Watch On
Europe’s powerful new Ariane 6 rocket will fly for the second time ever today (March 3), and you can watch the action live.
The Ariane 6 is scheduled to launch a French spy satellite from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana today at 11:24 a.m. EST (1624 GMT; 1:24 p.m. local time in Kourou).
You can watch the action live here at Space.com or directly via the France-based company Arianespace. Coverage will begin about 30 minutes before liftoff.
Ariane 6, which Arianespace operates on behalf of the European Space Agency (ESA), is the successor to the workhorse Ariane 5, which retired in 2023 after 117 orbital missions.
It took longer than expected for the new rocket to come online. Development of the Ariane 6 began in 2014, but the launcher didn’t debut until last July, when it successfully sent nine cubesats to orbit. The flight didn’t go perfectly, however; the Ariane 6’s upper stage failed to complete an engine burn designed to set up the deployment of two experimental reentry capsules.
ESA had aimed to launch the Ariane 6’s second mission last year but took some extra time to address the issues experienced on Flight 1.
Related: Europe’s new Ariane 6 rocket launches on long-awaited debut mission (video)
Today’s launch will send up an optical spy satellite called CSO-3 for the French military. If all goes to plan, CSO-3 will deploy into a sun-synchronous orbit about 500 miles (800 kilometers) above Earth.
Satellites in sun-synchronous orbit cruise over patches of the planet at the same local solar time each day, meaning they view those areas with consistent lighting conditions over time. This type of orbit is therefore particularly popular with spy and weather satellites.
“CSO-3 is the third in a constellation of three military Earth-observation satellites for the DGA-led MUSIS program (Multinational Space-based Imaging System),” the French space agency CNES said in a statement. (The DGA, or Direction générale de l’armement, is the French government’s defense procurement agency.)
The first two members of the network, CSO-1 and CSO-2, launched in 2018 and 2020, respectively.
