📊 Analysis
Statistics & insights on rockets and organizations — technology, history, numbers.
Ariane 42P
RetiredAérospatiale
The Ariane 4 was an expendable space launch system, developed by the Centre national d'études spatiales (CNES), the French space agency, for the European Space Agency (ESA). It was manufactured by ArianeGroup and marketed by Arianespace. Since its first flight on 15 June 1988 until the final flight on 15 February 2003, it attained 113 successful launches out of 116 total launches.
Key figures
Total launches
15
Successes
14
Failures
1
Success rate
93.3 %
Success streak
8
Maiden flight
Nov 20, 1990
Reusable
No
Shortest launch interval ⓘ
22d 23h
Planned launches
0
Ariane, Ariane 4 family total
116 launches · 113 successes · 3 failures (6 variants)
🧐 Data check
Automatic plausibility checks — anomalies are surfaced transparently here:
- ℹ️The figures above apply only to the “Ariane 42P” variant. The Launch Library counts each variant separately — the Ariane, Ariane 4 family totals 116 launches across 6 variants.
Technology
Length
55.9 m
Diameter
3.8 m
Launch mass
323 t
Liftoff thrust
3,944 kN
Stages
2
LEO (low Earth orbit)
6,000 kg
GTO (geo transfer)
2,990 kg
Launches per year
of which in our database: 15
Successes Failures Other/planned
History & events
Sources
- Launch Library 2 (The Space Devs)
- Wikipedia