While It Won't Be Done Anytime Soon, Europe May Soon Get its Own Human-Certified Rocket

Arianespace has been given a contract by the European Space Agency to explore the use of the firm's Ariane 6 Rocket for crewed missions.

The Ariane 6 has been the old world's only real pathway to space delivery, allowing European companies and governments a measure of self-sufficiency they wouldn't have if they had to rely on American launch systems. Unfortunately for them, Arianespace has only given them independence in payload delivery until now, leaving them at the mercy of outsiders when European Space Agency astronauts had to hitch a ride to the ISS.

That could change, if the firm can use the Ariane 6 as the basis of a Crew-Rated launch system. They'd been given a contract under the ESA's Future Launchers Preparatory Programme to study the feasibility of a crewed iteration of the Ariane 6, which would add a crew capsule alongside a host of security adjustments.

Human spaceflight is a serious endeavor, and despite China's less than stringent approach to safe rocketry, the ESA won't just rubber stamp a rocket on the basis of payload alone. Redundancies, backups, and fallbacks all need to find their way into the machine to ensure whomever is sent up can come back down intact.

The study still has a way to go, but a July launch of the heavy-lift Ariane 6 set some optimism into motion in the ESA, and that has a way of greasing wheels in a bureaucracy. Should a human-capable Ariane 6 come into being, the space market will get even more interesting, and give SpaceX (and technically to a lesser extent, Boeing) some competition.

FMI: www.arianespace.com