Happy Birthday Ariane

Dec 29, 2009 Alun Science, The Past No Comments Archaeoastronomy, Ariane, Contemporary Archaeology, Space

I missed this, the ESA put out the video on their You­Tube chan­nel before Christ­mas, but if I keep quiet about that maybe no one will notice. Ariane is now 30 years old.

The first Ariane launched from Kourou in French Guiana on Christ­mas Eve 1979. The Kourou site sounds like a con­veni­ent a trop­ical jungle remote from ESA headquar­ters. How­ever, as Alice Gor­man has found, not every­one finds it exot­ic­ally dis­tant.

Ariane could also be con­sidered an Amer­ican suc­cess story too. The reason the French and Ger­mans needed to build it was that Richard Nixon pre­ven­ted the com­mer­cial use of European satel­lites launched on US Delta rock­ets. That forced Europe into build­ing its own inde­pend­ent rocket which now it one of the most com­mer­cially suc­cess­ful launch­ers. You can read more about Ariane on Jonathan Amos’s blog Space­man, which I’ve just dis­covered, or more about Kourou on Alice Gorman’s blog Space Age Archae­ology.