The Vega rocket puts its satellites into orbit

Takeoff of the Vega rocket in Kourou, December 5, 2016. -

The mission had been postponed many times due to the weather.

The Vega rocket, the first space charter for Europeans, succeeded in its mission during the night from Wednesday to Thursday by placing its fifty satellites in orbit.

The European launcher, the lightest in the Arianespace range, performed flawlessly after a flight of just under two hours, according to an AFP journalist at the Kourou base.

🚀 The images of the takeoff of the European rocket Vega

It managed to put around fifty satellites into orbit last night pic.twitter.com/GoWaqN2vYO

- BFMTV (@BFMTV) September 3, 2020

Forty minutes after takeoff, in a sequence of around ten minutes, Vega carried out, as planned, a first series of orbiting, for the seven micro-satellites on board, revealing the first smiles under the masks of the engineers from the Jupiter Control Center in Kourou.

An hour later, two minutes apart, the lightest launchers in the Arianespace range separated from the two Cubesats for a total of 46 nano-satellites.

This mission, VV16, is a validation flight of the new European small satellite launch service.

"This is truly Vega's return to flight"

Jan Wörner, Director General of the European Space Agency did not hide his relief.

Returning to the shared launch project, SSMS, he referred to “an extremely important project”, almost a year after the failure of flight 15. “It is truly Vega's return to flight”, underlined Jan Wörner .

This success was all the more important for Arianespace as the mission involved 21 customers from 13 different countries.

The applications of nanosatellites and micro-satellites range from Earth observation to communication, including technological development and scientific research.

With this new platform dedicated to small satellite launches, Arianespace fully intends to score points in this booming nano and micro-satellite market.

The same modular shared launch prototype is planned for Vega C, the other configuration of the launcher, and an architecture adapted to the future Ariane 6 is also planned.

Piloted by the European Space Agency, the SSMS shared launch system was developed by the Italian Avio.

Next shot in mid-October

The next firing at the Space Center is scheduled for mid-October, it will be a Soyuz rocket.

"It's a beautiful symbol, after an Ariane 5, now Vega, we will be in October with Soyuz, it illustrates our family of launchers", commented Stéphane Israël, CEO of Arianespace during the Vega mission.

This flight should mark the return of the rocket since its failure in the summer of 2019, which had led to its destruction, as a precaution.

Vega represents a crucial issue for space Europe, which will enter a booming market, where competition - particularly that of the American SpaceX - is raging: the "VV16" mission is its first shared launch (or "Rideshare").

The last postponement of the launch on Tuesday was due to a typhoon passing over a tracking station in South Korea.

Before that there was the Covid-19 crisis, then particularly unfavorable weather conditions (strong high altitude winds) this summer over Guyana.

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