Dominique Luchart's Blog, page 669

In the hearing, lawmakers accused CEOs of being smug, evasive, and condescending; CEOs appeared barely to restrain their own exasperation with yes/no questions (Brian Fung/CNN)

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Firefly Aerospace readies Alpha rocket for 2021 debut launch, ramps up operations, ,

Though Firefly Aerospace missed its own 2020 deadline to launch its Alpha rocket into space, the company says it’s confident a 2021 debut is in the cards.

In an exclusive interview with Space.com, Firefly CEO Tom Markusic described the flurry of activity going on at his new home base at California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base, where he divides his time into two chief areas. Half of it is supporting launch teams for the first Alpha launch, which is expected to take place this spring, and the other half is looking at options for a very large fundraising round.

Markusic is hoping for a large external infusion of money to add to Firefly’s ongoing “bootstrap” efforts to win contracts from large vendors; the money could come from public or private sources depending on interest, he added. (By late 2020, more than $160 million had come to Firefly from co-founder Max Polyakov, through his company Noosphere Ventures, according to CNBC.)

Related: Firefly Aerospace uses rocket engine to light birthday candles in epic cake video

Markusic said the company is at a crucial “inflection point” as it moves toward securing contracts for the small-satellite launcher Alpha and also continues developing an ecosystem of products that includes a larger successor rocket (Beta) and a robotic moon lander (Blue Ghost).

“When you look at companies like ours, there is this development phase that is risky, with all kinds of ups and downs, and we are really transitioning to an operational phase — plus trying to address the next generation of products,” he told Space.com. “Having said that, the real demarcation of that inflection point is successfully launching Alpha to space.”

Markusic said that Firefly had aimed to get Alpha off the ground by the end of 2020.

“But 2020 was a crazy year in many ways,” he added. “I’m not one for excuses, but it was one of the hardest years I’ve seen in my lifetime. We should consider ourselves fortunate we got as far as we did.”

Firefly’s desired timeline was partly derailed by the coronavirus pandemic, which has been difficult for many in the space industry. While investment opportunities remain high, in part buoyed by a strong stock market and overall aerospace sector growth, manufacturing companies of all stripes (even outside of space) suddenly found themselves grappling with physical distancing, supply chain hiccups and other obstacles due to COVID-19.

Alpha is “ready to go,” but two other major issues delayed its launch, Markusic said. The first involved an avionics flight termination system piece from an external vendor (whom Markusic did not name), which had qualification issues that created delays.

Also, Markusic said, “we didn’t put enough focus on the launch site.” Upgrading the United Launch Alliance Delta II facilities Firefly inherited at Vandenberg proved to be “more challenging than anticipated,” he added, but “we’re literally weeks away from being done.”

One of Alpha’s differentiators from other startup rockets, according to Firefly, is a more crack- and leak-resistant propellant system, built with carbon fiber composites designed to contain supercooled liquid oxygen fuel.

Another big attractor for customers is Firefly’s goal to soon provide end-to-end “space services,” ranging from launch to landing and also including a specialized subsidiary for security launches. The subsidiary, called Firefly Black, was selected in late 2020 to launch Mission Two of NASA’s Venture Class Launch Service Demonstration 2 contract. This mission will deliver two cubesat constellations to space.

And last month, NASA announced that it had contracted with Firefly to land science instruments on the moon in 2023 using Blue Ghost. That deal, which was organized via the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, is worth $93.3 million.

Private moon rush: These companies have big plans for lunar exploration

After Alpha’s debut, Markusic said, Firefly hopes to launch two more operational flights with paying customers aboard, perhaps also in 2021 — but only if the rocket is ready.

It’s been a long and busy road to launch thus far. Firefly rose from the ashes of a predecessor company, Firefly Space Systems, that filed for bankruptcy protection a few years ago due to a major European investor pulling out as a result of Brexit.

By early 2019, after 2.5 years of hard work largely outside of the view of the world, the new Firefly had a Cinderella story to tell, as the company secured a $52 million expansion for future launches at Florida’s Cape Canaveral. It also had a big NASA contract win in 2018 via CLPS, which aims to spur lunar exploration by aiding the development of private landers, rovers and other craft.

Meanwhile, Firefly company growth is up 50%, with roughly 325 employees now compared to 200 a year ago. Many of these people are working remotely, and those that do come into facilities have special shifts ensuring a minimum of people overlap with each other.

“We haven’t had any employee-to-employee spread of the virus, which is pretty amazing,” Markusic said. A small handful tested positive for COVID-19 from external sources, and strict quarantines were immediately put into place to protect fellow workers each time.

In recent months, Firefly has been active on Twitter posting updates for the public and potential investors. This included a Jan. 22 note that Alpha is undergoing final integration and checkouts of its first stage, second stage and payload section, and announcing a multi-year launch services agreement with Adaptive Launch Solutions in December.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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World’s oldest meteor crater isn’t what it seems, ,

The world’s oldest meteor impact crater is not a crater at all, say scientists of a new study suggesting natural forces put the giant indent into Earth’s surface. But the jury is still out.

The wannabe crater, known locally as the Maniitsoq structure, is located 34 miles (55 kilometers) southeast of the town of Maniitsoq in Greenland. The structure is around 62 miles (100 km) in diameter and formed around 3 billion years ago, although its origin has been disputed in recent years.

In 2012, geologist Adam Garde, of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, and colleagues said they had found evidence that the Maniitsoq structure was created by a meteor impact, calling it the earliest known example of its kind on Earth. However, a new study calls into question the 2012 team’s findings.

Related: Crash! 10 biggest impact craters on Earth

“After an extensive investigation of the Maniitsoq region, we have not yet found evidence of microscopic shock deformation that is found in nearly all other impact craters,” lead author Chris Yakymchuk, a geologist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, told Live Science. “Our data indicate that the structure in the region is the product of ancient plate tectonic movement, deformation and heating over hundreds of millions of years.”

However, Garde said he is not convinced.

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Part of the Maniitsoq structure in southeast Greenland. (Image credit: University of Waterloo)

Not an impact crater?

Garde and his colleagues concluded the Maniitsoq structure is an impact crater mainly due to the structure of rocks at its center, they wrote in 2012 in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters. The researchers said that the depth of those rocks and the way they had been forced into the ground could be explained only by the impact of a meteorite.

“With the data they had at the time, an impact origin was plausible,” Yakymchuk said. “Our goal was to test the impact hypothesis using more data collected with a wider array of techniques.”

Other studies had already shed some doubt on the 2012 findings, but Yakymchuk said he and his team arrived with an “open mind” about the structure’s origin when they started their research in 2016.

Their main evidence against an impact origin comes from an analysis of zircon crystals — extremely durable and minute structures made up of zirconium silicate. The team analyzed more than 5,000 of these mineral grains and didn’t find any evidence — such as fractures within the crystals — of them being damaged by a powerful impact.

“Zircon crystals are microscopic time capsules that can capture the damage produced from shock waves generated during a meteorite impact,” Yakymchuk said. “We did not find any damage that indicated ancient shock waves passed through these minerals.”

Recently, scientists have used these crystals to show that Earth’s crust grew rapidly at around the same time the Maniitsoq structure was formed, Live Science previously reported. This kind of tectonic growth spurt likely created the Maniitsoq structure, the researchers said.

Yakymchuk’s team also found a different age for the structure.

“When we started to combine some field observations with data on the age of specific rock units, it started to point us away from an impact crater origin,” Yakymchuk said. “The age we retrieved was 40 million years younger than the proposed age of impact.”

Contrasting views

The new findings highlight the need to continually challenge previous studies, which is an important part of the scientific process, Yakymchuk said. “As we develop new scientific techniques and technologies, we are always testing previous hypotheses.”

However, the authors of the 2012 study argue the new paper doesn’t tell the whole story.

“The most obvious single feature of the Maniitsoq structure that requires an extraterrestrial impact is the central part of the structure,” Garde, lead author of the 2012 study, told Live Science. “I would be happy to change my interpretation, but I would first of all need to see a convincing alternative physical explanation.”

Natural geological processes aren’t enough to explain the formation of the structure, especially in the central regions where rocks appear to have been put under a tremendous amount of force, Garde said.

“Our observations are not discussed in the new study, although they are of fundamental importance,” Garde said.

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He also doesn’t think that zircon crystals can tell the whole story because no other proposed impact craters are this old, meaning the evidence for a past impact might have been wiped away by geological processes over the eons. Other studies have also shown that zircon crystals can get damaged on the surface without any visible damage within the crystals, Garde said.

“Yakymchuk et al. have not studied the exterior surfaces of the zircons they have imaged,” Garde said. “So also as regards the zircons something is missing in their story.”

However, the Maniitsoq structure is no longer recognized as an impact crater, according to the Earth Impact Database. Instead, a study published Jan. 21 in the journal Nature claims the Yarrabubba impact structure in Western Australia, at around 2.2 billion years old, is now the oldest known impact crater.

The new study was published online March 1 in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

Originally published on Live Science.

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NASA astronauts get up-close look at SpaceX’s Starship SN11 prototype (photo), ,

NASA astronauts just got a tutorial on the spaceship that may land people on the moon a few years from now.

Christina Koch and some of her NASA colleagues recently toured SpaceX’s South Texas facility, where the company is building and testing prototypes for its Starship deep-space transportation system. The astronauts even snapped a selfie with the latest Starship iteration, SN11, which could launch on a high-altitude test flight this week.

“Common goals, shared vision. NASA astronauts learning about the SpaceX Starship — one element in a growing worldwide field of deeper space exploration systems with sights on the moon and Mars,” Koch wrote on Twitter Tuesday (March 23).

Those words served as a caption for the selfie, which shows Koch and fellow astronauts Michael Barratt, Matthew Dominick and Reid Wiseman standing in front of the stainless-steel SN11 (“Serial No. 11”).

Starship and Super Heavy: SpaceX’s Mars-colonizing vehicles in images

See more

Koch and Dominick are in the first cadre of 18 astronauts that NASA selected for its Artemis program, which aims to establish a long-term, sustainable human presence on and around the moon by the end of the 2020s.

Starship may end up being a big part of this effort. The SpaceX system is one of three private concepts that NASA is considering as Artemis’ human landing system. The other two moon-lander ideas are being developed by Dynetics and a team led by Jeff Bezos’ spaceflight company, Blue Origin.

SpaceX’s Starship system consists of a 165-foot-tall (50 meters) spacecraft, known as Starship, and a giant first-stage booster called Super Heavy. Both elements are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, and both will be powered by SpaceX’s next-generation Raptor engine. The final Starship will have six Raptors and the final Super Heavy will have about 30, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said.

SN11 features just three Raptors. It won’t go all the way to space on its upcoming flight; SpaceX is targeting a maximum altitude of about 6.2 miles (10 kilometers).

SN11’s three immediate predecessors performed such a flight as well. All did quite well, though none of the craft aced the trial end to end. SN8 and SN9 — which launched in December 2020 and February 2021, respectively — came down to Earth too hard and crashed at the landing site. SN10 touched down successfully during its March 3 flight but couldn’t hold it together, exploding in a massive fireball about eight minutes later.

Such test flights will continue well beyond SN11. Musk has said that SpaceX aims to get a Starship prototype to Earth orbit this year, and he envisions the system being fully operational by 2023. There’s already a Starship mission tentatively scheduled to launch that year — “dearMoon,” a flight around the moon booked by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa.

Mike Wall is the author of “ Out There ” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.

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The 1st few seconds of the Big Bang: What we know and what we don’t, ,

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of How to Die in Space. He contributed this article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Opinions and Insights.

Believe it or not, physicists are attempting to understand the universe when it was only a handful of seconds old.

But the situation here is complex, to say the least, and while we’ve made significant headway, there’s still a lot left to learn. From miniature black holes to exotic interactions, the infant universe was a busy place.

The universe: Big Bang to now in 10 easy steps

The known knowns

Let’s start with the general framework. 13.77 billion years ago, our universe was incredibly hot (a temperature of over a quadrillion degrees) and incredibly small (about the size of a peach). Astronomers suspect that, when our cosmos was less than a second old, it went through a period of incredibly rapid expansion, known as inflation.

This inflation event was perhaps the most transformative epoch ever to occur in the history of our universe. In less than a blink, our universe became incredibly larger (enlarging by a factor of at least 10^52). When this rapid expansion phase wound down, whatever caused inflation in the first place (we’re not sure what) decayed, flooding the universe with matter and radiation (we’re not sure how).

A few minutes later (literally), the first elements emerged. Prior to this time, the universe was too hot and too dense for anything stable to form — it was just a giant mix of quarks (the fundamental building blocks of atomic nuclei) and gluons (the carriers of the strong nuclear force). But once the universe was a healthy dozen minutes old, it had expanded and cooled enough that the quarks could bind themselves together, forming the first protons and neutrons. Those protons and neutrons made the first hydrogen and helium (and a little bit of lithium), which went on hundreds of millions of years later to build the first stars and galaxies.

From the formation of the first elements, the universe just expanded and cooled, eventually becoming a plasma, and then a neutral gas.

While we know that this broad-brush story is correct, we also know that we’re missing a lot of details, especially in the time before the formation of the first elements. Some funky physics may have been in operation when the universe was only a few seconds old, and it’s currently beyond our theoretical understanding — but that doesn’t stop us from trying.

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This graphic shows a timeline of the universe based on the Big Bang theory and inflation models. (Image credit: NASA/WMAP)The known unknowns

A paper recently appearing in the preprint journal arXiv, and accepted for publication in The Open Journal of Astrophysics, lays out some of the more exotic very-early-universe scenarios.

For example, there’s the whole question about dark matter. We don’t know what dark matter is made of, but we do know that it’s responsible for over 80% of the matter in the universe. We have a well-understood story for how normal matter originated in the hot, dense soup of the early cosmos, but we have no clue when or how dark matter came on the scene. Did it appear in the first few seconds? Or much later? Did it mess up the cosmic chemistry that led to the first elements, or stay in the background?

We don’t know.

Then there’s inflation itself. We don’t know what provided the power source for the incredible expansion event, we don’t know why it lasted the length of time that it did, and we don’t know what eventually stopped it. Perhaps inflation lingered for longer than we’ve been assuming, and made its presence known for an entire second, rather than the tiny fraction that we’ve been assuming.

Here’s another one: there’s this massive thorn in the side of every cosmologist known as matter-antimatter asymmetry. We see from experiments that matter and antimatter are perfectly symmetrical: for every particle of matter made in reactions throughout the universe, there’s also a corresponding particle of antimatter. But when we look around the cosmos, we see heaps and heaps of normal matter and not a drop of antimatter in sight. Something huge must have happened in the first few seconds of the universe’s existence to throw off that balance. But as to who or what was responsible, and the exact mechanism, we’re not sure.

And if dark matter and inflation and antimatter weren’t enough, there’s also the possibility that the early universe might have manufactured a flood of small black holes. Black holes in the present-day cosmos (i.e., the past 13 billion years) all come from the deaths of massive stars. Those are the only places where the density of matter can reach the critical thresholds necessary to trigger black hole formation. But in the exotic early universe, random patches of the cosmos may have achieved sufficient density, triggering the creation of black holes without having to go through the whole star-formation thing first. Maybe.

Images: Black holes of the universe

Digging deeper

While our theory of the Big Bang is supported by a wealth of observational data, there are plenty of mysteries to satisfy the curiosity of generations of cosmologists. Thankfully, we’re not completely blind when trying to study this early epoch.

For example, even if we can’t directly see the state of the universe when it was only a few seconds old, we can try to recreate those conditions in our powerful particle colliders. It’s not perfect, but it can at least teach us about the physics of those kinds of environments.

We can also look for clues left over from the first few seconds. Anything funky going on then would’ve left its mark on the later universe. Changing the amount of dark matter or a lingering inflation would upset the creation of hydrogen and helium, something we can measure today.

And the universe transitioned from a plasma to a neutral gas when it was 380,000 years old. The light released then has persisted in the form of the cosmic microwave background. If the universe popped out a bunch of small black holes, they would affect this afterglow light pattern.

We might even hope to observe this epoch directly. Not with light, but with gravitational waves. That chaotic inferno must have released a torrent of ripples in the fabric of space-time, which — like the cosmic microwave background — would have survived to the present day. We don’t yet have the technological capability to directly observe those gravitational waves, but every day we’re inching closer.

And perhaps when we do, we’ll get a glimpse of the newborn universe.

Learn more: “The First Three Seconds: A Review of Possible Expansion Histories of the Early Universe“

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

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On This Day in Space! March 25, 1655: Christiaan Huygens discovers Saturn’s moon Titan, ,

On March 25, 1655, Saturn’s moon Titan was discovered by the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens (a name that you’ve probably heard mispronounced as “Hoy-gens”).

Titan is the largest moon of Saturn and it was the first of 62 moons to be found orbiting Saturn. Huygens discovered Titan using a telescope he designed himself. While looking at Saturn’s rings, he noticed a bright and tiny dot nearby.

Huygens suspected it was a moon, but just to be sure, he kept watching it for a few days. He confirmed that the tiny speck was orbiting Saturn and therefore must have been a moon. More than 300 years later, the European Space Agency sent a spacecraft to Titan and named it after him.

Catch up on our entire “On This Day In Space” series on YouTube with this playlist.

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Still not enough space? Don’t forget to check out our Space Image of the Day, and on the weekends our Best Space Photos and Top Space News Stories of the week.

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.

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Bang & Olufsen’s new HX headphones offer 35 hours of battery life for $499,

Bang & Olufsen’s latest pair of headphones are the Beoplay HX. They’re over-ear, noise canceling, and offer up to a truly impressive 35 hours of battery life. The headphones launch in black today for $499 (GBP499 / EUR499), but there’s a white model coming at the end of April, to be followed by a white and brown version in May.

At $499, the Beoplay HX are among the more expensive wireless noise-canceling headphones available. But this isn’t unfamiliar territory for Bang & Olufsen: the previous Beoplay H9 headphones cost exactly the same — and this is the company that also sells an $800 pair of Bluetooth headphones.

Thirty-five hours of battery life beats pretty much all competitors (and it rises up to 40 hours if you turn ANC off). The $549 AirPods Max are rated at just 20 hours with ANC on, while our top pick $350 Sony WH-1000XM4 can go for up to 30 hours. Others, like the Sennheiser Momentum 3 Wireless or Shure Aonic are rated for 16 hours and 20 hours, respectively.

A white and brown model is following in May.Image: Bang and Olufsen

Beyond battery life, the other thing your $499 gets you is build quality. The Beoplay HX’s ear cushions are made from lambskin with a memory foam interior, while the headband uses cow hide and knitted fabric in its construction. The ear cups themselves feature an aluminum disc surrounded by a recycled plastic housing, and the arm sliders are also aluminum.

The rest of the Beoplay HX specs are typical. There’s a USB-C port for charging, a 3.5mm jack for wired connections, buttons on the left and right ear cup, and also touch controls on just the right side. The headphones support Bluetooth 5.1, and for codecs, you get aptX Adaptive, AAC, and SBC. Google Fast Pair and Microsoft Swift Pair are both included for easy pairing with their respective platforms. And yes, the headphones come with a 3.5mm cable in the box, unlike the AirPods Max.

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SEC starts implementing a law that would delist foreign companies like Alibaba and Baidu from US stock exchanges if they don’t comply with US auditing standards (Benjamin Bain/Bloomberg)

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Soyuz rocket launches 36 OneWeb satellites into orbit for modified satellite internet constellation, ,

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An Arianespace Soyuz rocket launches 36 OneWeb satellites to orbit on March 24, 2021. (Image credit: OneWeb)Image 2 of 6

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The Soyuz-2.1b carrier rocket with the Fregat upper stage and 36 spacecraft lifted off from the Vostochny Cosmodrome. (Image credit: Roscosmos)Image 3 of 6

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OneWeb now has 146 satellites in its constellation after the fifth launch on March 24, 2021, when a Soyuz rocket delivered another 36 satellites to orbit. (Image credit: Arianespace)Image 4 of 6

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An Arianespace Soyuz rocket launches 36 OneWeb satellites to orbit on March 24, 2021. (Image credit: Arianespace)Image 5 of 6

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A Soyuz rocket arrives at the launch pad at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Siberia ahead of its planned launch of 36 OneWeb satellites in March 2021. (Image credit: Arianespace)Image 6 of 6

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This Arianespace image shows how OneWeb’s 36 internet satellites are stacked for launch on a Soyuz rocket ahead of a March 24, 2021 liftoff. (Image credit: Arianespace)

A Soyuz rocket successfully sent 36 OneWeb satellites into orbit Wednesday (March 24) as the London-based company continues its recovery from a tough 2020.

The European launch provider Arianespace launched the Soyuz rocket from Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia’s far east at 10:47 p.m. EDT (0247 GMT or 11:47 a.m. local time Thursday, March 25).

OneWeb satellites should have begun to deploy in groups of four beginning at 12:05 a.m. EDT (0405 GMT on Thursday, March 25), with the ninth and final group expected to deploy at 2:38 a.m. EDT (0638 GMT), if all goes according to plan. The satellites will circle Earth in a near-polar orbit at an altitude of roughly 280 miles (450 kilometers), which is slightly higher than the tilted equatorial orbit of the International Space Station.

This was the fifth launch for OneWeb overall. The satellite constellation, still under construction, aims to offer access to the Internet in remote areas using multiple Internet protocols, including 3G, LTE, the newest generation 5G (which enables the Internet of Things) and Wi-Fi, according to launch provider Arianespace.

In photos: OneWeb launches global satellite internet constellation

OneWeb “is focused on scaling the satellite constellation to launch commercial services starting at the end of 2021 to the UK, Alaska, Canada, northern Europe, Greenland, Iceland, and the Arctic seas,” Arianespace wrote in a mission description.

OneWeb had originally planned to put 48,000 satellites into orbit, but after a tough 2020 it filed a request with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in January proposing 6,372 satellites.

The company, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy a year ago shortly after the coronavirus pandemic erupted, told the FCC that the revision “demonstrates the commitment and vision” of its new owners, which are the British government and Indian telecom company Bharti Global. The goal is to deploy “a cost-effective, responsible, and groundbreaking satellite network to deliver global broadband,” according to the filing, which was quoted by Space News in January.

A release by OneWeb announcing the new launch said the company is now “hiring at a fast pace” — with 200 new employees coming in since last fall — as the company builds a global ground station network. It pointed to a $73 million contract with Intellian for user terminals, and another contract (for an undisclosed amount) with Satixfy for Wi-Fi terminals on aircraft.

“OneWeb Satellites, a joint venture with Airbus, is manufacturing the satellites and has returned to full production,” OneWeb added, saying it has secured global priority spectrum rights with the International Telecommunications Union to support the growing constellation.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.

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Watch live tonight! Arianespace Soyuz rocket launching 36 OneWeb satellites, ,

The European launch provider Arianespace will use a Soyuz rocket to launch 36 satellites into orbit for the OneWeb internet constellation. It lifted off from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Siberia, on Wednesday (March 24) at 10:47 p.m. EDT (0247 March 25 GMT).

OneWeb satellites will deploy in groups of four beginning at 12:05 a.m. EDT (0405 GMT on Thursday, March 25). The last group of four satellites will deploy at 2:38 a.m. EDT (0638 GMT).

You can watch the mission live here in the window above, courtesy of Arianespace, or directly via the company’s YouTube. Arianespace will provide updates on the status of the satellites via Twitter.

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A Soyuz rocket arrives at the launch pad at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Siberia ahead of its planned launch of 36 OneWeb satellites in March 2021. (Image credit: Arianespace)

The next Arianespace mission is planned from Vostochny Cosmodrome with Soyuz on March 25, to deliver 36 satellites into orbit.

By operating this fifth flight on behalf of OneWeb, Arianespace will bring the total fleet to 146 satellites in Low Earth Orbit. Arianespace is proud to share in the fulfilment of its customer’s ultimate ambition: providing internet access for everyone, everywhere.

Flight ST30, the second commercial mission performed by Arianespace and its Starsem affiliate from the Vostochny Cosmodrome, will put 36 of OneWeb’s satellites into a near-polar orbit at an altitude of 450 kilometers. The mission will have a total duration of three hours and 51 minutes and will include nine separations of four satellites, that will raise themselves to their operational orbit. This launch will bring up to speed Arianespace’s operations this year to the benefit of OneWeb, and will raise to 146 the number of satellites deployed for the global telecommunications operator.

OneWeb’s mission is to bring internet everywhere to everyone, by creating a global connectivity platform through a next generation satellite constellation in low Earth orbit. OneWeb’s constellation will deliver high-speed, low-latency connectivity services to a wide range of customer sectors including aviation, maritime, backhaul services, as well as governments, emergency response services and more. Central to its purpose, OneWeb seeks to bring connectivity to every place where fiber cannot reach, and thereby bridge the digital divide.

Once deployed, the OneWeb constellation will enable user terminals that are capable of offering 3G, LTE, 5G and Wi-Fi coverage, providing high-speed access globally – by air, sea and land.

OneWeb Satellites, a joint venture between OneWeb and Airbus Defence and Space, is the constellation’s prime contractor. The satellites were built thanks to its leading-edge satellite manufacturing process that can build up to two satellites a day on a series production line dedicated to the assembly, integration, and testing of the satellites.

A total of 110 OneWeb satellites have already been orbited by Arianespace: the first six were successfully orbited by Arianespace from French Guiana on February 27, 2019. On February and March 2020, Arianespace and its Starsem affiliate successfully launched 68 OneWeb satellites from Baikonur Cosmodrome on two successful Soyuz flights. On December 2020, the team successfully delivered an additional 36 satellites into orbit, with first commercial flight operated from new Vostochny Cosmodrome.

For further information, download the Flight ST30 Launch Kit by clicking here: http://www.arianespace.com/press-kits/To follow the launch live online, go to our site, arianespace.com or to the Arianespace YouTube channel at youtube.com/arianespace (audio feed in English starting at T-15 minutes).

About Arianespace

Arianespace uses space to make life better on Earth by providing launch services for all types of satellites into all orbits. It has orbited almost 800 satellites since 1980, using its family of three launchers, Ariane, Soyuz and Vega, from launch sites in French Guiana (South America) and from the Russian cosmodromes in Baikonur and Vostochny. Arianespace is headquartered in Evry, near Paris, and has a technical facility at the Guiana Space Center in French Guiana, plus local offices in Washington, D.C., Tokyo and Singapore. Arianespace is a subsidiary of ArianeGroup, which holds 74% of its share capital, with the balance held by 15 other shareholders from the European launcher industry.

About Starsem

Starsem is dedicated to providing international commercial marketing and operation of the Soyuz launch vehicle from the Baikonur cosmodrome. Shareholders in Starsem are Arianespace, ArianeGroup, the State Space Corporation ROSCOSMOS and the Samara Space Center “RKTs-Progress.”

Find out what the astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station are up to by tuning in to the “ISS Live” broadcast. Hear conversations between the crew and mission controllers on Earth and watch them work inside the U.S. segment of the orbiting laboratory. When the crew is off duty, you can enjoy live views of Earth from Space. You can watch and listen in the window below, courtesy of NASA.

“Live video from the International Space Station includes internal views when the crew is on-duty and Earth views at other times. The video is accompanied by audio of conversations between the crew and Mission Control. This video is only available when the space station is in contact with the ground. During ‘loss of signal’ periods, viewers will see a blue screen.

“Since the station orbits the Earth once every 90 minutes, it experiences a sunrise or a sunset about every 45 minutes. When the station is in darkness, external camera video may appear black, but can sometimes provide spectacular views of lightning or city lights below.”

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