KOUROU, French Guiana, Dec 3 (Reuters) - A western European Ariane rocket launched a military surveillance satellite on Friday, the second in a French-led drive for a European "spy in the sky'' independent of the United States.
The Ariane-40 rocket blasted off at 1622 GMT from the Kourou launchpad in French Guiana. It placed into orbit 23 minutes later the 2.5-ton Helios 1B satellite, an enhanced twin of the Helios 1A satellite launched four years ago.
France, running the project with minority partners Italy and Spain, gave high publicity to the launch from this site in the northeastern part of South America.
Stung by Washington's high-tech superiority during the Kosovo crisis, Paris has stepped up its efforts to convince its European Union partners to support an ambitious military satellite network as part of its new defense program.
Yves Gleize, director of weapons systems at the French arms procurement agency DGA, said all-weather intelligence gathering satellites were a strategic priority for Europe.
"We are convinced that we will be able to reach all-weather intelligence capability together with our partners,'' he told a pre-launch news conference.
The two satellites in the seven billion franc ($1.07 billion) Helios 1 program cannot see at night or through clouds, a major handicap in European weather.
But French defense officials said pictures from Helios 1A were used to prepare air strikes and pinpoint columns of ethnic Albanian refugees during the Kosovo conflict last spring.
Major-General Richard Wolsztinsky told reporters the pictures also provided independent information on the risk of collateral damage -- hitting civilians and structures lacking military value -- during the NATO bombing campaign.
U.S. criticizes France
France has been criticized by the U.S. military for opposing several NATO strikes in which civilians could be hurt and President Jacques Chirac has said he demanded that Belgrade's bridges be spared.
Helios 1B has more computer memory than its older brother. Like Helios 1A, it was placed on a 700-kilometer-high (435-mile) orbit going over the North and South poles, but at a 180-degree angle to cut in half the time gap between two overflights of a given region.
"Intelligence, like fish, must be fresh,'' Wolsztinsky said.
Helios 1A has so far sent back some 100,000 pictures, shared out in line with the partners' financial stakes -- 79 percent for France, 14 percent for Italy and seven percent for Spain.
The five-year life span of Helios 1A expires next year, but officials said it had not shown any sign of weakness yet.
A Helios 2 program of satellites with infrared night vision -- but still no capability to see through cloud cover -- is due to take over in 2003.
But Italy's Admiral Mario Bartoli and Spain's General Emilio Poyo Guerrero, who attended the launch, told reporters their countries had not made a final decision on whether to join.
France had hoped Germany would help co-finance the $3 billion all-weather Horus satellite it planned as the next step in its satellite development program.
But it had to shelve that project last year when Germany, which has fewer qualms than France about depending on Washington for some of its most sophisticated intelligence, balked at the huge price tag.
Berlin agreed this week to a more modest program to share a military telecommunications satellite with Paris, part of France's Syracuse III project due for launch at the end of 2003.
The launch was the 50th successful blast-off in a row for a rocket from the Ariane 4 family.
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