page_title: European Space Agency
section_title: Ariane 5
hierarchical_section_title: European Space Agency / Launch vehicle fleet / Ariane 5
caption_attribution_description: Ariane10
context_page_description: The European Space Agency is an intergovernmental organisation of 22 member states dedicated to the exploration of space. Established in 1975 and headquartered in Paris, ESA has a worldwide staff of about 2,200 in 2018 and an annual budget of about €6.68 billion in 2020.
  ESA's space flight programme includes human spaceflight; the launch and operation of uncrewed exploration missions to other planets and the Moon; Earth observation, science and telecommunication; designing launch vehicles; and maintaining a major spaceport, the Guiana Space Centre at Kourou, French Guiana. The main European launch vehicle Ariane 5 is operated through Arianespace with ESA sharing in the costs of launching and further developing this launch vehicle. The agency is also working with NASA to manufacture the Orion Spacecraft service module, that will fly on the Space Launch System.
  The agency's facilities are distributed among the following centres:
  ESA science missions are based at ESTEC in Noordwijk, Netherlands;
  Earth Observation missions at ESA Centre for Earth Observation in Frascati, Italy;
  ESA Mission Control is in Darmstadt, Germany;
context_section_description: The Ariane 5 rocket is ESA's primary launcher. It has been in service since 1997 and replaced Ariane 4. Two different variants are currently in use. The heaviest and most used version, the Ariane 5 ECA, delivers two communications satellites of up to 10 tonnes into GTO. It failed during its first test flight in 2002, but has since made 82 consecutive successful flights until a partial failure in January 2018. The other version, Ariane 5 ES, was used to launch the Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) to the International Space Station (ISS) and will be used to launch four Galileo navigational satellites at a time.
  In November 2012, ESA agreed to build an upgraded variant called Ariane 5 ME (Mid-life Evolution) which would increase payload capacity to 11.5 tonnes to GTO and feature a restartable second stage to allow more complex missions. Ariane 5 ME was scheduled to fly in 2018, but the whole project was scrapped in favor of Ariane 6, planned to replace Ariane 5 in the 2020s.
  ESA's Ariane 1, 2, 3 and 4 launchers (the last of which was ESA's long-time workhorse) have been retired.
caption: Ariane 5 ECA transported to the ELA-3 launch pad
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