The executive president of ArianeGroup is responsible for ensuring a rapid increase in industrial pace, otherwise the European rocket will be left behind by SpaceX, at a time when it must face the opening up to competition of the manufacture of mini-launchers. .
What analysis do you make of the difficulties encountered by ArianeGroup eight months after your arrival?
I knew the problems well before I took office, having been a board member for three years. The results are contrasted with on the one hand an on-time program, that of the new M51.3 ballistic missile which successfully completed its qualification firing on November 18, and on the other an accumulation of delays for Ariane-6.
Perhaps the company had not understood the reality of the situation. However, in the new, very competitive space environment, technical assets are no longer enough; we must be very reactive. My task is therefore to push for the transformation towards more agility and to improve operational performance.
How can we explain these four years of delay in the Ariane-6 program?
When, in 2014, the European Space Agency [ESA] launched the Ariane-6 program, intended to replace Ariane-5 six years later, the company had just been created, ArianeGroup resulting from the merger of the space activities of Airbus and Safran, its two shareholders. It was therefore necessary to integrate five entities, and simultaneously define new governance between ArianeGroup, ESA and the National Center for Space Studies [CNES].
We also had to recreate skills that we had lost. Indeed, between the decisions to launch the two launchers, a generation of engineers had passed, Ariane-5 having been decided in 1988, more than twenty-five years earlier. In addition, as development progressed, difficulties arose linked to insufficient “technical de-risking”, that is to say the lack of detailed preliminary projects, which caused delays. The two years of Covid also hampered development.
“Geographical return”, this ESA practice of reallocating an industrial burden to each State, equivalent to its financial contribution, has also penalized you, being a source of additional costs. Should it be maintained?
This model will have to evolve in the future, it must be remodeled, but we must not forget what it has brought. Without this, we would not have had forty years of European success. But it is often a source of complexity in cooperation programs, when all the actors must share the same objectives and make the same efforts.
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