Soyuz set for first French Guiana launch

PARIS (Reuters) - A Russian Soyuz rocket will blast off from French Guiana on Thursday in a new East-West partnership designed to redraw commercial competition in space.

The scheduled lift-off is the first time that Soyuz, which first flew in 1966 and traces its roots back even further to the earliest Cold War intercontinental ballistic missiles, has been launched from outside its former Soviet bases.

Aboard the Soyuz will be the first two satellites in Europe's Galileo global positioning satellite constellation.

Once fully operational later this decade, the system aims to give Europeans autonomy from the U.S. government-controlled Global Positioning System. Russia says it completed its own similar system earlier this month.

The launch follows years of delays and budget disputes over Galileo, as well as almost a decade of discussions since France and Russia agreed to co-operate on Soyuz launches in 2003.

The Soyuz rocket has been adapted to allow European space launch company Arianespace, which operates the Ariane-5 space juggernaut, to lift medium-sized 3.2-tonne payloads into orbit.

Moscow is expected to receive tens of millions of dollars for each launch to help finance its own space activities, while the presence of Russian rockets at the European launchpads at Kourou near the equator will help Arianespace cut costs.

"We are at the end of one episode (in our space business) and at the beginning of another," Arianespace chief executive Jean-Yves Le Gall told Reuters in an interview.

"Soyuz will launch medium-sized satellites that could not be launched by Ariane-5. Soyuz will permit us to launch more often from Guiana.... Soyuz decreases Ariane-5 launch costs because fixed costs at the launch site in Guiana will be spread out through a larger number of launches," Le Gall said.

 
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