By Joey Roulette and Tim Hepher
(Reuters) – Europe’s Ariane 5 rocket on Wednesday blasted off from French Guiana for the final time, carrying two military communications satellites and leaving its nations with a vacuum in autonomous access to space for the first time in more than four decades.
The 53-metre-tall, three-stage launcher left the launch pad in the French spaceport of Kourou on its 117th and final mission at 7 p.m. local time (2300 GMT) according to a live webcast.
The mission to deploy France’s Syracuse 4B and Germany’s Heinrich Hertz (H2Sat) satellites to geostationary orbit caps 27 years of service for Ariane 5, whose successor – Ariane 6 – has been hit by technical delays until 2024 for operational use.
(Reporting by Tim Hepher in Paris and Joey Roulette in Washington; Editing by Ben Klayman and Matthew Lewis)
