{"id":946,"date":"2025-07-18T19:27:20","date_gmt":"2025-07-18T19:27:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mississaugaoffice.com\/?p=946"},"modified":"2025-08-05T21:07:26","modified_gmt":"2025-08-05T21:07:26","slug":"frances-new-rocket-baguette-one-to-go-where-no-baker-has-gone-before","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mississaugaoffice.com\/index.php\/2025\/07\/18\/frances-new-rocket-baguette-one-to-go-where-no-baker-has-gone-before\/","title":{"rendered":"France\u2019s new rocket Baguette One to go where no baker has gone before"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The country wants to reach the upper crust of space (Picture: Getty)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

If seeing a gigantic baguette flying in space is on your bucket list, do we have news for you. <\/p>\n

Well, kind of. France will soon have a new player in the space race <\/a>– a rocket called Baguette One. <\/p>\n

Humankind reaching the heavens was once unthinkable, with the rockets that have made it possible<\/a> named after ancient gods like Apollo or mythical creatures like Pegasus. <\/p>\n

Then there’s the boulangerie name that the Bordeaux-based start-up HyPrSpace has come up with for its 10-metre-high pocket rocket.<\/p>\n

Baguette One is intended to be a trial run for the company’s larger rocket, the Orbital Baguette One (or OB-1, pronounced ‘Obiwan’, a nod to the Star Wars<\/a> Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi).<\/p>\n

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To clarify, this is what the actual rocket will look like (Picture: HyPrSpace\/ Morton, Nigel)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

HyPrSpace CEO, Sylvain Bataillard, said she wanted to be ‘serious but not sinister’ when it came to picking a name. <\/p>\n

But the name wasn’t quite serious enough for the presenters at TFI, France’s main broadcaster, when they covered the Baguette One yesterday. <\/p>\n

When journalist Adrien Portron began giving a rundown on the rocket to the panel, even he struggled to keep a straight face when they were shown an AI-generated image of a baguette on a launchpad. <\/p>\n

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\ud83e\udd56 "Baguette One", la fus\u00e9e made in France \ud83d\ude80 D\u00e9collage imm\u00e9diat avec @PortronAdrien<\/a> dans #BonjourLaMatinaleTF1<\/a> \u2935 pic.twitter.com\/ZxBKcwhM7i<\/a><\/p>\n

— TF1Info (@TF1Info) July 17, 2025<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n

Both baguette rockets are micro-launchers – delivery vans for small, 300kg satellites that drift just above the Earth’s atmosphere.<\/p>\n

‘To understand, we can compare heavy-lift launchers to micro-launchers,’ Bataillard told CNews<\/a>. <\/p>\n

‘A micro-launcher is like a “taxi” with a high fare currently between $40,000 and $50,000 per kilo to take it into space. A large launcher is like a bus with fares less than $10,000 per kilo. <\/p>\n

‘But with our rocket, we could offer a “taxi” for around \u20ac20,000\/kg.’<\/p>\n

These cosmic cabs will rely on a cheap, eco-friendly engine (at least, in the multi-million world of spacecraft propulsion systems), Bataillard said.<\/p>\n

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The Baguette One launch will be held next year (Picture: HyPrSpace)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Rather than using rocket fuel, ‘space bakers’ designed hybrid boosters that use a mixture of solid and liquid propellants, such as recycled plastic.<\/p>\n

Neither of the baguettes will use a turbopump, a costly piece of equipment which pushes high-pressure fluid into the engine’s combustion chamber. <\/p>\n

Baguette One will be launched from one of three military bases next year -Biscarrosse, Saint-M\u00e9dard-en-Jalles or \u00cele du Levant – making it the first rocket launch in metropolitan France.<\/p>\n

HyPrSpace’s Baguette One isn’t a half-baked idea, though. <\/p>\n

Backed by President Emmanuel Macron<\/a>, the firm received \u20ac35million (about \u00a330million) in subsidies last year.<\/p>\n

This is part of the French government’s France 2030, a fund that invests in innovative technologies. <\/p>\n

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The micro-launcher will be powered by a ‘hybrid’ engine (Picture: HyPrSpace)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

French defence officials have expressed an interest in HyPrSpace’s propulsion technology as a novel way to chuck satellites into space.<\/p>\n

More than 26,000 satellites will be launched by 2032, amounting to eight satellites a day, consultancy firm Novaspace<\/a> estimates.<\/p>\n

Elon Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, owns around two-thirds of the sofa-sized orbiters whizzing above your head right now, according to the satellite tracker CelesTrak<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Yet studies <\/a>have shown that all this hardware above our heads means more harmful metals lingering in the atmosphere, while some space officials worry that the final frontier is becoming a celestial rubbing tip<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Bataillard, however, remains optimistic. <\/p>\n

‘Space today is like the internet in the 1990s,’ he added. ‘We know that a lot of things are going to happen.’<\/p>\n

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk<\/a>.<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

For more stories like this, <\/strong>check our news page<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n


\n\t\t\tComment now<\/title><\/span><br \/>\n\t\t\t<span class=\"comment-now__label\">Comments<\/span><br \/>\n\t\t<\/a><\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The country wants to reach the upper crust of space (Picture: Getty) If seeing a gigantic baguette flying in space is on your bucket list, do we have news for you. Well, kind of. France will soon have a new player in the space race – a rocket called Baguette One. Humankind reaching the heavens…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":948,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mississaugaoffice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mississaugaoffice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mississaugaoffice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mississaugaoffice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mississaugaoffice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=946"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mississaugaoffice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/946\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":953,"href":"https:\/\/mississaugaoffice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/946\/revisions\/953"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mississaugaoffice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mississaugaoffice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mississaugaoffice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mississaugaoffice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}