ArianeGroup and Thales announced on May 12, 2026, that they had carried out the first flight test of the FLP-t 150 ballistic munition the previous week, at the DGA Essais de Missiles range on the Île du Levant off France’s Mediterranean coast.
The test, supported by France’s defense procurement agency DGA, validated the architecture, propulsion, and guidance choices for a guided rocket with an operational range exceeding 150 kilometers, the two companies said.
The announcement comes a month after the competing MBDA-Safran consortium fired its Thundart rocket on April 14, 2026, also at Île du Levant.
Both candidates are competing under the French Ministry of the Armed Forces’ Frappe Longue Portée Terrestre (FLP-T) program, launched in 2023 to replace the nine Lance-Roquettes Unitaires (LRU) currently fielded by the French Army’s 1st Artillery Regiment. The LRUs, modernized variants of the US M270 platform, have a maximum range of around 70 kilometers and are approaching obsolescence. A down-select is expected later in 2026, with the winning system set to enter service by 2030.
A ballistic pedigree
The FLP-t 150 sits at the upper end of conventional artillery systems, with apogees of several tens of kilometers and largely supersonic velocities. ArianeGroup, which leads propulsion and guidance work, has drawn on its heritage in the M51 submarine-launched ballistic missile and other strategic systems. Thales is responsible for the wider system, including fire control and the X-Fire ground launcher, developed jointly with Soframe.
The munition uses rear-mounted fin guidance to perform terminal maneuvers, a feature the manufacturers say preserves accuracy in GNSS-jammed environments, a concern that has moved up French requirement lists since Russia’s electronic warfare performance in Ukraine exposed the vulnerability of satellite-guided munitions.
The X-Fire launcher will conduct its own first demonstration firings before the end of May 2026. It is designed for compatibility with both the sovereign FLP-t round and foreign munitions, and plugs into ATLAS, Thales’ existing artillery automation backbone.
ArianeGroup and Thales emphasized that the system is 100% French-designed and ITAR-free, a point of particular relevance to French export ambitions. The final commercial designation of the munition is expected to be disclosed at the Eurosatory exhibition in Paris in June 2026, where the Thundart team is also expected to push its case ahead of the DGA’s selection.
