Satellite News

Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo rocket plane has exploded and crashed during a test flight, killing one crew member and seriously injuring another.

Orbital said that based on initial sweeps conducted by its safety team, it appears likely that substantial hardware evidence will be available to aid in determining root cause of the recent Antares launch failure. Preliminary telemetry analysis indicates the failure initiated in the rocket’s first stage.

The Wallops Incident Response Team has completed an initial assessment of Wallops Island, Virginia, following the catastrophic failure of Orbital Science Corp.’s Antares rocket shortly after lift-off on 28 October from Pad 0A of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

An Antares rocket carrying a Cygnus transporter to the ISS on the commercial Orb-3 resupply mission exploded about six seconds after lift-off on 28 October, 2222 UTC from Wallops Flight Facility, USA.

The Independent Inquiry Board formed to analyse the causes of the anomaly occurring during the orbital injection of satellites in the Galileo constellation by a Soyuz rocket launched from the Guiana Space Center on 22 August has announced its definitive conclusions.

The ILS Failure Review Oversight Board (FROB) has concluded its work, after a detailed review of the findings, conclusions and identified corrective action plans from the Russian State Inter-agency Commission (IAC) and Khrunichev (KhSC) investigations into the probable cause of the 16 May failure of the Russian Federal Proton mission carrying the Ekspress AM4R satellite.

The partial launch failure of a Soyuz carrying two Galileo navigation satellites was reportedly caused by a frozen fuel pipe in the rocket’s Fregat upper stage.

Contact has been lost with South Korea’s Science and Technology Satellite-2C months ago, according to local media.