Converted Boeing 747 takes off from Newquay, Cornwall
Rocket will be deployed over the Atlantic in next hour
‘Start Me Up’ mission will deploy nine small satellites
NEWQUAY, England, Jan 9 (Reuters) – Virgin Orbit’s “Cosmic Girl” carrier aircraft took off from Newquay’s spaceport in Cornwall, southwest England on Monday night, the initial stage of Western Europe’s first ever satellite launch.
The modified Boeing 747 with a rocket under its wing took to the air and then soared out over the Atlantic Ocean, where after an hour it will release a rocket at about 35,000 feet (10,668 meters).
More than 2,000 space fans cheered when the aircraft left the runway.
The “horizontal” launch has catapulted the resort in southwest England – population 20,000 and famous for its reliable Atlantic waves – into the limelight as Western Europe’s go-to destination for small satellites.
Virgin Orbit (VORB.O), part-owned by British billionaire Richard Branson, said nine satellites would be deployed into lower Earth orbit (LEO) from its LauncherOne rocket in its first mission outside its United States base.
($1 = 0.8213 pounds)
Additional reporting by Sarah Young; editing by Nick Macfie and Sandra Maler, Kate Holton
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PARIS, Aug 12 (Reuters) – The European Space Agency (ESA) has begun preliminary technical discussions with Elon Musk’s SpaceX that could lead to the temporary use of its launchers after the Ukraine conflict blocked Western access to Russia’s Soyuz rockets.
The private American competitor to Europe’s Arianespace has emerged as a key contender to plug a temporary gap alongside Japan and India, but final decisions depend on the still unresolved timetable for Europe’s delayed Ariane 6 rocket.
“I would say there are two and a half options that we’re discussing. One is SpaceX that is clear. Another one is possibly Japan,” ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher told Reuters.
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“Japan is waiting for the inaugural flight of its next generation rocket. Another option could be India,” he added in an interview.
“SpaceX I would say is the more operational of those and certainly one of the back-up launches we are looking at.”
Aschbacher said talks remained at an exploratory phase.
“We of course need to make sure that they are suitable. It’s not like jumping on a bus,” he said. For example, the interface between satellite and launcher must be suitable and the payload must not be compromised by unfamiliar types of launch vibration.
“We are looking into this technical compatibility but we have not asked for a commercial offer yet. We just want to make sure that it would be an option in order to make a decision on asking for a firm commercial offer,” Aschbacher said.
SpaceX did not reply to a request for comment.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 has already swept up other customers severing ties with Moscow’s increasingly isolated space sector amid the Ukraine conflict, but a high-profile European mission could be seen as a significant win for the U.S. rocket maker.
Aschbacher stressed any back-up solution would be temporary, however, adding he was not worried about the future of Ariane 6.
Satellite internet firm OneWeb, a competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet venture, booked at least one Falcon 9 launch in March. It has also booked an Indian launch.
On Monday, Northrop Grumman booked three Falcon 9 missions to ferry NASA cargo to the International Space Station while it designs a new version of its Antares rocket, whose Russian-made engines were withdrawn by Moscow in response to sanctions.
‘WAKE-UP CALL’
Europe has until now depended on the Italian Vega for small payloads, Russia’s Soyuz for medium ones and the Ariane 5 for heavy missions. Its next-generation Vega C staged a debut last month and the new Ariane 6, designed in two versions to replace both the Ariane 5 and Soyuz, has been delayed until next year.
Aschbacher said a more precise Ariane 6 schedule would be clearer by October after current hot-firing testing. ESA would then finalise a back-up plan to be presented to ministers of the agency’s 22 nations in November, he said, adding the most recent Ariane 6 delay was not the result of any signifcant new setback.
“But yes, the likelihood of the need for back-up launches is high,” he said. “The order of magnitude is certainly a good handful of launches that we would need interim solutions for.”
Aschbacher said the Ukraine conflict had demonstrated Europe’s decade-long cooperation strategy with Russia in gas supplies and other areas including space was no longer working.
“This was a wake up call, that we have been too dependent on Russia. And this wake-up call, we have to hope that decision makers realise it as much as I do, that we have to really strengthen our European capability and independence.”
However, he played down the prospect of Russia carrying out a pledge to withdraw from the International Space Station (ISS).
Russia’s newly appointed space chief Yuri Borisov said in a televised meeting with President Vladimir Putin last month that Russia would withdraw from the ISS “after 2024”.
But Borisov later clarified that Russia’s plans had not changed and Western officials said Russia’s space agency had not communicated any new pullout plans.
“The reality is that operationally, the work on the space station is proceeding, I would say almost nominally,” Aschbacher told Reuters. “We do depend on each other, like it or not, but we have little choice.”
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Reporting by Tim Hepher and Joey Roulette
Editing by Mark Potter
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
April 5 (Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) has secured rocket launches with three companies, the company said on Monday, as it spends billions on putting together a satellite constellation to beam broadband internet that will rival Elon Musk-owned SpaceX’s Starlink.
The e-commerce giant said its Project Kuiper has secured 83 launches over five years and includes a deal with Blue Origin, a company owned by Amazon founder and chairman Jeff Bezos.
The race to beam broadband internet using thousands of satellites in low earth orbit is heating up, with SpaceX so far gaining advantage over other players. Project Kuiper plans to launch its first two prototype satellites by year’s end.
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“Amazon is investing billions of dollars across the three agreements. Together, it is the largest commercial procurement of launch vehicles in history,” an Amazon spokesperson told Reuters.
The contract includes 18 launches with Arianespace’s Ariane 6 rockets, 12 launches with Blue Origin’s New Glenn – with an option to add up to 15 more – and 38 launches with the Vulcan Centaur rocket made by United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture between Lockheed Martin (LMT.N) and Boeing Co (BA.N).
Together, they will provide capacity for the company to deploy the majority of its satellite constellation, the company said.
The deals are betting on three heavy-lift rockets that have yet to fly and whose development has been delayed. Arianespace’s Ariane 6, under development, could launch up to 40 Kuiper satellites each mission, said the company’s chief executive Stéphane Israël.
Also under development, Blue Origin’s New Glenn will carry 61 Kuiper satellites while ULA’s Vulcan will carry 45, the companies’ CEOs said Tuesday at a conference in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Dave Limp, head of Amazon’s devices unit, said the company “wanted diversity in our launch partnerships,” which includes previously announced deals with ULA and rocket startup ABL Space.
“It’s the largest contract ever signed by Arianespace in its history,” ArianeGroup CEO André-Hubert Roussel told Reuters, declining to provide financial details. “It’s the result of two years and half of talks with them,” he said, adding that the launches would take place between 2024 and 2027.
Project Kuiper aims to use over 3,000 satellites in low earth orbit to beam high-speed, low-latency internet to customers, including households, businesses and government agencies.
Securing launch capacity from multiple providers reduces risks associated with launch vehicle stand-downs and saves costs that can be passed on to customers, said Rajeev Badyal, vice president of technology for Project Kuiper.
Blue Origin’s BE-4 engine, which will also power the Vulcan rocket, has faced multiple delays.
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Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru, additional reporting by Joey Roulette in Colorado Springs, Colorado and Mathieu Rosemain in Paris; Editing by Anil D’Silva and Nick Zieminski
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Dec 25 (Reuters) – NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, a revolutionary $9 billion instrument able to peer more deeply into the cosmos than ever, was due for launch early Saturday from South America’s northeastern coast, opening a highly anticipated new era of astronomical exploration.
The powerful infrared telescope, hailed by NASA as the premiere space-science observatory of the next decade, was packed inside the cargo bay of an Ariane 5 rocket poised for blastoff at 7:20 a.m. EST (1220 GMT) from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) launch base in French Guiana.
If all goes according to plan, the 14,000-pound instrument will be released from the French-built rocket after a 26-minute ride into space.
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The Webb telescope will then take a month to coast to its destination in solar orbit roughly 1 million miles from Earth – about four times farther away than the moon. And Webb’s special orbital path will keep it in constant alignment with Earth as the planet and telescope circle the sun in tandem.
By comparison, Webb’s 30-year-old predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, orbits Earth itself from 340 miles away, passing in and out of the planet’s shadow every 90 minutes.
Named for the man who oversaw NASA through most of its formative decade of the 1960s, Webb is about 100 times more sensitive than Hubble and is expected to profoundly transform scientists’ understanding of the universe and our place in it.
Webb mainly will view the cosmos in the infrared spectrum, allowing it to peer through clouds of gas and dust where stars are being born, while Hubble has operated primarily at optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.
COSMOLOGICAL HISTORY LESSON
The new telescope’s primary mirror – consisting of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-coated beryllium metal – also has a much bigger light-collecting area, enabling it to observe objects at greater distances, thus farther back into time, than Hubble or any other telescope.
That, astronomers say, will bring into view a glimpse of the cosmos never previously seen – dating to just 100 million years after the Big Bang, the theoretical flashpoint that set in motion the expansion of the observable universe an estimated 13.8 billion years ago.
Hubble’s view reached back to roughly 400 million years following the Big Bang, revealing objects that Webb will be able to re-examine with far greater clarity.
Aside from examining the formation of the earliest stars in the universe, astronomers are eager to study super-massive black holes believed to occupy the centers of distant galaxies.
Webb’s instruments also make it ideal to search for evidence of potentially life-supporting atmospheres around scores of newly documented exoplanets – celestial bodies orbiting distant stars – and to observe worlds much closer to home, such as Mars and Saturn’s icy moon Titan.
The telescope is an international collaboration led by NASA in partnership with the European and Canadian space agencies. Northrop Grumman Corp (NOC.N) was the primary contractor. The Arianespace launch vehicle is part of the European contribution.
Webb was developed at a cost of $8.8 billion, with operational expenses projected to bring its total price tag to about $9.66 billion, far higher than planned when NASA was previously aiming for a 2011 launch. read more
Astronomical operation of the telescope, to be managed from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, is expected to begin in the summer of 2022, following about six months of alignment and calibration of Webb’s mirrors and instruments.
It is then that NASA expects to release the initial batch of images captured by Webb, though scientists are keeping mum about where precisely they plan to point the telescope first. Webb is designed to last up to 10 years.
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Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Cynthia Osterman
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.