Lift-off for European Space Agency rocket with Irish-designed technology

A EUROPEAN ROCKET using Irish-designed technology has blasted off from France’s Kourou space base in French Guiana.

Lift-off of the Ariane 6 was at 2:01 am local time (5:01 Irish time) for the fourth commercial flight since the expendable rockets came into service last year.

Irish space company Réaltra provides the state-of-the-art technology Video Telemetry System (VIKI) for the rocket.

The VIKI provides live HD video images from six cameras located on-board the Ariane 6.

Réaltra is the Irish word “galaxy” and the company was founded in 2018.

Nammo Ireland meanwhile supplies components for both the Vulcain 2.1 and Vinci engine.

Ariane 6 uses three engines and the Vulcain 2.1 engine on the main stage fires during liftoff to take the rocket into space.

After this, the Vinci engine, located on the upper stage, takes over and steers its payloads to the correct orbit.

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In all, 13 countries have contributed to the Ariane 6 and thousands of Europeans have worked on it.

The rocket is carrying two more satellites of the European Union’s Galileo programme, a global navigation satellite system that aims to make the bloc less dependent on the US’s Global Positioning System (GPS).

The two satellites were set to be placed in orbit nearly four hours after lift-off.

They will bring to 34 the number of Galileo satellites in orbit and “will improve the robustness of the Galileo system by adding spares to the constellation to guarantee the system can provide 24/7 navigation to billions of users.

The satellites will join the constellation in medium Earth orbit 23, 222 km above Earth’s surface,” according to the European Space Agency (ESA) which oversees the programme.

Previous Galileo satellites were primarily launched by Ariane 5 and Russian Soyuz rockets from Kourou.

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Europe halted space cooperation with Moscow.

Before the Ariane 6 rocket entered into service in July 2024, the EU contracted with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to launch two Galileo satellites aboard Falcon 9 rockets in September 2024 from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.

- © AFP 2025 and with additional reporting from Diarmuid Pepper