Q&A with Guido Levrini, ESA’s manager of the Copernicus space segment

An Ariane 5 rocket delivered a robotic space tug and a pair of commercial communications satellites into orbit Saturday following a fiery blastoff from French Guiana, debuting new upgrades in Arianespace’s first mission since temporarily suspending launch operations earlier this year due to the coronavirus pandemic.

A new Chinese launch vehicle, the Long March 8, has successfully placed five payloads into orbit on its first mission, debuting an expendable booster intended to eventually be outfitted for recovery and reuse.

NASA has decommissioned a long-lived satellite launched in 2000 that demonstrated remote sensing and surveying instruments and techniques common in today’s orbiting Earth observatories.