The ultimate flight of Europe’s Vega rocket lifted off Wednesday evening from French Guiana, carrying an essential 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 real 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 remark community, with satellites fitted with completely different sorts of devices monitoring land surfaces, oceans, and the ambiance.
Sentinel-2C will exchange Sentinel-2A, which launched on a Vega rocket in 2015 and is nearing the top of its life. An similar satellite tv for pc named Sentinel-2B has been in orbit since 2017 and can 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 collection are just like the US authorities’s Landsat satellites, offering wide-angle optical views of crops, forests, and concrete areas to trace adjustments 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 Angle Vernier Higher Module) that ignites its engine a number of instances to put satellites into barely completely 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, buildings, and avionics for the rocket. From the beginning, Arianespace, the French launch service supplier, has been chargeable for advertising and marketing and gross sales for the Vega program.
The Vega rocket can be changed by the bigger Vega-C rocket, with a extra highly effective booster stage and a wider payload fairing. One of many main functions of the Vega-C can be to launch future Copernicus satellites for Europe.
“I believe it was an excellent success,” stated Giulio Ranzo, Avio’s CEO, in an interview with Ars a number of hours earlier than Wednesday evening’s mission. “It was our first launcher. It was our first expertise as a significant participant within the launcher area. We put it collectively from a clear sheet of paper, so the legacy may be very, very robust. We’ve discovered so much.”
22 and accomplished
Nevertheless, in a dozen years of service, the Vega rocket by no means actually took off within the industrial launch market. It averaged about two flights per 12 months and primarily deployed satellites for the European Area Company and different European authorities businesses, which desire launching their payloads on European rockets.
Within the first few years after its debut launch in 2012, it appeared that the Vega rocket is likely to be aggressive for contracts to launch small Earth remark satellites for industrial corporations and authorities clients outdoors of Europe.
A Vega rocket launched an Earth-imaging satellite tv for pc for Kazakhstan in 2013, and subsequent missions delivered related 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 exceptional report for a model new launcher.
A 12 months later, one other Vega rocket fell in need of orbit and destroyed two Spanish and French satellites. Simply two years after the Vega rocket began flying, the European Area Company (ESA) authorized the event of its substitute, the Vega-C, to deal with heavier payloads.
“We’ve been capable of excellent sure subsystems in Vega which are vastly 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’ve got 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 industrial launch market. Vega, based mostly on an expendable design, was overpriced to be aggressive with SpaceX, which began providing rideshare flights on its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket in 2021.
