INVESTIGATORS will need time to discover the precise cause of yesterday's failure of the maiden Ariane-5 flight over French Guiana, but European Space Agency officials said it was apparently due to a fault in the automatic guidance system. However, the damage to the morale and prestige of the European space industry is clear.
In the international satellite industry, an explosion is nothing new or, in the long run, necessarily damaging. In 1994 Ariane space, the French based 53 company consortium behind yesterday's launch, suffered two crashes but remained the world's leading satellite launcher, with about half the market.
The real blow from yesterday's crash is that it was Ariane-5 that tailed. The new launcher is central to Europe's drive to continue its leadership of the satellite launching industry into the 21st century against competition from the Americans, the Russians and the Chinese.
Ariane-5 stood for European, and particularly French, pre-eminence in an industry once dominated by the US. Last year more than 13,000 people visited "Ariane City", the production facility on the banks of the Seine.
Ariane-5, which cost $7 billion to develop, offered satellite launching customers lower costs, a larger payload and, Ariane space said, greater reliability. Mr Francis Avanzi, Ariane space's chief operating officer, said earlier this year that the consortium wanted to launch three Ariane-5 rockets next year, four in 1998 and five or six in 1999.
At the end of the century, launches of the existing Ariane-4 rocket would cease and production of Ariane-5 would increase to eight a year. Ariane-5 was designed to launch two satellites with a combined weight of 5.9 tonnes or one weighing 6.8 tonnes. Ariane-4, with a payload of 4.8 tonnes, was becoming redundant now that the average telecommunications satellite weighs three tonnes.
Ariane space said Ariane-5 was a radically new design. The heart of Ariane-5 is a gigantic new "cryogenic" main stage rocket, which burns 25 tonnes of liquid hydrogen in 130 tonnes of liquid oxygen during its 10 minute burn time.
Adding thrust to the main stage are a pair of new solid fuel boosters 20 times larger than their counterparts in Ariane-4. Each one burns 237 tonnes of hydrocarbon fuel for two minutes after lift off.
Ironically, Ariane-5 was designed to be much more reliable than its predecessors, because it was originally expected to lift not only communications satellites but also people into orbit.
It is a simpler design than Ariane-4, with fewer engines, and for the first time its main stage can be fired and tested on the ground to ensure that it is working perfectly before lift off. One of the main consequences of yesterday's accident is that the two year lead Ariane space hoped to have before the arrival of new competitors will be truncated.
The newest challenger to Arianespace is International Launch Services, a joint venture formed by Lockheed Martin, the US defence group, and two Russian companies, Khrunichev Enterprise and RSC Energia.
Lockheed Martin makes the Atlas, 11 of which were launched successfully from Florida last year. The Russian companies offer the larger Proton rocket. By joining forces, the new alliance hopes to market both launchers around the world.
McDonnell Douglas, the US aerospace company, is developing the Delta III, a rocket similar in size to the Atlas. The first launch is planned for 1998. Boeing, the largest US aircraft maker, has teamed up with Russia's RSC Energia, Kvaerner of Norway and NPO Yuzhnoye of Ukraine to launch satellites from a platform in the Pacific.
But Mr Stephane Chenard, senior space analyst with Euroconsult, the Paris consulting firm, said the extent of the setback to Europe's space operations should not be overstated. "There will be some delay in the programme, some more money will have to be spent, but everyone knows it will work eventually," he said. "People hardly remember today that the second and fifth Ariane-1s blew up. These things happen."