CHANGE: Europe’s venerable Ariane 5 rocket faces a bittersweet ending on Tuesday.

The Ariane 5 rocket made its debut in June 1996 with a launch failure, and its second launch a year later was also a partial failure. But after that, the rocket has had a commendable record of success across 116 total launch attempts. For most of its history, the rocket was a true workhorse, launching dozens of commercial satellites into geostationary space and ensuring that the nations of Europe could get their national security payloads into orbit.

The rocket has also lifted a number of important space science missions, including the Rosetta, Herschel, Planck, BepiColombo, and JUICE spacecraft. Perhaps the rocket’s most notable launch came in December 2021, when it lofted the James Webb Space Telescope for NASA into a very precise orbit.

Because Webb did not need to expend any on-board fuel to correct its orbit, NASA was able to double its estimated lifetime for the mission. A NASA systems engineer, Mike Menzel, said an agency analysis found that Webb has enough propellant on board for 20 years of life, up from its original estimate of 10 years.

That was one helluva launch.

The replacement rocket, the Ariane 6, is years late and isn’t reusable, so it likely won’t find much of a market outside of homegrown missions for Europe’s militaries and intelligence agencies.