The 98-foot-tall (30-meter) Vega rocket took off at 9:50 pm EDT Wednesday (01:50 UTC Thursday) from the European-run spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
Sentinel-2C will replace Sentinel-2A, which launched on a Vega rocket in 2015 and is nearing the end of its life.
The Vega rocket will be replaced by the larger Vega-C rocket, with a more powerful booster stage and a wider payload fairing.
We have learned a lot.” 22 and done However, in a dozen years of service, the Vega rocket never really took off in the commercial launch market.
Just two years after the Vega rocket started flying, the European Space Agency (ESA) approved the development of its replacement, the Vega-C, to handle heavier payloads.
A key environmental monitoring satellite for the EU’s flagship Copernicus program was launched on Wednesday night by Europe’s Vega rocket, which made its final flight from French Guiana possible.
At 9:50 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, or 01:50 p.m. UTC on Thursday, the 98-foot-tall (30-meter) Vega rocket lifted off from the European-run spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. From the South American launch pad, the rocket traveled northward, intending to reach a polar orbit approximately 480 miles (775 kilometers) above the planet.
Only Sentinel-2C, a remote sensing platform that will be added to Europe’s fleet of Copernicus environmental satellites, was carried on board. With satellites equipped with various instruments to monitor land surfaces, oceans, and the atmosphere, the multibillion dollar Copernicus system is the most extensive space-based Earth observation network in the world.
After being launched on a Vega rocket in 2015, Sentinel-2A is almost out of service and will be replaced by Sentinel-2C. In 2028, Sentinel-2D will take the place of Sentinel-2B, an identical satellite that has been in orbit since 2017.
Sentinel-2C was launched into an orbit that was on target by the upper stage of the Vega rocket about an hour after liftoff. The satellite was found to be in good health in orbit when Sentinel-2C then radioed its status to ground controllers.
Similar to the Landsat satellites operated by the US government, the Sentinel-2 series of European spacecraft offers wide-angle optical views of crops, forests, and urban areas to monitor changes from season to season and year to year. The Copernicus data is freely shared with users worldwide by the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union.
The Attitude Vernier Upper Module (AVUM), a liquid-fueled upper stage that ignites its engine multiple times to place satellites into slightly different orbits, and three solid-fueled rocket motors that fire one after the other power the Vega launcher. Up to 3,300 pounds (1,500 kilograms) of payload mass can be delivered by Vega into an orbit that is 700 kilometers (or 435 miles) high.
The Italian aerospace company Avio designed Vega and is in charge of an industrial consortium that produces the rocket’s solid motors, structures, and avionics. Marketing and sales for the Vega program have been handled by Arianespace, the French launch service provider, since the beginning.
The Vega rocket will be superseded by the larger Vega-C rocket, which boasts a wider payload fairing and a more potent booster stage. The Vega-C will be used primarily to launch upcoming Copernicus satellites for Europe.
A few hours prior to Wednesday night’s mission, CEO of Avio Giulio Ranzo told Ars, “I think it was a great success.”. It was the first launcher we had. That was the first time we had been a significant player in the launcher market. The legacy is very, very strong because we assembled it starting from scratch. Much has been learned by us. “.
22 completed.
But despite being in operation for twelve years, the Vega rocket never really took off in the market for commercial launches. It mainly deployed satellites for the European Space Agency and other European government agencies, who prefer to launch their payloads on European rockets, and operated on an average of two flights annually.
The Vega rocket appeared to be competitive for contracts to launch small Earth observation satellites for government and commercial customers outside of Europe in the early years following its first launch in 2012.
In 2013, Kazakhstan launched an Earth-imaging satellite into orbit using a Vega rocket; similar satellites were later launched into orbit for the governments of Peru, Turkey, and Morocco. The governments contracted European companies Thales Alenia Space and Airbus Defense and Space to build the satellites and oversee the launch contracts for those missions. The European business Arianespace was selected by Airbus and Thales to carry these satellites into orbit on Vega rockets.
After that, in 2019, a Vega rocket failed to launch a military reconnaissance satellite for the United Arab Emirates, breaking a record of 14 consecutive successful launches for a nascent launch vehicle.
After a year, two Spanish and French satellites were destroyed when another Vega rocket failed to reach orbit. The European Space Agency (ESA) approved the development of the Vega-C rocket, which is designed to carry heavier payloads, just two years after the Vega rocket first took to the air.
“With Vega-C, we have significantly enhanced certain subsystems that we were able to perfect in Vega,” stated Ranzo. “That was the intended outcome. It was going to be our first time, and in the past twelve years, we’ve learned a lot and applied that knowledge to a new iteration of the rocket. “.
The Vega-C made a successful first launch in July 2022, but five months later, on its second attempt, it was unsuccessful. Since then, it has not flown, and engineers have fixed the issue that caused the Vega-C’s second stage solid rocket motor to fail in December 2022 by redesigning the nozzle.
The increasing rivalry in the commercial launch market matched the unreliability of the Vega rocket. Built on a disposable design, Vega was overpriced to compete with SpaceX, which in 2021 began providing rideshare flights on its reliable Falcon 9 rocket.
