On Saturday night in French Guiana Ariane launched what’s often called the European Super-Rocket, but what I call the French Mega-Fuck-Falcon 2000. This machine is an amazing thing, or you could call it a beautiful flying heavy-payload behemoth, because it carries 10,000 kg of payload to 36,000 km above the earth.

Here are more numbers: it carried 2 satellites, and released them both successfully. Here’s a video of some men with nylon shirts enjoying the moment. One of these satellites was a Spanish spy satellite, for the Spanish government to listen to people around the world. The other satellite was a French television satellite, which will transmit more than 850 television channels and 550 radio stations to 110 million homes in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East for the next 15 years.

Fucking great. Thank God someone is doing this.

Although the company is French, and most operations are conducted by the French, the two biggest shareholders of Ariane are German.