Satellite News

Rocket: Kosmos 3M; Payload: SAR-Lupe 1; Date: 19 December 2006, 1400 UTC; Launch Site: Plesetsk, Russia. Germany’s first spy satellite was successfully placed in a near-polar 500 km orbit, inclined at 98 degrees.

Rocket: H-IIA; Payload: Engineering Test Satellite (ETS) VIII (Kiku No. ; Date: 18 December 2006, 0632 UTC; Launch Site: Tanegashima Space Center, Japan. Twenty-seven minutes and 35 seconds after lift-off, successful satellite separation was confirmed.

Boeing Commercial Space Company recently celebrated the transfer of the 25th payload accommodations package to Sea Launch Company.

SpaceDev has been awarded a US$330,000 Phase I study contract from Benson Space Company to further the SpaceDev Dream Chaser spaceship programme.

Rocket: Minotaur I; Payload: TacSat 2, GeneSat 1; Date: 16 December 2006, 1200 UTC; Launch Site: Wallops Island, USA. The satellites were successfully launched on the four-stage launch vehicle contracted by the U.S. Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center through Orbital Sciences Corporation’s Launch Systems Group.

The launch of JAXA’s H-IIA Launch Vehicle No. 11 (H-IIA F11) with the Engineering Test Satellite Kiku No. 8 (ETS-VIII) onboard has been postponed because of bad weather at the Yoshinobu Launch Complex at the Tanegashima Space Center.

U.S. Air Force officials cleared TacSat 2 for launch on 16 December after a software glitch had grounded it and the Minotaur I rocket carrying it.

The first attempt to launch a rocket from the mid-Atlantic region’s commercial spaceport (MARS) on Wallops Island has been postponed again.