The launcher, called the Ariane 5 ECA, designed to place payloads weighing up to 10 tonnes into geostationary orbit, was due to lift off in November.

"We are very close to our goal of returning the ECA to service," said the head of Arianespace Jean-Yves Le Gall, but he added that no one would forgive the company if the rocket was launched without every last detail having been checked.

The Ariane 5 ECA, with its increased capacity, can handle dual launches of larger satellites.

The Arianespace consortium of the European Space Agency (ESA) sees the ECA as a key tool in its struggle to dominate the market for satellite launches.

The fault which caused the Ariane 5 heavy rocket to be destroyed by technicians only minutes into its first flight was traced to its main rocket motor, a commission of inquiry said.

Members of the ESA approved funds for an emergency programme to fix the troubled heavy launcher in May 2003, a package worth 555 million eurosmillion dollars).

The decision paved the way for the redesigning of the Vulcan-2 engine, which was blamed for the disaster.

ESA leaders who met on Wednesday were "not able to come to a decision on the formal return of the Ariane 5 ECA to service," even though "99.5 percent of the work had been done," Le Gall said.

He said that since the failure of the Ariane ECA's maiden flight, five standard Ariane 5 rockets had been launched successfully, including ESA's tricky Rosetta mission involving a flight to a distant comet.

"Since our failure in 2002 it is worth noting that we have signed 15 contracts," Le Gall told journalists.

"We have the best order book in the business with 36 launch contracts for Ariane 5 and five for Soyuz," he said, putting this success down to Arianespace's offer "not only of a launcher, but of a launch service."

He said Arianespace would end the year with a turnover of more than 600 million euros (780 million dollars), up on the previous year, as well as a balanced overall net return.

Arianespace is the world's leading carrier of commercial satellites, accounting for 60 percent of launches.

All rights reserved. � 2004 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.

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