The European Space Agency's new launch vehicle, Ariane 6, completed its maiden flight on Tuesday.
Ariane 6 First Flight – Pure Feed (Official Broadcast)
The agency (ESA) celebrated the launch with a post that provided little detail other than "At 5:06 p.m., a little over an hour after launch, the first set of satellites aboard Ariane 6 was released from the upper stage and placed into an orbit 600 km above Earth Satellites and experiments from various space agencies, companies, research institutes, universities and young professionals were included in this first flight.
But all was not well. The mission plan also called for Ariane 6's upper stage to perform a demonstration where its Vinci engine was restarted – to test the craft's ability to move into different orbits so it can perform missions that require cargo to be dropped at multiple locations in conditions of microgravity. .
Ariane 6 can theoretically do so, thanks to its inclusion of what ESA describes as a "novel auxiliary propulsion unit" (APU).
