The final launch of Arianespace's Ariane 5 lifted off from Europe’s spaceport in French Guiana at 22:00 UTC 5 July 2023/00:00 6 July CEST (19:00 local time) from launch pad ELA-3. This launch was the 117th mission for the heavy-lift launch vehicle that had been in service since June 1996. The last Ariane 5 carried two customer satellites to a geostationary transfer orbit, the two payloads were Heinrich-Hertz-Satellit from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) & SYRACUSE 4B for the French Direction Générale de l’Armement (DGA).
Heinrich-Hertz-Satellit
The Heinrich-Hertz-Satellit is a payload from the German Space Agency DLR. In a press release from the DLR they state the following use for the spacecraft;
"The satellite will enable experiments on communications, and antenna and satellite technologies developed and built by German research institutes and companies, that will validate these technologies for use in space or test them under real operating conditions for the first time.".
They also aim to have the spacecraft operate in geostationary space for fifteen years.
SYRACUSE 4B
SYRACUSE 4B is the second in a pair of satellites built by Thales Alenia Space and Airbus Defence and Space for the French defense procurement agency Direction Générale de l’Armement (DGA). The spacecraft was built on the Spacebus NEO platform, which enables state-of-the-art signal blocking and jamming defenses and has a designed lifespan of fifteen years in orbit. Not much more is known about SYRACUSE 4B as it is a military spacecraft.
A Gap in Europe's Access to Space
With the last launch of the Ariane 5 Europe now lacks any domestic operational launch vehicles for at least six months. Ariane 6 is a few years behind schedule with an optimistic first launch date in Q4 2023 and Vega-C has been delayed on its return to launch after a recent failure in testing and is now unlikely to launch before the end of the year. The European Space Agency (ESA) however has already moved some of its payloads to Space X's Falcon 9 rocket, such as the Euclid Telescope, amid all of the delays to its own rocket programs.
