ESA lofts one astronaut and four Galileo satellites into orbit It has been a good 24 hours for the European Space Agency. Not only has its first four-in-one Galileo satellite launch gone flawlessly, but ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet is on his way to the International Space Station. At 1306 GMT on Thursday, an Ariane 5 rocket lifted off from its spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, carrying …
For a moment I thought he was on an Ariane, and I wondered, how?
Though what happened to the ESA space truck adaptation for human use? I think five have been used.
In unlikely facts, the ESA, while part EU funded, has Canada as an Associate Member and not all EU nations are members. So UK can stay in ESA after Brexit.
Good to hear the Ariane 5 Launch of the Galileo was OK.
Roscosmos is looking at a new version of Energia to compete in heavy lifting. The Indians, Chinese and Space X are getting commercial.
Arianespace still has the majority of launches and the majority of satellites in orbit launched by them. The ownership is complex. It's worth looking up CNES, ESA and Arianespace, also Roscosmos (new space centre and a pad at the European Space port), Japanese, Israel, India, China. The Americans are not as dominant as the media sometimes suggests. Chinese and Indians catching up.
Putting on my pedant hat, ESA had been launching the Galileo satellites on Soyuz rockets owned by Arianespace and launched from their site in French Guyana; so Roscosmos got the money for the launch vehicle to pass through to the manufacturer, but was not responsible for the launch.
(the two earliest Giove satellites did go up from Baikonur)
It's not completely obvious that launching 675kg satellites four at a time on Ariane 5 (which can happily take six tons to the harder-to-reach geosynchronous orbit) is better than launching two at a time on a smaller rocket.
Geosync satellites are placed in an equatorial orbit but the Galileo satellites, although in a lower orbit are flying in a ball-of-string pattern at different angles to the equator. This single ES-variant Ariane V flight had to deliver the four satellites into different orbits hence the use of a new upper stage "dispenser" with a restartable engine that carried out multiple burns to do the job.
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