KOUROU, French Guiana—White light flooded in through large windows behind Alain Charmeau as he mused about the new age of rocketry. The brilliant sunrise promised another idyllic day in this beach town, but outside the sands remained untroubled by the feet of tourists.

Lamentably, the nearshore waters of this former French colony are chocolate rather than azure, muddied by outflow from the Amazon and other rivers. French Guiana has other compensating assets, however. It lies just 5.3 degrees north of the equator. Neither tropical cyclones nor earthquakes threaten the area. And its coast offers untrammeled access to both the east and north. These natural gifts have helped this remote region become one of the world’s busiest spaceports.

From here, Europe has established a long but largely unheralded history in the global rocket industry. Nearly three decades ago, it became the first provider of commercial launch services. If your company or country had a satellite and enough money, Europe would fly it into space for you. Remarkably, more than half of all telecom satellites in service today were launched from this sprawling spaceport.

But times change. Like the rest of the aerospace world—including the Russians and traditional US companies like Boeing, Aerojet, and Lockheed Martin—Europe must now confront titanic changes in the global launch industry. By aggressively pushing low-cost, reusable launch technologies, SpaceX has bashed down the traditional order. Blue Origin, too, promises more of the same within a few years for larger satellites. Beyond these prominent new space companies serving larger satellites, dozens of more modest ventures are pursuing innovative strategies like 3-D printing to slash costs and snag a share of the small satellite market from traditional providers.

Inside the breakfast hall of the Hotel des Roches, which overlooks the lonely beach, Charmeau acknowledged this new reality. “We have strengths, and we have some advantages,” he said of his company, the Paris-based ArianeGroup. “But these are extremely challenging times.”

This Frenchman may not be widely known in the United States, but as ArianeGroup’s chairman, Charmeau has become one of the most powerful people in the world of aerospace. He manages the production of three existing rockets: the Ariane 5, Vega, and a version of the Russian Soyuz. He also oversees development of the Ariane 6, and in late June he had come here to assess progress toward building the launch pad for this new rocket. Europe’s survival in the new era of low-cost rockets depends upon its success.

Dressed in a pressed white short-sleeved dress shirt, he looks the part of an engineer. Charmeau has the CV of an academic, too, having earned a degree from the Ecole des Arts et Métiers, a prestigious school founded in 1780 by a French Duke who later tried to help King Louis XVI escape execution. Charmeau also holds a master’s degree from the California Institute of Technology.

He's a fighter. Though now 62, Charmeau has retained a blunt style both in appearance and manner even after rising through the corporate ranks. Were Charmeau a cyclist, with his athletic build and combative mentality, he might properly be called a puncheur, an aggressor who excels at short, steep climbs. (He says he's more partial to golf and swimming, though.)

These are probably the qualities that Europe needs in its aerospace leader during this age. Certainly, during an interview with Ars, Charmeau conceded no ground to the Americans and their cheaper rockets, desire for reusability, or grand plans to settle the Solar System. When asked about Elon Musk’s desire to colonize Mars or Jeff Bezos’ goal of having millions of people working in space, Charmeau responded with an impish smile.

“I think we are in different worlds,” he said. “In the US, they think and they speak like this. Our mission is different. Our culture is different.”

For Charmeau, it will be enough to build quality rockets and to serve his European and commercial customers with reliable service at a reasonable cost. But will that be enough for the rest of the world?

Already, the Russians, who practically invented orbital spaceflight, are crumbling before commercial forces. In the United States, SpaceX has pushed its blue-blooded competitor United Launch Alliance to slash jobs, sending the ULA scrambling to build a new rocket, called the Vulcan. Still, that may not be enough. Charmeau wants to ensure the same fate does not befall Europe.

Will he succeed? Outside the hotel, the dark, muddy waters of the Atlantic Ocean here in French Guiana seem a particularly apt mirror. Europe faces much uncertainty in its effort to retain its place among the stars.

A head of broccoli

From above, French Guiana looks like nothing so much as an endless head of flowering broccoli, spreading from horizon to horizon. The verdant, misty forest is broken only by a few stubby, brown rivers draining into the ocean and a narrow ribbon of auburn shoreline.

Long a French colony, Guiana rallied behind Charles de Gaulle and Free France during World War II. De Gaulle never forgot this, and in 1964 the statesman returned the favor, visiting French Guiana to declare that France would build a spaceport there to launch rockets. France was with this territory, de Gaulle said, and it would attain worldwide fame for the spaceflight role it would play. “We have begun, and we will keep going,” de Gaulle told a crowd in Cayenne, then the only town of any real size in the territory. Go, it did. Today, French Guiana is a department of France, part of the European Union, and among the most prosperous regions of South America.

When de Gaulle visited French Guiana more than 50 years ago, about 200 people lived in the vicinity of Kourou, which sits 50km to the north of Cayenne. Mud huts were initially the only infrastructure. First, workers from France and other parts of Europe hacked roads through the jungle, then they built residence halls, a hospital, and other basic needs before working on the spaceport. The Guiana Space Center, or CSG, officially opened for business in 1968.

The world’s great launch facilities each have their own characteristic biome. The first orbital spaceport, in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, lies amid an arid, desolate Asian steppe. It is blistering hot in the summer and desperately cold during the winter. NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, was built amid a swamp along the Atlantic Ocean. It is humid most of the year but generally more temperate.

Unlike the desert in Kazakhstan or the swamp in Florida, jungle defines the CSG in Kourou. Traveling around the spaceport and its facilities, with monkeys and capybaras skittering to and fro, one feels as though the jungle waits to reclaim its lost territory. Many of the buildings, built in the early 1990s to support the Ariane 5 rocket, look twice as old due to the depredations of the year-round tropical climate.

Eric Berger

Eric Berger

Eric Berger



Eric Berger

Eric Berger

Eric Berger

Things break down more quickly here. Paint fades. Metal rusts. And the jungle must be constantly beaten back.

The European Space Agency’s senior official on site—a trim, soft-spoken Swede named Charlotte Beskow—explained during an interview that she had recently taken a vacation. “I was away for three weeks during the rainy season, and when I returned the grass was knee-high,” she said. “And I had no idea what might be in that grass.”

Despite these challenges, it works out in the end. Because it lies so close to the equator, rockets launched from Kourou can take full advantage of the Earth’s rotational speed. A comparable booster sent into space from CSG can lift 20 percent more mass into orbit than Florida and 35 percent more than Baikonur.