Ariane 6

The figures are the A64, the four-booster configuration with the long fairing: 62 metres, a 5.4 metre core, 15,400 kilonewtons at liftoff and 21,600 kilograms to low orbit. The two-booster A62 is the same core with half the strap-ons, 8,400 kilonewtons and 10,300 kilograms, and the choice between them is the entire flexibility of the vehicle.

That is the design bet in full. Where SpaceX bought cost reduction by flying the same hardware repeatedly, ArianeGroup bought it by making one core serve two markets and by simplifying manufacture. Nothing on an Ariane 6 comes back. It was a defensible call in 2014 and it looks worse every year that Falcon 9 keeps landing.

The price argument has already been lost. The vehicle was conceived at about 70 million euros for the A62 and 90 million for the A64; projected prices now exceed 100 million per mission. A rocket designed to halve the cost of Ariane 5 costs roughly what Ariane 5 cost, and it does so without the dual-launch trick that made Ariane 5 defensible.

The flight record is genuinely good. Nine launches through the end of August 2026, eight of them clean. The one blemish was on the maiden flight in July 2024, when the auxiliary propulsion unit failed during the deorbit burn after the payloads had already been delivered, and the fix was demonstrated on the next flight. The A64 did not debut until February 2026.

Cadence is the real problem. Arianespace targeted six flights in 2025 and eight in 2026, and delivered four and four. A vehicle whose only economic argument is cost per flight has to fly often to spread its fixed costs, and this one is running at about half the rate its own business case assumed.