Buzztiger

So Gaia relies on maintaining very accurate pointing at the stars while measuring their position. For this purpose it uses special cold gas (Nitrogen) thrusters with very low flow noise. These cold gas tanks are now empty and Gaia simply cannot continue to operate.

Sniff, our most successful scientific Spacecraft by publications. The new Voyage 2050 programme certainly provides science topics that could lead to a worthy successor.

So glad to see that Arianespace is back in business. At least now it is also abundantly clear that Europe needs its own and sovereign access to space.

Glad this worked out, good to have both Launchers back in service. We need independent access to space for Europe.

Yes beautiful!

Rocket fuelled up now , so everything going ahead smoothly...

If it reenables European sovereign and independent access to space it's a success. Fingers crossed that it's also as reliably as A5. Commercially I agree.

So launch window start has been shifted by one hour according to my info: 21:00 - 00:00 Amsterdam/Berlin CEST.

Wohoo a proper launch thread. Thank you!

Let's hope they manage to launch at the beginning of the window.

So for Amsterdam/Berlin timezone that's starting at 20:00 tonight.

It's been too long since we had an operational European launcher. I hope Vega C and A6 are available and reliable by the end of the year. There is quite a queue of new missions, several of them already had to be launched with SpaceX.

Some more information in the Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/apr/23/australian-taxpayers-paid-466000-for-training-of-nations-first-female-astronaut-katherine-bennell-pegg

There is currently no mission planned for her as Australia just paid the training cost when she did not get selected into the ESA astronaut chor.

Australia would also now have to pay for a ride to the ISS. The tourist ticket info I found was about 30 MUSD but that's including the training I think.