its first test flight. The mission has been a notable success and, with the medium-sized Vega rocket, jointly developed by ESA and the Italian Space Agency, scheduled to launch at the end of the year, the number of missions from the spaceport is about to increase drastically, reports Politico .
We therefore need "space" in the center in Guyana, it is urgent to find a solution for the Soyuz stuck in the hangars.
All the details.
THE AGREEMENT BETWEEN RUSSIA AND EUROPE FOR THE KOUROU SPACE CENTER
Just north-east of Kourou, in French Guiana – an overseas department of France – lies the European Spaceport, chosen by the French government in 1964 as a satellite launch base and currently home to the Ariane and Vega launcher families, developed by ESA.
Since Kourou is located just 500 km north of the equator, it is ideally placed for orbit launches, as rockets achieve superior performance thanks to a slingshot effect due to the Earth's rotation speed. Furthermore, there is no risk of cyclones or earthquakes.
In 2005, ESA and Roscosmos made an agreement to fly the Russians from French Guiana.
SOYUZ LAUNCHERS BLOCKED IN THE EUROPEAN SPACEPORT IN FRENCH GUYANA
But, as already mentioned, in the aftermath of the war in Ukraine, the Russian space agency blocked all Soyuz rocket launches from the European spaceport in French Guiana.
Locked away in silos in a corner of the spaceport are at least two disabled Russian Soyuz-2 rockets, according to four officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to Politico .
For its part, the French space agency Cnes said the rockets were safely stored on the grounds of the spaceport. “There are no plans to send them back to Russia,” read an emailed statement.
“There is some sort of deal in the works,” said one of the officials familiar with the talks. “We need the space.” But this raises major geopolitical questions, according to the newspaper.
HOW TO DO?
“The prospect of loading precious, heavy rockets, each worth $80 million and weighing about 100 tons, onto a barge and shipping them back to Russia is politically problematic,” Politico argues.
“There is a fully assembled one [Soyuz-2 in a warehouse] because at the beginning of the war in Ukraine the launch was scheduled in a few days,” the official told Politico , adding that negotiations over what to do with the rockets “are carried out at a very high level”.
To further complicate matters, since Roscosmos has deployed its own engineers to install and fuel the Soyuz-2 rockets, the CNES and ESA teams are not trained to dismantle and move them, the newspaper further specifies.
NEED TO FIND A SOLUTION SOON
But the Russian launchers need to be moved because there are plans for private rocket companies to use the former Roscosmos area at the northern end of the spaceport, according to Politico . This is part of CNES and ESA's efforts to free themselves from traditional dependence on large state programs and move towards a more American way of doing business, focused on offering a boost to smaller, more agile startups. Rockets built by companies such as Spain's PLD Space, France's MaiaSpace and German duo Isar Aerospace and Rocket Factory Augsburg are likely to lift off from the center soon under the startup plan, Politico claims.
Without forgetting that with the official debut of Ariane 6, the spaceport will resume operations after the pause of recent years: the plan includes six launches of Ariane 6 next year, together with three Vega missions. This is a return to the launch cadence of previous years.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/che-cosa-succede-nello-spazioporto-europeo-in-guyana-francese-con-i-razzi-russi/ on Tue, 23 Jul 2024 05:37:41 +0000.