Satellite News

The launch window for Virgin Orbit’s third commercial flight,Above the Clouds, opens this on 12 January 2022. The spacecraft to be launched to Low Earth Orbit at 500 km circular orbit at 45 degrees inclination for this mission includes satellites for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Space Test Program, Polish company SatRevolution, and Spire Global, Inc.

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Arianespace and the European Space Agency ESA have signed a contract to secure the launch of FLEX and ALTIUS on Vega C, from Europe’s Spaceport mid-2025.

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Rocket: Falcon 9; Payload: 49 Starlink satellites (Starlink 4-5); Date: 6 January 2022, 2149 UTC; Launch site: Kennedy Space Center, USA. The satellites were deployed into 210 km × 339 km × 53.22 degrees transfer orbit 15 minutes after lift-off.

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Arianespace has been awarded a launch contract by SITAEL, with the Italian Space Agency (ASI) as the final customer, to orbit PLATiNO 1 & 2 satellites, between 2022 and 2024 on Vega and Vega C. PLATiNO 1 and 2 are Earth observation small satellites operating on Sun-synchronous orbits. PLATiNO 1 will embark a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), operating in the X band, while PLATiNO 2 will carry an optical thermal instrument.

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Arianespace performed a total of 15 launches in 2021: three by Ariane 5, nine by Soyuz (including eight from the Russian spaceports in Baikonur and Vostochny for the OneWeb constellation) and three by Vega. A total of 305 satellites were launched. Out of the 15 launches, there were 11.5 for solely commercial customers, making Arianespace the leader in this market, according to the company.

The European Union Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA) has chosen Arianespace to launch four new Galileo satellites for Europe’s own satellite navigation system. With this order, EUSPA takes over the role of placing launch services contracts for Galileo from ESA, which acted so far in the name and on behalf of the European Commission and will continue to be the technical authority for these launches.

Security at key facilities of Baikonur’s spaceport has been tightened and the branches of Roskosmos’s enterprises are working as normal, the Russian state space corporation’s head, Dmitry Rogozin, said.

The Ariane 6 core stage and upper stage are now en route to Europe’s Spaceport. After final assembly at ArianeGroup’s Les Mureaux site and completion of all its functional acceptance tests, the core stage was taken to the French port of Le Havre.