Two Pléiades Neo Earth observation satellites are set to join Airbus’s constellation of high-resolution optical imagers with a launch Tuesday night from French Guiana on the first commercial flight of Europe’s Vega C rocket, a mission delayed from November to change out suspect hardware on the launcher’s payload fairing.
Unfavorable upper level winds kept Rocket Lab’s Electron launcher on the ground Sunday night in Virginia. Overnight the company announced it would not try again on Monday due to a continuing forecast for strong upper level winds. The Electron rocket is to carry into orbit three commercial radio frequency monitoring satellites for HawkEye 360.
Rocket Lab said Saturday that the company received final approval from NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration to launch their first mission from the United States on Sunday, clearing final regulatory and technical hurdles with a new autonomous range safety destruct unit that delayed the launch more than two years.
SpaceX launched 54 more Starlink internet satellites Saturday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, using a Falcon 9 booster on its 15th flight to space, a record for the company’s reusable rocket fleet. The mission was also the third Falcon 9 rocket flight in less than 34 hours from SpaceX’s three active launch pads in less.
SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 3:46 a.m. PST (6:46 a.m. EST; 1146 GMT) Friday, carrying the Surface Water and Ocean Topography satellite into orbit for NASA and the French space agency CNES. The Falcon 9’s first stage booster returned to the California launch base for landing.
The first two spacecraft in an 11-satellite refresh of SES’s Medium Earth Orbit O3b internet constellation are poised to rocket into space from Cape Canaveral on Friday, less than two weeks after shipment to the Florida spaceport from a Boeing factory in California already fully fueled and integrated for launch.
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