Slide 79 of 99
Notes:
The French space agency, CNES, started investigating a small spaceplane to be launched on top of the Ariane rocket -- “Hermés”. By 1984, Hermés had evolved into a small mini-space shuttle capable of carrying a crew of 4-6 plus a 4500kg payload in its cargo bay. The illustration shows Hermés on a space telescope mission.
Hermés would be too heavy for existing Ariane launch vehicle, so the French were looking at uprated Ariane-5 versions for the 1990s. The early Ariane-5 design from 1984 shown here would have consisted of an existing booster stage from the Ariane-4 program. However, the upper stage rocket would be new. Burning highly efficient liquid oxygen and hydrogen propellant, it would have boosted the payload capability to more than 15t -- enough to launch Hermés as well as heavy communications satellites in the 1990s. The Ariane-5 project was finally approved in 1987, but by this time the design had evolved into a larger and totally new rocket.
