Credit: ESA / CNES / Arianespace / ArianeGroup / Optique Vidéo du CSG / P Piron
The European Space Agency has disclosed that launching the Sentinel-1D Earth observation satellite aboard an Ariane 62 rocket in November 2025 cost €82,070,773.
As part of its involvement in the development of the European Union’s Copernicus Earth observation satellite constellation, ESA is responsible for placing contracts with European industry for the development, launch, and operation of satellites. As part of this responsibility, the agency publishes an annual list of all contracts awarded with a value of more than €15,000. In 2025, this included the disclosure of the cost of launching Sentinel-1D aboard an Ariane 6 rocket in its two-booster variant.
The procurement action for the launch is listed in the ESA disclosure as the Sentinel-1D Alternative Launcher Service. The term “alternative” refers to the fact that, when Arianespace was initially contracted to launch the mission in November 2022, it was slated to be carried into orbit aboard an Avio-built Vega-C rocket. However, following the grounding of Vega-C for almost two years after a December 2022 failure, and the early retirement of Sentinel-1B after recovery efforts following a late 2021 anomaly failed, the decision was made to shift the launch of Sentinel-1D to Ariane 6.
ESA’s disclosure marks the first public indication of Ariane 62 launch pricing, enabling a more direct comparison with other launch systems such as Falcon 9.
While Falcon 9 can lift roughly twice the payload of Ariane 62 to low Earth orbit, raw capacity can be a poor basis for price comparison on dedicated institutional missions, which rarely push a rocket to its limits. A more meaningful comparison comes from the contract prices themselves.
The Sentinel-1D satellite was launched aboard Ariane 6 for approximately €82 million. In December 2022, NASA, in partnership with ESA, announced that it would launch the Sentinel-6B mission aboard a Falcon 9 at a cost of approximately $94 million, around €90 million at December 2022 exchange rates. On this basis, Ariane 62 appears broadly comparable in price to Falcon 9 for dedicated institutional missions, although differences in mission profile and contractual structure limit direct comparability.
In addition to providing data for a comparative analysis of Ariane 6’s market position, ESA’s disclosure also highlights the cost to the Sentinel-1D mission caused by the grounding of Vega-C. With Vega-C typically priced at around €40 million per mission, shifting Sentinel-1D to Ariane 6 effectively doubled the mission cost.
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