Satellite News

Vector, a nanosatellite launch company, and Open Cosmos, a space mission provider, announced an agreement to reserve five orbital launches between 2019 and 2023 on the Vector-R launch vehicle. The announcement comes in advance of Vector’s first orbital launch in July.

Rocket: Soyuz-2.1a; Payload: Progress MS-08 [Progress P69]; Date: 13 February 2018, 0813 UTC; Launch site: Baikonur, Kazakhstan. The Progress cargo transportation spacecraft developed and built by RSC Energia was successfully put into a low Earth orbit.

Roskosmos has delayed the launch of a Soyuz rocket carrying a Progress cargo ship by two days after Sunday’s planned lift-off was aborted at the last minute.

ESA has chosen five feasibility studies from industry proposing an economically viable, commercially self-sustaining microlauncher, without public funding. ArianeGroup, MT-Aerospace, ELV, Deimos and PLD Space are carrying out the studies.

The first test flight of a Falcon Heavy rocket may have been a great publicity stunt but was technically not as successful as many reports suggest.

The construction of two Angara launch vehicles may be ordered in 2019-2020 in order to put Gonets-M satellites into orbit from Plesetsk Cosmodrome.

Rocket: Falcon Heavy; Payload: dummy mass; Date: 6 February 2018, 2145 UTC; Launch site: Kennedy Space Center, USA. At the time of writing this, the rocket’s second stage had completed the second of its three burns on this test flight.

Energia corporation has been designated as the developer of the Super-Heavy Space Launch Vehicle System (SH SLVS). Subcontractors include enterprises of the State Corporation Roskosmos: RSC Progress, TsENKI, etc.