Q&A with Guglielmo Aglietti, RemoveDebris principal investigator (members only)

Frank Culbertson, a former shuttle and station astronaut and now head of Orbital ATK’s space systems group, spoke with Spaceflight Now’s Stephen Clark on the sidelines of the 2015 International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight.

A European Vega launcher failed Wednesday night around two minutes after liftoff from French Guiana and fell into the Atlantic Ocean, destroying an Airbus-built surveillance satellite for the United Arab Emirates.

Follow the key events of the Soyuz rocket’s ascent into orbit from the Guiana Space Center with the first COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation, or CSG 1, radar observation satellite, the European Space Agency’s CHEOPS exoplanet telescope, and three CubeSats.