Arianespace said from its headquarters outside Paris that the mammoth rocket, with a capacity to place up to 10 tonnes of payload into orbit, took off at 2103 GMT more than one hour into the start of the launch window.

The Ariane 5 ECA placed into geostationary orbit the 3.6-tonne XTAR-EUR satellite, due to provide government and military communications for the United States and Spain in a footprint ranging from eastern Brazil to Singapore.

It also released a small Dutch satellite, Sloshsat, weighing 127 kilogrammes (279 pounds) to test the dynamics of fluids in orbit.

The head of Arianespace, Jean-Yves Le Gall, described it as "an exceptional moment", adding that "those who believed in Ariane 5 '10 tonnes' were right."

The first version of the Ariane 5 ECA failed catastrophically on its maiden flight in December 2002. It veered offcourse after liftoff and had to be blown up over the Atlantic, destroying its half-billion-dollar satellite cargo.

A painstaking inquiry into the 2002 disaster pinned the blame on a cooling system in the ECA's Vulcain-2 motor, an upgraded version of the Vulcain-1 engine that powers the standard 6.8-tonne Ariane 5.

Backed by pledges of 550 million euros (715 million dollars) from the European Space Agency's (ESA) stakeholder nations, a programme was initiated to fix the problem.

More than half a billion euros (650 million dollars) and Europe's bid to rival the United States and Russia in the lucrative market for satellite launches was riding on the latest rocket.

The European aeronautics and space giant EADS has a 27.03-percent stake in Arianespace, which operates and markets the Ariane range of launchers designed by the ESA.

The commercial interest in the ECA is productivity. A launch costs about 150 million euros (195 million dollars), so if two or three satellites can be launched in one go, the costs per satellite are far cheaper than with a single payload.

US corporations have likewise gone in for the huge end of the market.

There is Boeing's Delta 4 Heavy, which made its test flight last December 21, with the capacity to put between 6.4 and 24 tonnes of cargo into space depending on the distance to orbit.

There is also Lockheed Martin's Atlas 5, which made its inaugural flight in 2002, and which has an advertised payload capacity of between 4.9 and 20.5 tonnes.

However, apart from launches for government agencies, the market remains somewhat in the doldrums, partially because the bust of the late 1990s telecoms boom left a lot of cheap, surplus satellite capacity around.

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