PARIS — While Arianespace is committed to moving to its peak launch rate of the Ariane 6 “as soon as possible,” it may take several years for the company to reach that cadence.
During a panel at the Paris Air Show June 17, David Cavaillolès, chief executive of Arianespace, emphasized his desire to ramp up launches of the Ariane 6, which has performed two launches to date.
“We need to go to 10 launches per year for Ariane 6 as soon as possible,” he said. “It’s twice as more as for Ariane 5, so it’s a big industrial change.”
After the inaugural launch of Ariane 6 last July, Arianespace launched the second Ariane 6 in March, placing a French reconnaissance satellite into orbit. Cavaillolès reiterated earlier plans to conduct four more Ariane 6 launches through the end of the year, including the first launch of the more powerful Ariane 64 variant with four solid-rocket boosters.
However, he declined to offer a specific timeline for increasing launch cadence to 10 per year. “Everybody is extremely motivated, but we want to do it step by step,” he said. “First we have to deliver on ’25 and this is a big challenge, so we focus on that.”
“Next year, of course, we will do more,” he said, but suggested it might be a few years until it reaches its goal of “cadence 10,” or 10 launches per year. “In ’29, when we start deploying IRIS², which is a milestone program, we’ll be more than for sure at cadence 10.”
Arianespace expects to perform 13 Ariane 64 launches in 2029 and 2030 for IRIS², the European broadband secure connectivity constellation. However, before that it has a contract with Amazon for 18 Ariane 64 launches of its Project Kuiper broadband satellites. With Amazon facing looming regulatory deadlines for deploying that constellation, Arianespace is under pressure to increase the Ariane 6 launch rate.
Amazon is the largest customer in the Ariane 6 backlog, which includes more than 30 launches. “It means that we have years and years of activity in front of us,” Cavaillolès said of that backlog. He said the company expected to announce more launch contracts in the coming weeks and months.
That interest in Ariane 6 is coming from both government and commercial customers. “We see a lot of states, a lot of space agencies, wanting to develop their own space infrastructure because they don’t want to rely on other people,” he said. “For us, of course, this is an opportunity.”
Commercial operators, he added, “tell me that the current situation, the dependency on one actor — the situation of, let’s say, hegemony — is a big threat to them. It’s absolutely unacceptable to rely on only one provider,” a veiled reference to SpaceX. “For this reason, they want us to succeed.”
That makes the first Ariane 64 launch critical for the company, given that vehicle’s use for both Kuiper and IRIS². “We are preparing this launch based on the lessons learned from the Ariane 62 launch,” said Martin Sion, chief executive of ArianeGroup, the prime contractor for the Ariane 6, on the same panel.
He said he expected the first Ariane 64 launch in a few months, although some industry sources say that the launch could slip into early 2026. Cavaillolès also committed to a first Ariane 64 launch before the end of the year.
“All the teams here and in Kourou, and everywhere in the supply chain,” he said, “are doing the maximum to make this happen.”