Out of sight, inside a long, slender gray building emerging from the Guyanese forest of the Kourou Space Center, lie horizontally the two stages of the Ariane 6 rocket. Recently arrived at the port very close to the basis, at the end of a journey started in Bremen (Germany) then passed through Le Havre and Bordeaux, aboard the large hybrid sailing cargo ship Canopée – an ecological techno flagship specially designed for the transport of the European heavy launcher –, the elements of several hundred tonnes are in the assembly phase.
Then they will slide on rails towards the mobile gantry of the launch pad, a metal nave 90 m high and weighing as much as the Eiffel Tower (8,000 tonnes), where the rocket, flanked by its two boosters filled with powder, will be “verticalized”, before receiving its summit cap, with its cargo of satellites.
The final phase of testing will then begin in April before the inaugural launch of Ariane 6, scheduled – in principle – between June 15 and the end of July.
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