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Baikonur, Kazakhstan (AFP) Aug 15, 2005 In its fight to remain on top of the worldwide market for satellite launches, the European group Arianespace is allying itself with Russian rivals, whose rockets and launch sites are complementary with its own. When on Sunday the company's Starsem division launched Galaxy-14, a two-tonne US telecommunications satellite, the lift-off took place not at Arianespace's usual site at Kourou in French Guiana, and not atop one of the European Space Agency's Ariane range of launchers. The US satellite went up on a Soyuz rocket from this Kazakh space center, just three days after Arianespace placed the Thaicom-4 satellite in orbit atop an Ariane-5 rocket from Kourou. At 6.2 tonnes, Thaicom-4 was the heaviest commercial satellite ever built. "Our policy is to offer a range" of launch possibilities, said Jean-Yves Le Gall, the managing director of Arianespace who supervised both launches. His company aimed to lift "all kinds of satellites into all kinds of orbits," he said. Arianespace added to its own launch capacities in 1996 by creating Starsem, a Euro-Russian company which holds exclusive rights to international operations for Soyuz rockets. Arianespace owns 15 percent of the company, while the European company's parent group EADS holds 35 percent, the Russian federal space agency Roscosmos has a 25-percent stake and Russia's Samara space centre holds the remaining 25 percent. A venerable workhorse among launch vehicles, Soyuz models have been fired into space 1,669 times, with a success rate of 98 percent since the historic first flight with the Soviet Sputnik satellite in 1957. "Soyuz is becoming more and more integrated into the range of Arianespace launchers," Le Gall told reporters. The Ariane series used in Kourou currently comprises the Ariane-5, used for launches of more than three tonnes, and the Ariane-5 ECA, which can carry a payload of 10 tonnes, the equivalent of two big satellites. In 2008, the company is to begin launching Soyuz rockets from its home base, which is much closer to the equator than Baikonur and thus better for putting satellites into geostationary orbit. The combination allows Arianespace to offer greater availability than its main competitor, International Launch Services of the United States, which uses another Russian rocket, the Proton. The Galaxy-14, launched for the US operator PanAmsat, "was to have been launched by an Ariane-5 but for reasons of availability, we decided to go with a Soyuz," Le Gall said. Galaxy-15 is scheduled to go up in late September aboard an Ariane rocket. On that occasion it will share the payload compartment with Syracuse 3A, a 3.8-tonne French military telecoms satellite. In all, five Ariane-5 launches have been programmed for this year from Kourou, of which two have already taken place, along with three Soyuz shots from Baikonur. The fifth of those Ariane launches could nonetheless be delayed until early 2006, Le Gall said. By the end of the year, Soyuz is to launch the European Space Agency's Venus Express probe and a demonstration model of the future European navigation satellite Galileo. All rights reserved. © 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse. Related Links Starsem SpaceDaily Search SpaceDaily Subscribe To SpaceDaily Express 
EU Clears Boeing/Lockheed Martin Space Launch Joint Venture
Brussels (AFP) Aug 09, 2005The European Union's executive commission said Tuesday that it has cleared a joint venture in space launch services between US defence contractors Lockheed Martin and Boeing. |
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