EoW May 2009

Transat lant ic Cable

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

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

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EuroWire – May 2009