Launcher components

Meggitt has secured contracts worth £15m for high-pressure and extreme-temperature components for the main-stage Vulcan 2 and upper-stage HM7 engines of the Ariane 5 launcher.

Ariane 5 has been designed to deliver payloads into low Earth orbit. Its development is being overseen by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES), with EADS Astrium acting as prime contractor.

This is the fifth contract since Meggitt’s win on the Ariane 5 in the early 1990s. Work on the Vulcan 2 engine components began last month and is expected to last five years.

Production for the HM7 engine contract with EADS Astrium started seven months earlier, in order to provide a continuous supply of components to EADS ahead of the Paris Air Show.

Following the show in June, an agreement was made on the upper-stage hardware covering 40 engine launchers. The company also won a contract at the beginning of the year from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to provide large gimbals for the main engine of the Japanese space launcher’s H2A engine.