Ariane 5
The Ariane 5 is a european launcher, usually used to put satellites in earth orbit. It is the successor to the Ariane 4, but it is not directly derived from it. Its development took 10 years and cost $7 billion. It was originally designed to launch the manned mini shuttle Hermes too, thus it was intended to be "Man Rated" from the beginning. With this spacecraft canceled by ESA, the rocket became a purely commercial launcher. The currently payload capability to GTO is about 6,200 kg. Upgrades are already underway to boost this to 12,000 kg, making it possible to launch two "heavy" satellites at once.
On its first test flight, 40 seconds after launch, the self-destruct mechanism destroyed the rocket after it had detected a malfunction in the control software. A data conversion from 64-bit floating point to 16-bit signed integer value had caused an internal SRI software exception. The floating point number had a value greater than what could be represented by a 16-bit signed integer. This resulted in an Operand Error. The data conversion instructions (in Ada code) were not protected from causing an Operand Error, although other conversions of comparable variables in the same place in the code were protected.
Arianespace is responsible for the production, operation and marketing of the Ariane 5.
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