Ariane 6 control room during hot-fire test
Scenes at the Ariane 6 control room during hot-fire test.
On the launch pad in Kourou, French Guiana, the Ariane 6 test model was put through a combined test hot-fire (CTHF) before launch – over seven-minutes ‘hot firing’ of its Vulcain 2.1 main stage. This engine, on a real flight, would work with the boosters to propel the 62-m-tall rocket off Earth and into space. For the test on 23 November 2023 the rocket stayed firmly on the ground, but its upgraded engine burnt through 150 000 kg of supercooled liquid oxygen and hydrogen fuel for the duration of a real flight. Not only was the core stage being tested, but all aspects of the launch pad and operations, too, from the delicate procedure of fuelling both the main engine and the orbital stage stacked above it to testing the thermal effects of a launch on mechanical and electrical components.
About five km from the Ariane 6 launch pad CNES adapted the “Centre de Lancement 3”, the former Ariane 5 launch control centre, for Ariane 6. This bunker has 1-metre thick walls to protect the people inside. If the Ariane 6 rocket was an aircraft, this would be the cockpit, the people behind these computers are the ones that monitor the rocket and can send commands to the launcher during the countdown to launch. Underneath them is a server, called the control bench, that processes over 20 000 data points each second to report on the health of the rocket and the launch pad. It is the brain of the whole system interpreting sensor information on temperatures, valves, pressure, pyrotechnics, propellant systems and more.
