Flight VA261 will carry to space two payloads – the German space agency DLR’s experimental communications satellite Heinrich Hertz and the French communications satellite Syracuse 4b.

The flight will be the 117th mission for Ariane 5, a series which began in 1996. Notable Ariane 5 payloads have included ESA’s comet-chasing Rosetta, a dozen of Europe’s Galileo navigation satellites – orbited with just three launches – and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Ariane 5’s next-to-last launch sent ESA’s Juice mission to Jupiter.

This heavy launcher more than doubled the mass-to-orbit capacity of its predecessor, Ariane 4, which flew from 1988 until 2003 as a favourite of the telecommunications industry with its need to put large payloads into very high geosynchronous orbits. Ariane 5’s capacity enables it to orbit two large telecommunications satellites on a single launch, or to push large and heavy payloads into deep space.