Ariane 1

On Christmas Eve 1979, at 14:14 local time, a slender white rocket climbed out of the South American rainforest at Kourou and carried Europe's independence to orbit with it. Nine days earlier the first attempt had ended in the cruellest way a countdown can: the engines ignited at zero, roared into life, and then went out with the rocket still on the pad. A second try was scrubbed by weather and small faults. On the third attempt Ariane L01 flew, and flew perfectly, placing its CAT-1 technology capsule into orbit and ending the American monopoly on the West's access to space.

Behind that launch lay a decade of European frustration. The continent's first joint rocket programme, Europa, had failed repeatedly through the 1960s and early 1970s and never produced an operational launcher, while reliance on US rockets came with conditions that chafed commercially and politically. In 1973 European governments approved a new launcher, led by France through the space agency CNES under the newly forming ESA. The result stood 47.4 metres tall and weighed 210 tonnes at liftoff, and its third stage burned cryogenic liquid hydrogen, a technology only the United States had flown before.

What followed turned a rocket into an industry. In 1980 Europe created Arianespace, the world's first commercial launch services company, to sell Ariane flights on the open market. Ariane 1 and its upgraded siblings, Ariane 2 and 3, flew 28 times between 1979 and 1989 and placed 38 satellites in orbit, and by the late 1980s the family had captured a major share of the world's commercial launches to geostationary orbit. An Ariane 1 also gave Europe its first deep-space mission, lofting the comet probe Giotto in July 1985. The line that began that Christmas Eve runs unbroken to Ariane 6 today.