Satellite News

ESA, CNES and ArianeGroup have jointly established a consolidated reference planning for Ariane 6 development, leading to a launch in Q2 2022. Vega-C’s maiden flight is currently planned for June 2021.

Firefly announced a substantial commitment to increase its manufacturing capacity by transitioning large parts manufacturing to Automated fibre Placement (AFP) Mongoose Hybrid systems from Ingersoll Machine Tools beginning next year.

D-Orbit announced the successful completion of the deployment phase of ORIGIN mission, the first of ION Satellite Carrier. ION, D-Orbit’s satellite platform, successfully released 12 SuperDove satellites for Earth-imaging company Planet, in the precise orbital slots requested by the client.

Investment in the Russian-Kazakh rocket launch pad Baiterek [aka Baitarek] project totals around US$1 billion, Russia’s State Space Corporation Roskosmos Chief Dmitry Rogozin was quoted as saying.

Rocket: Chang Zheng-2C; Payload: three Yaogan 30-07 satellites, Tianqi-6; Date: 26 October 2020, 1519 UTC; Launch site: Xichang Satellite Launch Center, China. The satellites were deployed into 588 km x 604 km x 35.00 degrees orbits.

NASA and SpaceX are now targeting 15 November, 0049 UTC for the launch of the first crew rotation mission to the International Space Station as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program.

Momentus Inc. and Gran Systems announced a service agreement for Gran System’s 2U CubeSat NUTSAT to fly on Momentus’ December 2020 Vigoride demo mission.

Rocket: Soyuz-2.1b/Fregat; Payload: GLONASS-K No.15L (Uragan-K No.15L); Date: 25 October 2020, 1908 UTC; Launch site: Plesetsk, Russia. Spacecraft separation into a 19,125 km x 19,150 km x 64.81 degrees orbit occurred a little over three and a half hours after launch.