CERES ("Centre d'Essais et de Recherches d'Engins Spéciaux" for "''Special Weapons Research and Tests Center"'') Ile du Levant was a French suborbital rocket launch site, located at

Ile du Levant Île du Levant (), sometimes referred to as Le Levant, is a French island in the Mediterranean off the coast of the Riviera, near Toulon. It is one of the four that constitute the Îles d'Hyères. Part of the island is occupied by the naturist ...

, and active between 1956 and 1968. CERES played a pivotal role in testing a wide array of tactical missiles used in France, as well as conducting tests for

sounding rocket A sounding rocket or rocketsonde, sometimes called a research rocket or a suborbital rocket, is an instrument-carrying rocket designed to take measurements and perform scientific experiments during its sub-orbital flight. The rockets are often ...

s on behalf of

CNES CNES () is the French national space agency. Headquartered in central Paris, the agency is overseen by the ministries of the Armed Forces, Economy and Finance and Higher Education, Research and Innovation. It operates from the Toulouse Spac ...

and

ESRO The European Space Research Organisation (ESRO) was an international organisation founded by 10 European nations with the intention of jointly pursuing scientific research in space. It was founded in 1964. As an organisation ESRO was based on a ...

. Additionally, the center was involved in experiments with

ONERA The Office National d'Études et de Recherches Aérospatiales ( English: National office for aerospace studies and research) or ONERA, dubbed ''The French Aerospace Lab'' in English, is the French national aerospace research center. Originally f ...

and SEREB experimental vehicles, solidifying its significance in the realm of missile research and testing.

History

In the early 1950s, a military missile test site was established at the French naval base on the Ile du Levant, an offshore island in the Mediterranean near

Toulon Toulon (, , ; , , ) is a city in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region of southeastern France. Located on the French Riviera and the historical Provence, it is the prefecture of the Var (department), Var department. The Commune of Toulon h ...

. Known as CERES, it replaced a beach site at

Pampelonne Pampelonne (; ) is a commune in the Tarn department in southern France. See also *Communes of the Tarn department The following is a list of the 314 communes of the Tarn department of France. The communes cooperate in the following int ...

used for launches since 1948. This facility served as a Naval Air Force base throughout the 1950s, testing missiles not only for the Navy but also for other branches of the armed forces. On September 1, 1968, it merged with other institutions for form CEM (''Centre d'Essais de la Méditerranée'' or ''Mediterranean Test Center'').

Launches

More than one hundred vehicles were launched from Ile du Levant, including sounding rockets such as Monica, Daniel, Antarès, Bélier,

Agate Agate ( ) is a banded variety of chalcedony. Agate stones are characterized by alternating bands of different colored chalcedony and sometimes include macroscopic quartz. They are common in nature and can be found globally in a large number of d ...

, Centaure,

Bérénice ''Berenice'' () is a five-act tragedy by the French 17th-century playwright Jean Racine. ''Berenice'' was not played often between the 17th and the 20th centuries. It was premiered on 21 November 1670 by the Comédiens du Roi at the Hôtel de ...

, Belenos,

LEX Lex or LEX may refer to: Computing * Amazon Lex, a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text * LEX (cipher), a stream cipher based on the round transformation of AES * Lex (software), a computer pro ...

, MD-620, Tacite, MSBS M112, MSBS M011, Dauphin, Belisama, Epona and Grannos.

References

{{improve categories, date=November 2023 Space program of France Rocket launch sites in France Military installations of France Spaceports in Europe