Ariane 5

The vehicle was conceived as an expendable launcher at CNES, the French space agency, in cooperation with European partners, and its manufacture was led by Aérospatiale and later ArianeGroup at the head of a multi-country contractor consortium. Although counted within the Ariane family, it is not a direct derivative of its predecessor. It was meant to launch the Hermes crewed spaceplane, which is why it was rated for human spaceflight, a requirement that shaped its design even though Hermes never flew. Operated by Arianespace, it lifted off from the Guiana Space Centre and served geostationary transfer orbit, low Earth orbit and escape trajectories.

The cryogenic main stage, known as the EPC, consisted of a tank 5.4 m in diameter and 30.5 m tall split into two compartments, one for liquid oxygen and one for liquid hydrogen, with a Vulcain 2 engine of 1390 kN vacuum thrust at its base. Two solid propellant boosters of roughly 277 tonnes each were attached to its sides, delivering on the order of 7080 kN and burning for 130 seconds before dropping into the ocean. Across the successive versions — G, G+, GS, ECA and ES — the stack ranged between 46 and 52 m in height, for a liftoff mass of 777 000 kg. The SYLDA system allowed two large communications satellites to share a flight, and SPELTRA up to three somewhat smaller payloads, with small auxiliary passengers riding on the ASAP platform.

The first flight, on 4 June 1996, was a famous failure: the rocket self-destructed 37 seconds after launch because of a fault in the control software. What followed was very different. Between 9 April 2003 and 12 December 2017 it recorded 82 consecutive successful launches, a streak that cemented its commercial standing, and it flew 117 times in all.

After the flight of 15 August 2020, Arianespace signed the contracts for its final eight launches before handing over to Ariane 6, in development since 2014 and first launched in 2024. One of those closing flights, on 25 December 2021, sent the James Webb Space Telescope towards its halo orbit at the Sun-Earth L2 point. The last Ariane 5 mission lifted off on 5 July 2023.