The first scheduled launch of the European Ariane 6 launch vehicle took place. A reconnaissance satellite was put into orbit

On March 6, 2025, at 18:24 Kyiv time, the second launch of the European Ariane 6 launch vehicle took place. The rocket launched from the Kourou Cosmodrome in French Guiana and launched the third military reconnaissance satellite of the Composante Spatiale Optique program – CSO-3 – into sun-synchronous orbit. The European Space Agency (ESA) announced this.

Recall that after the "retirement" of the Ariane 5 launch vehicle, ESA was left without its own rockets for a long time, and the first test launch of Ariane 6 was postponed many times, took place only on July 9, 2024, and ended in a partial failure during an attempt to deorbit the second stage. During this test, residents of various regions of Ukraine could observe a strange glow in the sky at night.

The launch on March 6, 2025 took place without any problems, the second stage brought the CSO-3 weighing 3,500-3,600 kg to a sun-synchronous orbit with an altitude of 800 km, after which the stage was regularly deorbited. A modification of the Ariane 62 was used for the launch, i.e. with two side boosters. The configuration with four boosters, i.e. Ariane 64 can deliver vehicles weighing up to 21,650 kg to low Earth orbit, 15,500 kg to sun-synchronous orbit or 5,000 kg to geostationary orbit, i.e. it is a full-fledged competitor to the Falcon 9, except, of course, for reusability.

The Composante Spatiale Optique series of satellites are French military surveillance and reconnaissance satellites, information from which France is currently providing Ukraine with instead of satellite information from the United States. There are now three such satellites in Earth orbit. CSO-1 and CSO-2 were launched in 2018 and 2020, respectively, using ESA- modified Russian Soyuz ST-A rockets. The launch of CSO-3 marks the return of Europe to the ability to launch critical satellites independently, without the help of either Russia or the United States.