Here Come the Europeans

By Frederic Golden

A rocket named Ariane ends the U.S. and Soviet space monopoly

It sounds like one of those Brechtian place names out of Mahaggony, where mysterious and sinful things occur. And its equatorial locale is primitive and threatening. Jungle encroaches almost to the doorsteps of Kourou (pop. 7,000), in French Guiana. Only a few miles offshore lies Devil's Island, once the world's most infamous penal colony, and local waters teem with piranha and alligators.

Yet Kourou is very much a part of the space age. Out of this unlikely old colonial enclave in the New World, the Old World is finally taking its own giant step into the cosmos. In the midst of the rain forest rises the launch complex for one of the world's newest and most powerful rockets: Ariane, a 155-ft.-high three-stage booster on whose mighty thrusters ride Western Europe's hopes of challenging the long U.S. and Soviet domination of space.

Like all new spacecraft, including the U.S. space shuttle Columbia, Ariane has had its problems. Its second trial in May 1980 ended with a mid-air explosion. But since then, it has carried four satellites, two per launch, into high earth orbit. The most recent lift-off came in the predawn darkness on Dec. 20, when Ariane awoke the sleeping jungle with a fusillade of flame and thunder. Last week, in Paris, the eleven-nation European Space Agency (ESA) confirmed what Ariane's customers had been eagerly waiting to hear: that the rocket was ready and able to launch satellites for any and all customers, including some who had already booked space on the U.S. shuttle.

Ariane (the French name for the Cretan princess of Greek mythology whose thread helped Theseus escape from the Labyrinth) took nearly a decade to develop. It is not only a triumph of European technology, but a stellar example of something much more rare: real international cooperation. The big rocket's first and third stages were built in France, the second in West Germany. Britain developed much of the computer software. Contributions came from Belgium, Spain, The Netherlands and, in fact, all of the founding partners in this billion-dollar collaboration. Ariane's first commercial flight is scheduled for late April, only a few weeks after Columbia's next launch, due March 22. Three more Arianes will be hurled aloft in 1982. The first will carry an Italian-made meteorological satellite and the British-built Marecs B maritime communications satellite. In fact, comsats, as they are known in space jargon, should continue to be Ariane's major and most lucrative cargo through the decade. Even at a cost of nearly $50 million apiece, excluding the launch fee, comsats can be a bargain, since they make it possible to transmit all sorts of information, from television pictures to computer data, to virtually any place on earth.

Because of Columbia's delays, some of the U.S. shuttle's would-be users have switched to Ariane, including several leading American firms, General Telephone and Electronics, Southern Pacific Communications and Western Union. One persuasive factor: European banks are making low-cost loans available to those who want to book Ariane flights. Says NASA Chief James Beggs: "While the United States still leads in space technology, the Europeans, the Russians, the Japanese and others are coming on fast, and they are there to stay."

Hustling up business for Ariane in the U.S. market is none other than Grumman Aerospace, builder of NASA'S lunar module, the little ship that carried American astronauts to the moon's surface. Says a Grumman spokesman: "People in the satellite business have to get satellites into orbit. If Ariane is ready, they'll use it, especially if the price is right." Apparently it will be. At the moment, Arianespace, ESA's French-dominated private operating arm, is asking about $25 million per launch. Though this is more than the shuttle's minimum rate, they are sweetening the deals with discounts, deferred payments and other inducements.

Europe's space planners, however, see more than comsats in the sky. With their new booster, they hope to rim the earth with a host of satellites, including some that can keep watch on both heaven and earth. In 1984 Ariane is scheduled to orbit the first in a series of French-built SPOT satellites. Like NASA's pioneering Landsats but equipped with a new generation of sensors, SPOT will send back images of the earth in various types of light, possibly revealing information about undiscovered resources, including oil, climatic conditions and even the growth of crops. A year later Ariane will carry aloft an instrument to intercept--and study--Halley's comet, an icy collection of cosmic debris that returns to the earth's vicinity only once every 76 years. The robot's name is Giotto (after the 14th century Florentine painter who incorporated the comet in his celebrated fresco of the Magi).

Four years from now, Ariane will launch another scientific satellite, called Hipparcos (after the ancient Greek astronomer who assembled the most extensive star catalogue of its time). Its mission: to record the position and velocity of some 100,000 stars with far greater accuracy than is possible using ground-based telescopes peering through the turbulent atmosphere. At about the same time, the West Germans are slated to join with the U.S. in sending an instrument-packed probe into Jupiter's stormy atmosphere.

Undoubtedly, the most significant and costly European-American collaboration involves a 23-ft.-long West German-made cylindrical chamber called Spacelab. Nestled in Columbia's big cargo bay, it will serve as an orbital workshop during shuttle flights for as many as four scientists at a time. They will conduct extensive tests in conditions of weightlessness or, as scientists prefer to call it, microgravity. Such an environment could be enormously valuable for manufacturing products of exceptional precision and purity, among them new types of drugs and vaccines, alloys and electronic components, all of which can be adversely affected by the tug of gravity during terrestrial fabrication. The first Spacelab, along with its pallets--external platforms for mounting instruments--was flown to Florida's Kennedy Space Center late last year and will be unveiled at a ceremony this week. Spacelab's first flight is expected next year.

Yet the Europeans, notably the French, are unwilling to hitch themselves entirely to the American star. Under a policy begun by Charles de Gaulle, France has long cooperated with the U.S.S.R., developing an advanced laser system that measured the distance between earth and moon during the Soviet robot lunar landing in 1970. Currently, two French jet pilots, Jean-Loup Chretien, 43, and Patrick Baudry, 36, are in Zvezdnoy Gorodok (Star City), the space training center outside Moscow. One of them will become the first "guest" cosmonaut from outside the East bloc to fly aboard a Soviet spacecraft since three Americans took part in the Apollo-Soyuz linkup six years ago.

At first glance, Ariane hardly seems like much of a match for the shuttle, which incorporates both the power of a rocket ship and the complexity of an airplane. In its present form it can lift no more than 3,750 lbs. into high earth orbit, in contrast to the shuttle's maximum payload of 65,000 lbs. Unlike the reusable shuttle, Ariane is strictly a one-shot affair. None of its parts can be used again. But a closer look shows certain advantages, especially for comsat launches.

Ariane carries such cargo all the way to geosynchronous orbit, 23,300 miles above the equator, where an object revolves around the earth at a speed that matches the planet's spin and thus hovers over a fixed spot on the ground. The shuttle cannot fly above 690 miles. To boost its satellites higher, it will have to carry along an additional rocket, yet to be developed, plus the necessary fuel. That weight will sharply reduce the shuttle's rentable pay load. Ariane also gets an extra boost from its equatorial launch site, where the earth's surface velocity is greater than at more northerly locations like Cape Canaveral. When such things are taken into account, the shuttle's cargo-carrying advantage over Ariane for geosynchronous orbit dwindles to 2 to 1.

The Europeans hope to capture as many as a fourth of all commercial satellite launches in the late '80s, about $1.5 billion in business. So far 40 are scheduled through the decade, but the number could rise. A second launch pad is being built in Kourou. Though government subsidies are built into the rate schedule, Ariane-space's director of marketing, Claude Daoud, says, "We intend to make money for our shareholders by 1986." If Ariane continues on its trail-blazing trajectory, it may well be in the black by then.

--By Frederic Golden.

Reported by William Blaylock and Sandra Burton/Paris

With reporting by William Blaylock, Sandra Burton/Paris

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