The future of European launchers: The ESA perspective

Given that the launch-services market is undergoing a radical restructuring, Europe has to be able to offer a more complete package of services in order to maintain a sufficient level of industrial activity and reduce production costs. Therefore, for Europe to retain and improve the competitiveness of its launchers on the world stage and to satisfy evolving market demands, an optimised range of launch vehicles is needed. This immediately leads to two distinct objectives, which are: to maintain European launcher competitiveness in the short and medium term (up to 2010), and to prepare the necessary steps for the timely development of the new systems that will be required for longer term competition (2010 - 2020).