A commercial satellite to broadcast television programming to millions of homes in Brazil and a multipurpose communications craft to beam high-definition video and Internet signals across Indonesia are awaiting a half-hour ride into orbit on an Ariane 5 rocket Tuesday.
Standing nearly 180 feet (55 meters) tall, the Ariane 5 is scheduled to lift off from Kourou, French Guiana, at 2139 GMT (4:39 p.m. EST; 6:39 p.m. French Guiana time) Tuesday. The launch will mark the 91st Ariane 5 flight since 1996, and the launcher’s first mission this year.
The Sky Brasil 1 satellite, built by Airbus Defense and Space and weighing more than 13,000 pounds (6 metric tons) at launch, is the heavier of the two spacecraft aboard the Ariane 5 rocket. Telkom 3S, manufactured by Thales Alenia Space, weighs 7,826 pounds (3,550 kilograms) with its propellant tanks full.
The rocket will target an orbit ranging from 155 miles (250 kilometers) to 22,205 miles (35,736 kilometers), with a tilt of 4 degrees to the equator.
Imagery from the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket Tuesday show the launcher vaulting into space from Cape Canaveral with another batch of nearly 60 Starlink satellites, followed by the successful recovery of the rocket’s first stage booster and payload shroud offshore.
SpaceX test-fired a Falcon 9 rocket Saturday at Cape Canaveral, two days before a scheduled launch Monday with 60 Starlink broadband relay stations that will make SpaceX the owner of the world’s largest fleet of commercial satellites.
SpaceX scrubbed the launch of a nearly 7.5-ton Intelsat communications satellite Sunday after a computer-triggered abort halted the countdown in the final 10 seconds.