Moscow (AFP)
A Russian Soyuz rocket, operated by the European Arianespace, launched on Friday 36 new satellites from the British operator Oneweb, which is deploying a constellation to provide high-speed internet everywhere in the world.
The rocket took off "successfully" at 1738 GMT from the Russian cosmodrome in Vostochny, in the Far East, the Roscosmos space agency said in a statement.
Originally scheduled for Thursday evening, the Soyuz firing was postponed to the next day "for technical reasons", Arianespace having explained that it was necessary to replace an "element on the electrical installation".
This is the third launch of OneWeb satellites this year and it comes a month after the one on April 26, again with 36 machines placed in orbit.
In total, with the mission on Friday, 218 aircraft will be in orbit for this constellation.
Oneweb, owned by the British government with the Indian Bharti, foresees an operational global internet at the end of 2022 thanks to a network of 650 satellites.
Under a contract with European Arianespace confirmed in September 2020, 16 Soyuz shots are scheduled between December 2020 and the end of 2022 to complete the network.
Several projects with a view to setting up constellations providing space and a global internet are in progress.
The American billionaire Elon Musk, the head of the space company SpaceX, has meanwhile already put into orbit for this purpose a thousand satellites to create the Starlink network.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has a similar project called Kuiper.
The construction of the Vostochny Cosmodrome has been peppered with countless corruption scandals and delays.
Located in the Far East, near the border with China, this launch base will eventually replace the Baikonur one that Moscow has rented from Kazakhstan since the fall of the USSR in 1991.
© 2021 AFP