Ariane 6 Launch System Operational Concept Main Drivers

Abstract

The European launchers belonging to the Ariane and Vega families are leaders on the commercial launch services market, with demonstrated high reliability after a very lengthy run of successful flights. Ariane 6 is the next-generation heavy-lift European launch system in the Ariane family. It is being developed with the objectives of providing users with high mass lift-capability performance, mission versatility, operational flexibility, high launch rate and low launch service cost. The European Space Agency (ESA), in its role as Launch System Architect (LSA), is in charge of ensuring the coherence between the launcher and the launch base and of verifying the launch system performance to reach those objectives. With this goal, the Launch System Architect (ESA), the launcher prime (ArianeGroup) and the launch base prime (CNES) are working together on building up an optimised launch operations plan. The launch operations plan starts with the arrival at the launch range of the launcher elements and the spacecraft to be launched together with its support ground equipment. It ends with the post-flight analysis, the launch facilities’ revalidation and their reconfiguration for the following launch. To ensure that the above-mentioned challenging set of objectives is met, the launch preparation and launch operations concept (“Operational Concept” or CONOPS) will be designed taking the mission cost as the main driver and pursuing the same service quality and reliability as that provided by Ariane 5 today. Therefore, with a view to customer needs, the CONOPS is being constantly optimised to minimise waste. The optimisation of CONOPS is being done while complying with the safety requirements imposed by the applicable law and regulations which ultimately constitute a guarantee of operational system robustness. This paper presents the drivers established to build the Ariane 6 Operational Concept, the related trade-offs performed and the rationale for the selected choices. Lastly, some aspects of the preliminary operations plan resulting from the CONOPS exercise are compared with former Ariane operations plans to show differences and highlight improvements with respect to users’ expectations.