The ultimate flight of Europe’s Vega rocket lifted off Wednesday night time from French Guiana, carrying an necessary environmental monitoring satellite tv for pc for the European Union’s flagship Copernicus program.
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. The launcher headed north from the launch pad on the coast of South America, aiming for a polar orbit about 480 miles (775 kilometers) above the Earth.
The only payload was Sentinel-2C, a distant sensing platform set to affix Europe’s fleet of Copernicus environmental satellites. The multibillion-dollar Copernicus system is the world’s most complete space-based Earth commentary community, with satellites fitted with totally different sorts of devices monitoring land surfaces, oceans, and the environment.
Sentinel-2C will change Sentinel-2A, which launched on a Vega rocket in 2015 and is nearing the top of its life. An equivalent satellite tv for pc named Sentinel-2B has been in orbit since 2017 and will likely be changed by Sentinel-2D in 2028.
About an hour after liftoff, the Vega rocket’s higher stage launched Sentinel-2C into an on-target orbit. Then, Sentinel-2C radioed its standing to floor controllers, confirming the satellite tv for pc was wholesome in house.
The spacecraft in Europe’s Sentinel-2 sequence are just like the US authorities’s Landsat satellites, offering wide-angle optical views of crops, forests, and concrete areas to trace modifications season to season and 12 months to 12 months. The European Fee—the European Union’s govt arm—shares all of the Copernicus knowledge freed from cost to customers worldwide.
The Vega launcher is powered by three solid-fueled rocket motors, firing one after the opposite, and a liquid-fueled higher stage referred to as the AVUM (the Perspective Vernier Higher Module) that ignites its engine a number of occasions to put satellites into barely totally different orbits. Vega can ship as much as 3,300 kilos (1,500 kilograms) of payload mass right into a 435-mile-high (700-kilometer) orbit.
Avio, an Italian aerospace firm, designed Vega and oversees an industrial consortium that manufactures strong motors, constructions, and avionics for the rocket. From the beginning, Arianespace, the French launch service supplier, has been accountable for advertising and gross sales for the Vega program.
The Vega rocket will likely be changed by the bigger Vega-C rocket, with a extra highly effective booster stage and a wider payload fairing. One of many major functions of the Vega-C will likely be to launch future Copernicus satellites for Europe.
“I believe it was a fantastic success,” stated Giulio Ranzo, Avio’s CEO, in an interview with Ars a number of hours earlier than Wednesday night time’s mission. “It was our first launcher. It was our first expertise as a serious participant within the launcher area. We put it collectively from a clear sheet of paper, so the legacy may be very, very robust. Now we have discovered so much.”
22 and carried out
Nevertheless, in a dozen years of service, the Vega rocket by no means actually took off within the business launch market. It averaged about two flights per 12 months and primarily deployed satellites for the European Area Company and different European authorities companies, which choose launching their payloads on European rockets.
Within the first few years after its debut launch in 2012, it appeared that the Vega rocket is perhaps aggressive for contracts to launch small Earth commentary satellites for business firms and authorities prospects outdoors of Europe.
A Vega rocket launched an Earth-imaging satellite tv for pc for Kazakhstan in 2013, and subsequent missions delivered comparable satellites to orbit for the governments of Peru, Turkey, and Morocco. For these missions, the governments tapped European producers Airbus Protection and Area and Thales Alenia Area to construct the satellites and handle their launch contracts. Airbus and Thales selected Arianespace, one other European firm, to launch these satellites on Vega rockets.
Then, in 2019, a Vega rocket failed throughout launch with a navy reconnaissance satellite tv for pc for the United Arab Emirates, ending a streak of 14 straight profitable flights, a outstanding report for a model new launcher.
A 12 months later, one other Vega rocket fell wanting orbit and destroyed two Spanish and French satellites. Simply two years after the Vega rocket began flying, the European Area Company (ESA) authorised the event of its alternative, the Vega-C, to deal with heavier payloads.
“Now we have been capable of excellent sure subsystems in Vega which can be drastically improved in Vega-C,” Ranzo stated. “It was what it was meant to be. It was to be our first expertise, and in 12 years, we’ve discovered so much and put all we now have discovered into a brand new model of the rocket.”
The Vega-C launched efficiently for the primary time in July 2022 however failed on its second flight 5 months later. It hasn’t flown since then, and engineers have redesigned the nozzle for the Vega-C’s second stage strong rocket motor to repair the issue that led to the failure in December 2022.
The Vega rocket’s struggles with reliability coincided with rising competitors within the business launch market. Vega, primarily based on an expendable design, was overpriced to be aggressive with SpaceX, which began providing rideshare flights on its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket in 2021.