28 / 108
EuroWire – May 2009
26
Transat lant ic Cable
of commercial satellites that transmit the data for a globalised
economy, as well as for satellite broadcast, Internet, and
Earth-imaging tools. In this, France leads the pack.
“Through perseverance and some good luck and timing,
we’ve done fine for ourselves,” Thierry Vallée, an official of
the French government space agency CNES (Centre National
d’Études Spatiales), told the
Tribune
– which noted the
understatement. Kourou may be small (population 20,000)
but, at approximate two-month intervals, rockets light the
sky above the one-industry town on the Equator in launches
that are believed to cost $200 million apiece. This remarkable
achievement may be traced to the determination of France
to find its own way into space, independent of America.
The choice of French Guiana over the other outposts
French Polynesia and Djibouti was dictated by its equatorial
latitude, ideal for satellite launches. Mr Romero explained:
“The Earth’s rotation is fastest there, thrusting payloads into
space like a slingshot.”
The regression of the US in the commercial space race was
❈
❈
traced succinctly by the
Herald Tribune
:
The Reagan administration [1980-1988] prohibited the space
shuttles from carrying most commercial payloads after the
Challenger disaster in 1986. Later, NASA gave up on two
flawed plans for new vehicles, the National Aerospace Plane
and Lockheed Martin’s X-33 unmanned space plane.
Boeing (Chicago) and Lockheed Martin (Bethesda, Maryland),
whose mainstay was US military contracts, kept launching
commercial satellites from California and Florida in those
years. But that business declined drastically when the
telecommunications and dot-com bubbles burst.
Meanwhile, Arianespace had gathered together CNES and
other European stakeholders, mainly public entities without
large military programmes, in a consortium to operate out of
French Guiana. Jeff Foust, a senior analyst with the aerospace
consulting firm Futron, in Maryland, told Mr Romero of the
Tribune
, “The Europeans had to turn to the commercial sector if
they wanted to maintain their independent space capabilities.”
Whether that edge, patiently cultivated as Americans reached
for the moon, will withstand the current global crisis is another
story. Mr Romero wrote, “The number of launches is expected
to drop [in 2009], and it is anybody’s guess what demand will be
beyond that.”
Dorothy Fabian
USA Editor