Satellite News

Russia’s State Space Corporation Roskosmos intends to reduce the costs of the country’s new Angara rocket by means of cutting the RD-191 engines’ production cost, CEO of the engines’ manufacturer NPO Energomash research and production association Igor Arbuzov was quoted as saying.

The H-2A rocket will be retired within several years to make way for a new generation of launch vehicle. Its final mission is scheduled in fiscal 2023, the science ministry announced.

Rocket: Ariane 5 ECA; Payload: Eutelsat 65 West; Date: 9 February 2016, 0530 UTC; Launch site: Kourou, French Guiana. Ariane 5 deployed its passenger at the conclusion of a 27-minute flight sequence. Estimated orbital parameters at injection of its cryogenic upper stage were 249.8 km x 35,909 km x 0.48 degrees (target: 250 km x 35,896 km x 0.50 degrees).

The U.S. Navy and Lockheed Martin delivered the fifth Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) satellite to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, on 3 March prior to its expected May launch.

The assembly of Russia’s Proton-M rocket has been concluded ahead of a joint Russian-European launch of a Mars orbiter next week, the Roskosmos state corporation said.

India is slated to put into orbit its sixth navigation satellite on 10 March, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) announced.

International Launch Services and Inmarsat have agreed to a future launch of an Inmarsat satellite on board an ILS Proton from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Further details were not disclosed.

Aerojet Rocketdyne said it has completed a series of successful hot-fire tests of its RL10 upper-stage rocket engine. The RL10 development engine, dubbed XR708, included a core main injector built using additive manufacturing technology, often referred to as 3-D printing.