A Spacecraft’s Dance From French Guiana to Jupiter

This piece is part of a special series on how the global space industry is transforming life on Earth. Read the introduction to the series here.

It’s a Friday morning in April 2023, and the beach is packed with people. But what I’m witnessing is not a usual beach scene for Kourou, the coastal town in French Guiana where I’ve been living for the past six months for my doctoral research in anthropology. Everyone faces away from the sea, and no one seems remotely interested in taking a dip in the tropical waters. Rather, the crowd stares at a point west of town. Many hold their cellphones or cameras at the ready for the start of the show.

The highly anticipated show is the launch of JUICE, or the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, a cutting-edge spacecraft attached to an Ariane 5 rocket. A flagship mission of the European Space Agency (ESA), JUICE will head out on a multiyear voyage to Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, to observe its three ocean-bearing icy moons—Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede—as possible habitats. Ultimately, scientists hope to come closer to answering the question, “Is the origin of life unique to our planet, or could it occur elsewhere in our solar system—or beyond?”

Now the mission is set to lift off just a few kilometers from where we stand. From people’s phones, I hear radio buzzes from a livestream of the mission control room of the Centre Spatial Guyanais, the main launch site of the French and European space agencies, both headquartered in Paris, more than 7,000 kilometers away from this launch site in South America.

We wait for the team responsible for the launch to announce whether “all systems go.” The day prior, dark clouds hanging above the sea and a chance of lightning had delayed the launch. For a mission literally choreographed to the second, the ominous weather posed too big a risk.

Planning the JUICE mission took astronomical proportions: The ESA worked on this project for more than a decade, even before its story in space started. After liftoff, it will take another eight years for JUICE to reach its destination and begin its explorations.

A French aerodynamic engineer from the JUICE team who is in Kourou for the launch described the planned journey at an earlier public event as similar to “a ball in a pinball machine.” JUICE will bounce around space, using the gravitational lifts from several planets, including Earth, to reach its destinations. During the engineer’s presentation, the complexity of JUICE’s proposed path had dazzled me: an intricate dance between a human-made satellite and celestial bodies unimaginable distances removed from Earth.

Everything around the launch has been carefully choreographed, too, but for a different purpose: to get the public excited. Playing on the “juice” name, the ESA had organized a competition for the most creative space-themed drink, resulting in a recipe “inspired by Europa’s geology.” Mock-ups of the launchers decorate the welcome hall of French Guiana’s airport, and banners announce the mission around the city. The rocket itself has been adorned with a child’s artwork, the winner of a competition among young artists from around the world called Juice Up Your Rocket! And actual royalty, the Belgian king, had come to Kourou to witness the launch.

Suddenly, the sky lights up with the bright ball of the Ariane 5 rocket lifting JUICE. The soundwaves of the rocket produce a tremendous rumble that shakes the ground around us. Everybody claps and yells, the excitement palpable in the air.

Liftoff.

But as soon as the rocket disappears behind the clouds, the crowd dissipates. Despite all the buzz over the mission, for many people in Kourou, it remains a regular workday. And plenty of local people did not make it out of work or their homes for the launch in the first place. The crowd at the beach had been largely White Europeans, mirroring the workforce at the launch site; many of the engineering and policy positions involved in the mission are held by people from continental France.

These demographic imbalances stand out in French Guiana, a country known for its ethnic diversity: Nestled between Suriname and Brazil, it is a blend of Amazonian, South American, and Caribbean cultures. The territory is a mosaic of Amerindians, Creoles, Maroons, Haitians, Brazilians, H’mong, Chinese, and “Métro” communities from France.

After the launch, I head to the market. I had heard a special stand in honor of JUICE had been organized by a small group of European astronomers who came for the occasion. But as I look around the regular fruit and vegetable stands, nothing points to the fact that one of Europe’s most important space missions had just lifted off a few kilometers away.

The market buzzes with life. Here the ethnic diversity of the country is visible, but the astronomy booth proves elusive.

I ask some of the vendors if they know where it is. Each time, I receive a blank expression. “No, sorry, I don’t know anything about that,” they tell me.

The contrast between the anticipation of the launch and a typical day at the market demonstrates the disconnect between the space sector and a large portion of the local community. Even though the space industry, including this JUICE mission, markets itself to “deliver benefits to citizens of … the world” and to quench the “universal” thirst to understand the origins of life, many residents of Kourou feel removed from it, they tell me. Kourou is where the launcher and its payloads get assembled, but its missions and ambitions are designed elsewhere.

As a technology professor at a local university explains to me, “Space does not happen here. Space happens in big European cities. Paris. Toulouse. You name it. Here, it is just the land being used.”

The French government built the Centre Spatial Guyanais in the 1960s to replace a launch site in Algeria that was forced to shut down after the country’s independence from colonial rule. French Guiana, which remains an overseas territory of France, seemed ideal because of its favorable launching conditions and relatively low population density.

However, little attention was given to the people who inhabited the region. Communities largely lived off the land, relying on abattis, a slash-and-burn method of agriculture, as well as hunting and fishing. People lived in large, open wooden houses and tended to the land collectively, during what a former Kourou resident called the “happy days.”

The French space agency appropriated the land, forcing people out of their homes and into a new lifestyle. The agency involuntarily relocated them to small, concrete apartments and assigned plots of land not reachable by foot, leaving those without transport “with nothing to do.” This process of dispossession, euphemistically called “expropriation,” created a complex dynamic between the launch site and those inhabiting its surrounding areas.

In recent decades, residents have had other pressing priorities. In 2017, people from all over French Guiana took to the streets to protest social insecurity, high inflation, and inequality. Crowds chanted, “The rocket takes off, but Guyana remains on the ground.” Some demonstrators occupied the JUICE launch site for several days, demanding more resources for the territory. After an agreement was drawn up, the protests died down, but many of the central issues remain unresolved.

The European and French space agencies have been working toward generating more enthusiasm for the space sector among local communities. In the last three years alone, funding has gone to projects on astronomy, space technologies, and an inaugural space festival to celebrate the mission to Jupiter.

Still, the space industry remains an elite sector in French Guiana. Even though the rocket site sits a stone’s throw away from Kourou’s center, it remains far removed from the daily lives of most residents.