A success! The applause was loud and the cheers abundant on Tuesday, July 9, in the Jupiter Mission Control Room of the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, where the first flight of Ariane 6 was being monitored. The program's four-year delay was now a thing of the past, with this launch restoring Europe's sovereignty in the space sector, an autonomy it had lost nine months earlier.

"It's a historic day for ESA. It's a historic day for Europe," said Josef Aschbacher, director general of the European Space Agency (ESA). "Ariane is back!" exclaimed Martin Sion, executive president of ArianeGroup, the launcher's manufacturer. "Europe is back," added Philippe Baptiste, president of the National Center for Space Studies (CNES). It was a successful launch, despite a hitch at the end of the mission, which should have "no consequences on the next launches," reassured Stéphane Israël, Arianespace's executive president.

This rocket is, first and foremost, a response to Elon Musk, who revolutionized the market a decade ago with his Falcon 9, disrupting prices and forcing the Europeans to react or risk being wiped out. As a result, the teams had eagerly been waiting for this moment for many months. "We now need to launch Ariane 6 as quickly as possible. Everything is ready," said Toni Tolker-Nielsen, ESA's director of space transportation, on the eve of the launch, summing up the general mood.

The countdown began at 3 pm on Monday. One of the symbolic moments in the early hours of Tuesday morning was the removal of the mobile gantry, an 89-meter-high building enclosing the rocket. Slowly, this metal scaffolding structure weighing 8,200 tonnes – almost as much as the Eiffel Tower – moved back more than 80 meters, revealing the rocket. It was a rainy and muggy outing, with clouds gathering over the launch pad and the surrounding savannah, which covers two-thirds of the Guiana Space Center's 600 square kilometers with forests and mangroves.

The tanks were then filled with liquid hydrogen at -250°C and oxygen at -180°C. The launch area was then evacuated, within a radius of 2 kilometers, due to the risk of acoustic damage during lift-off. The 180-decibel shockwave is so strong that it can shatter or crush the body. From the Jupiter center, some 20 kilometers from the launch pad, the operation was monitored by some 60 people controlling the flight parameters on their computers in front of a giant screen displaying multiple images and data.

The mission lasted almost three hours, "enough time to circle the Earth twice and test all the new functions, such as the repeated ignition of the upper stage engine, the Vinci, which enables satellites to be placed in different orbits," explained Tony dos Santos, head of the Ariane 6 qualification mission at ESA, the day before. While the engine was correctly reignited during the first part of the mission, enabling nanosatellites designed by start-ups, schools and universities to be put into orbit 580 kilometers from Earth, this was not the case during the next phase, known as "experimentation."

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