The European Space Agency (ESA) said it is waiting for spring conditions to conduct the first hop test of its Themis reusable rocket booster demonstrator, after winter weather delayed preparations at the launch site in northern Sweden.<\/p>\n
The Themis vehicle has been stationed at the Esrange Space Centre near Kiruna since mid-2025, but heavy snow has prevented further progress toward the initial low-altitude flight, ESA officials said this week.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s in Kiruna and it\u2019s under snow today,\u201d said Toni Tolker-Nielsen, acting director of ESA\u2019s Space Transportation programme, when asked about the schedule during a press conference on Jan. 8. \u201cSo we are waiting for spring.\u201d<\/p>\n
ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said the agency is currently targeting the first quarter of 2026 for the initial hop test, marking the first powered flight of the demonstrator.<\/p>\n
ESA launched the Themis programme in 2019 to mature reusable launch vehicle technologies for future European rockets. The 28-metre-tall demonstrator was built by ArianeGroup, the programme\u2019s prime contractor, and transported in June 2025 from Les Mureaux, France, to Esrange. In September, ArianeGroup said the vehicle had been moved to the launch pad ahead of a final integrated ground test campaign, though no flight has yet taken place.<\/p>\n
The initial phase of testing in Sweden was originally expected to focus on low-altitude vertical hop tests. However, ESA expanded the scope of the programme in November 2024, awarding ArianeGroup an additional \u20ac230 million to broaden testing at Esrange.<\/p>\n
The extra funding covers further development of the Prometheus methane-fuelled rocket engine that powers Themis, as well as upgrades to a single-engine variant of the demonstrator known as T1E, which is intended for medium-altitude hop tests.<\/p>\n
After completion of the Swedish campaign, ESA plans to move to testing a more powerful three-engine variant, known as T3, at the Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana. That phase is expected to include higher-altitude hops and a significant expansion of the vehicle\u2019s flight envelope.<\/p>\n
Themis is seen as a key stepping stone for Europe as it seeks to close the gap with the United States and China in reusable launch technology and to reduce the cost of access to space over the longer term.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The European Space Agency (ESA) said it is waiting for spring conditions to conduct the first hop test of its Themis reusable rocket booster demonstrator, after winter weather delayed preparations at the launch site in northern Sweden. The Themis vehicle has been stationed at the Esrange Space Centre near Kiruna since mid-2025, but heavy snow […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20433,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1634,6825,244,831,6015,238,6826,484,6827,6314],"class_list":["post-20430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-arianegroup","tag-esrange-space-centre","tag-europe","tag-european-space-agency","tag-josef-aschbacher","tag-reusable-rockets","tag-space-transportation-development","tag-sweden","tag-themis","tag-toni-tolker-nielsen"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20430"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20430"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20430\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}