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by Symmetry 1637 days ago
The Ariane 5 is batting 106 for 111 which is pretty good odds and perfectly respectable for a heavy lift vehicle... but not so much so that I don't wish it was launching on an Atlas 5 instead.
2 comments

Ariane 5 had some early problems, the first failure even became a case study in critical software development. But it had only had one partial failure after the 17th launch: the payload was launched to the wrong orbit because the wrong coordinates were put in the computer. A huge QA problem but not the fault of the launcher which did exactly as told.

Now, both Ariane 5 and Atlas 5 are extremely reliable, mature rockets.

Four of those were in the first 15, the last recent one was in 2018, and was a partial failure.