The ESA archives is celebrating the recent inaugural flight of Ariane 6 with a special opening of our set of press kits from the first flights in the Ariane programme, including the very first launch of Ariane in December 1979. Join us as we look at the ancestors to twenty-first century Ariane with this fascinating collection!
The first flight of Ariane-1 in December 1979 was perhaps one of the crowning achievements for 1970s Europe. It was the realisation of the long-held dream of independent access to space with a European satellite launcher, which dated back to the creation of the first European space organisations in the early 1960s and the formal incorporation of ELDO, the European Launcher Development Organisation in February 1964.
ELDO was merged with its ‘partner’ ESRO (the European Space Research Organisation) to form ESA in 1975, and so it was some 15 years after the first formal steps towards a European launcher, that it all became reality under the banner of the young European Space Agency.
Test Programme and Qualification
Following an extensive testing programme (which you see documented in photos from 1977 and 1978 in the SHIP database – search for ‘Ariane’), the Ariane development programme was completed with four test (or development) flights: L01 , L02, L03 and L04, originally planned for the period from November 1979 to October 1980. At least two of these flights needed to be successful to qualify the launcher, declaring it operational.
In terms of payloads, the first of these test flights, L01, did not carry any satellite, but rather what the press kit calls a ‘technological capsule’ (also known as the CAT, Capsule Ariane Technologique) to take trajectory and environmental measurements. The passenger experiments carried on the other development flights of Ariane included two ESA satellites: Meteosat-2 on L03 and Marecs-A on L04.
Following qualification, further operational flights took place, starting with L5 in September 1982 which carried the Marecs-B and Sirio-2 satellites and L6 in June 1983, carrying ECS-1 and Amsat P3B. These were followed by the promotional flights L7 in October 1983 with the Intelsat 5 F7 satellite and the renamed V8 in March 1984 with Intelsat 5 F8.
This opening includes the press kits in both English and French from the four test flights (L01 to L04), the first two operational flights (L5 and L6) and the promotional flights L7 and V8, representing the complete set of Ariane launches which took place under the responsibility of ESA:
- Ariane L01 on 24 December 1979
- Ariane L02 on 23 May 1980 (launch failed)
- Ariane L03 on 19 June 1981
- Ariane L04 on 20 December 1981
- Ariane L5 on 9 September 1982 (launch failed)
- Ariane L6 on 16 June 1983
- Ariane L7 on 18/19 October 1983 (the V8 press kit lists both dates, owing to the difference between local time in Kourou and UT)
- Ariane V8 on 5 March 1984
The kits themselves follow the same general format and are divided into different chapters. Each contains a first section with detailed information or data on the launch itself (from purpose, objectives and description, to operational information and technical information on countdown and flight plan). This is then followed by second and third chapters with general information on the Ariane programme (including development, production and follow-on development) and the launch facilities at the Guiana Space Centre and the Ariane launch base. Sometimes these chapters were colour-coded although the choice of coloured paper was not consistent between kits.
The kits from L02 onwards also contain a final set of chapters with information on the APEX (Ariane Passenger Experiments) Programme or Intelsat and the satellites being carried. Some of the kits contain additional ESA news releases from the launch campaigns or other loose documents related to Ariane, which were probably inserted into the folders at the time by whoever the kits belonged to, and which have been digitised as an integral part of the relevant kit.
The kit for L01 is the smallest at 68 pages, since it contains no additional information on satellites. The other kits generally number between 95 and 110 pages (with the exception of the kits for L7 and V8, which decrease in length to around 70 pages).
How to access the full collection
Browse the collection in the SHIP database, using the search term ‘Ariane press kits’.
