Guiana Space Centre celebrates successes

The yearly space gathering in French Guiana, initially scheduled in January but deferred as a result of the tragic events in Paris, was held yesterday evening in Cayenne. CNES President Jean-Yves Le Gall took this opportunity to commend all of the Guianese teams for the successes accomplished over the past months that have been particularly prolific for the launch base.

This traditional yearly gathering held Thursday 12 February in Cayenne provided the ideal occasion to pay tribute to all of the teams at the Guiana Space Centre (CSG) for their efforts conducting launch operations at the spaceport. This year’s event was especially symbolic as it marked the day exactly 10 years ago that Ariane 5 ECA completed its first successful launch.

On this occasion, Jean-Yves Le Gall thanked everyone involved in the spaceport’s successes, emphasizing CNES’s triple role in French Guiana as launch base operator, investor and developer. CNES’s President noted that the base completed 11 launches in 2014, orbiting 23 satellites. He then looked ahead to the development of the new Ariane 6 launcher and the benefits it will bring to French Guiana while continuing to operate Ariane 5, Soyuz and Vega. Finally, Jean-Yves Le Gall underlined the 3,000 or so projects that CNES has co-funded in French Guiana in recent years, most of them conceived by very small firms and worth a total of €300 million, of which €90 million provided by the agency. He added that this funding effort is expected to be pursued through 2014-2020, notably as a result of new agreements between CNES, the regional council and local authorities, the agreement on digital development and the partnership sealed with the new University of French Guiana.

After the event, Jean-Yves Le Gall commented: “Above all, I want to thank every one of you for the great work you are doing here at the CSG. 2014 was undoubtedly CNES’s year, both for the successes we accomplished and for the key decisions that will prove vital to Europe’s future space effort. With the go-ahead for Ariane 6, we can look forward to plenty of work here in French Guiana and we can be proud, once again, to be shaping the future of our sector. I want to express my warmest thanks to all our partners in French Guiana, to the Préfet and government departments, regional and local authorities, our space industry partners here on the launch base and at local firms, and above all to each of you to whom we owe all of these successes.”