It was Saturday night, and a few buzzards were wheeling over the jungle that covers the former French penal colony when all hell broke loose.

It happens five or six times a year, but the birds never get used to the thunder and flames that belch from Ariane 5, the 800-tonne pride and joy of the French-led space business.

As the 20-storey column of aluminium, electronics and explosive fuel turned night into day over French Guiana, the bosses of Arianespace — the Franco-European company that Britain declined to join in the 1980s – were quick to sing its praises.

Ariane has earned its place as the world’s dominant launcher for commercial satellites: it has taken half of the planet’s currently functioning non-military satellites into space, including half of America’s.

But at Kourou, Europe’s “spaceport” in this chunk of France next to Brazil, they are content to stay out of the headlines. There have been no mis-fires since a new model Ariane went out of control after launch in 2002 and was destroyed over the Atlantic.

Little noticed by the outside world, the Russians have just landed here. A 100-strong team is putting the finishing touches to a launch pad for Soyuz rockets, the workhorse that has blasted dozens of cosmonauts into space from Central Asia since the 1950s. Arianespace has bought 14 ageing but reliable Soyuz rockets to supply smaller satellite customers who do not need their jumbo craft.

The hundreds of engineers, scientists and security personnel – guarded by the Foreign Legion – worked quietly all day for the countdown to the weekend’s blast-off: the 186th Ariane launch in nearly three decades. A few took time in their air-conditioned control centres to ponder on the oddness of their location. This steamy outpost oftrès haute technologie, wedged between jungle and ocean just north of Cayenne, was once home to le bagne, the terrible penal colony where tens of thousands of convicts were exiled to their deaths.

As Ariane climbed out of the mangrove swamp, it passed close over Devil’s Island, the former penal colony just a few miles off the coast from which Alfred Dreyfus, the wrongly convicted spy, scanned the horizon in the late 1890s. Henri Charrière, known as Papillon, later served his solitary term chained to the wall on the island neighbouring Devil’s Island. On each launch they evacuate the few people who live on these palm-covered islands in case something goes wrong.

This time there was no hitch as Ariane hauled two lorry-sized television satellites – Hotbird 9 and W2M – towards stationary orbit more than 20,000 miles (32,000km) up. The electronics of both were partly built in Portsmouth by Astrium, a division of EADS, the European group that also builds most of the rocket as well as Airbus airliners. Eutelsat, the Paris-based owner of the satellites, paid €500 million (£460 million) for the hardware and the launcher in the belief that there is a near-inexhaustible market for beaming ever-more-sophisticated entertainment and communications down to the world.

With a tricolour snapping in the breeze behind him, Jean-Yves Le Gall, 49, Arianespace’s chief, reeled off his company’s achievements. Despite the economic slump, business is booming and the order books are full for years, although competition is building from China and India. Mr Le Gall, an engineer-businessman, presides over every launch, taking the final go/no-go decision. He celebrated with champagne on Saturday night. “It’s always a moment of stress. It never becomes routine,” he told The Times.

Mr Le Gall spent a nerve-racking 30 minutes after the countdown was stopped ten seconds from launch on Saturday because of a fuel problem. He decided to order the lift-off after consulting his engineers, taking direct responsibility for hundreds of millions of euros of equipment. “That comes with the business,” he said yesterday over breakfast after his younger engineers had danced off their stress into the small hours at a lakeside club.

Britain’s refusal to join the Ariane project “was one of my little dramas” said Mr Le Gall, recalling the 1987 meeting when Margaret Thatcher’s Government took the decision. “They said that it wasn’t value for money. Britain gave up real industries and went into services. But when things get hard it’s better to be in industry, making and selling things.”

Arianespace is owned by France and a group of continental companies and governments. Britain retains a minor part in the launcher business through its involvement in the European Space Agency, which runs Europe’s overall space effort and pays for part of the French-run space base. British engineers at the launch lamented the short-sightedness of the decision to give up on rockets decades ago. “The British space industry is doing well – it’s just that it’s owned by the French,” a British technician joked.

Older executives credit Charles de Gaulle for deciding in the early 1960s to build an independent French rocket programme when Britain gave up its ill-fated Blue Streak project. Sergei Yermolayev, chief of the Soyuz team, said that his team were enjoying their mission and were not put off by the macabre past of Kourou, Devil’s Island and the other penal colonies. “We are not perturbed,” he said. “If you know the history of Russia, you know that we are not frightened by punishment colonies.”

Joint effort

The European Space Agency, with its headquarters in Paris, is made up of 18 member states, allowing it to take on bigger projects than a single country could. Its mandate is to plan Europe’s space programme and implement it. Emphasis is placed on discovering more about the Earth, solar system and Universe. It describes itself as “Europe’s gateway to space”.

(Sources: ESA.int)

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