A Soyuz booster vaulted into a sunset sky over French Guiana on Wednesday evening, arcing north from the jungle spaceport in South America with six satellites to inaugurate OneWeb’s global broadband network.
Carrying the ambition of an entrepreneur with a passion for connecting the world, a half-dozen satellites lifted off Wednesday aboard a Soyuz rocket from the edge of the Amazon jungle in South America to kick off a series of at least 21 planned launches to deploy OneWeb’s global Internet network.
The first six broadband satellites for OneWeb, which envisions a constellation of hundreds of orbiting relay stations beaming Internet signals down to Earth, lifted off Wednesday aboard a Soyuz rocket from French Guiana. Launch occurred at 2137 GMT (4:37 p.m. EST).
Six satellites built in France for OneWeb are set for blastoff Wednesday from French Guiana, the first of at least 21 launches using Russian-made Soyuz rockets to haul more than 600 of the refrigerator-sized craft to orbit for global broadband service.
United Launch Alliance plans to introduce a new payload fairing design on the next-generation Vulcan rocket, which will fly with composite parts made by Switzerland-based Ruag Space, the company’s chief executive said Wednesday.
Ruag Space, the Swiss manufacturer of nose shrouds for the Atlas 5 rocket, plans to relocate production of Atlas launcher components to United Launch Alliance’s rocket assembly plant in Decatur, Alabama.
A camera packed inside Europe’s Automated Transfer Vehicle failed to transmit images from inside the disposable supply ship as it plunged through Earth’s atmosphere Feb. 15 and broke apart over the South Pacific Ocean, the European Space Agency said Friday.