2023-10-07 03:27:00
The 23rd mission of the Vega light rocket, which was to carry twelve satellites on board on Friday evening, was canceled a few seconds before its launch from the Guiana Space Center.
At 10:36 p.m. (1:36 a.m. GMT Saturday), when the final timeline was announced, the launch was aborted following “an element of the launch assembly which was not ready,” said Arianespace, the responsible for marketing European space flights. Having only one firing window, the mission is postponed to a date which has not yet been communicated.
This third and final European launch of the year 2023 was to place two Earth observation satellites and ten other small satellites in low orbit, for a total weight of 1.2 tonnes of payload.
The two main passengers of this mission, Theos-2, a high-resolution optical observation satellite, and Formosat-7R/Triton, a scientific satellite equipped with a system for collecting signals bouncing off the sea surface to prevent typhoons , are to be launched respectively on behalf of the Thai Geoinformatics and Space Technology Development Agency and the Taiwan Space Agency (Tasa).
Ten other small satellites, including the Ness technology demonstration nanosat, developed by the French Space Agency, are also part of this 23rd Vega mission – including two failures – since its first takeoff in 2012.
With this aborted launch, the Europeans are left to fire two Vega rockets, an earlier version of the Italian Vega-C rocket, grounded since the failure of its first commercial flight in December.
Over the first six months of the year, Arianespace launched a single Ariane 5 rocket on behalf of the ESA (the last one was at the beginning of July) while the American SpaceX carried out 43 launches of its Falcon 9 – almost of two per week- and the Chinese CASC 18.
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