While It Won't Be Done Anytime Soon, Europe May 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. 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