Giant leaps from the backyard of fear

Stepping out of the aircraft at the tiny airport of Cayenne in French Guiana is a strange experience. Muggy heat embraces the disembarking passenger — not the kind that usually makes the tropics so appealing and delightful to strangers but a stickiness that makes one gasp.

It is wet: Every fibre of clothing is literally soaking up the humidity. In no time mosquitoes are attacking all exposed body parts.

Is this still Europe?

Technically, it is. French Guiana is a départment d'outre mer (overseas department) of France, located on the northern coast of South America and wedged between the northern Amazonas plains of Brazil and Surinam.

It is an integral part of the French republic, Paris is its capital, its provinces are called arrondissements, its currency is the euro and its prefecture is Cayenne.

Most of its 220,000 residents live on a small coastal strip while the rest of the country is covered by an incredibly dense, inaccessible rainforest.

Referring to this region, Paul Theroux, in his famous novel Mosquito Coast, said malaria and dengue fever are common in French Guiana and the jungle is infested with mosquitoes that carry the virus.

France, however, always found a way to put this former colony to some use. After French seafarers reached the coast in the 17th century, some colonists began settling here.

But most of them left owing to the tough living conditions that made agriculture uneconomical.

With a view to putting the outpost to some use, the French government established a penal colony in French Guiana and began deporting criminals and political prisoners there.

The Ile du Diable (Devil's Island) on the archipelago of the three Iles du Salut off the coast of Cayenne, especially, was a place greatly feared by convicts. A deportation to Guiana was considered akin to a death sentence.

Devil's Island was regarded as a fearsome place meant for the most dangerous criminals and political prisoners.

The hellishness of the place became more widely known through the Dreyfus Affair, one of the biggest political scandals in the history of France.

Albert Dreyfus, an army officer accused of spying for the German government, was convicted of treason and sentenced to solitary confinement for life on Devil's Island in 1894.

He was forced to stay there for three years but was released following a protest campaign by Emile Zola, one of France's most famous and influential writers of the time.

The Devil's Island prison was closed in 1954.

Today the ruins on Devil's Island can be reached by a short boat ride from the coast.

It is an fasinating place, with its solitary prison cells, decayed guards' buildings, large prison courtyard and open views of the coast.

The autobiographical novel Papillon by Henri Charriere, filmed in 1973 with actors Steve McQueen and Dustin Hofmann, tells the story of a desperate inmate on the island and his numerous attempts to escape.

After the closure of the prison, France a new purpose for its outpost and finally decided to utilise it for its space programme.

French Guiana jumped from the Middle Ages into the space age when France decided to build a spaceport in 1964 in the second-largest town of Kourou.

Four years later, the Guiana Space Centre went into operation. The place was chosen mainly for its proximity to the equator and because the launch path of rockets would lead over the sea.

The Guiana Space Centre is used for Ariane rocket launches and other commercial space programmes.

The space centre is also used to launch Russian-built Soyuz rockets under the terms of a Russian-European joint venture. On February 12, an Ariane 5 rocket carried two communication satellites into geostationary orbits.

Today the space centre employs close to 2,000 people, most of them French and other European expatriates.

At every launch, two or three Air France aircraft with European Union officials and delegates land in French Guiana, providing an impetus to the local tourism industry .

Curiously, on most occasions the official trips end with a barbecue on Devil's Island.

Each Ariane rocket launch costs about 150 million euros. The launch pad managed by the European Space Agency (ESA) serves commercial and military purposes.

Established in 1975, the intergovernmental organisation comprises 18 member states and has an annual budget of about 3.6 billion euros, says ESA Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain.

France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Italy are playing leading roles in the organisation.

The ESA is not a body of the European Union but there are close ties between the them and a liaison office in Brussels.

One of the biggest projects of Arianespace is the establishment of Europe's global satellite navigation system, a competitor to the United States Global Positioning System, GPS.

Another important long-time project is related to the EUMETSAT weather satellite programme.

Since 2008, Russian Soyuz rockets, are being launched from Kourou in collaboration with Moscow's commercial satellite programme.

The next step will be the integration of the new, smaller Vega rocket into the Ariane programme.

The Vega is designed to carry smaller payloads into space at a much lower cost than the Ariane rockets.

The biggest European engineering firms are benefiting the most from ESA's launch projects.

The lion's share of the annual budgets goes to the French company Arianespace, which manufactures the Ariane rocket, the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company, the French-German-Spanish aviation joint venture, Alcatel (France) and Finmeccanica (Italy).

Some small countries are also contributing to the European space mission, albeit to a lesser extent.

For example, Austrian-Canadian car manufacturer Magna has a division called Magna Aerospace, which delivers parts and engineering expertise to Arianespace.

The premises of the Ariane rocket launch centre are guarded by the 3rd Infantry Regiment of the French Foreign Legion.

Since 1973, the legion's base has dominated the town of Kourou where the legionnaires live in a neighbourhood called “Forget''.

Though life is normally peaceful in Kourou, tensions remain between France and the indigenous Creole.