Posted on 07/10/2019 10:15:44 PM PDT by cabojoe
A European Vega launcher failed Wednesday night around two minutes after liftoff from French Guiana and fell into the Atlantic Ocean, destroying an Airbus-built surveillance satellite for the United Arab Emirates.
Arianespace, the French launch service provider in charge of Wednesday night’s mission, declared a failure minutes after the 98-foot-tall (30-meter) Vega rocket took off from the Guiana Space Center on the northeastern coast of South America.
Luce Fabreguettes, Arianespace’s executive vice president of missions, operations and purchasing, said the failure occurred around the time of ignition of the Vega rocket’s solid-fueled Zefiro 23 second stage.
“As you have seen, about two minutes after liftoff, around the Z23 (second stage) ignition, a major anomaly occurred, resulting in the loss of the mission,” Fabreguettes said. “On behalf of Arianespace, I wish to express our deepest apologies to our customers for the loss of their payload.”
Arianespace released no immediate details on what went wrong, but Arianespace teams in French Guiana and at Avio — the Vega’s prime contractor in Italy — were analyzing data downlinked from the rocket in the hours after the accident.
(Excerpt) Read more at spaceflightnow.com ...
Here is the youtube video..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRdV5arYGhw
Thank you. I was watching until first stage separation and then turned it off, only to read later that it failed.
Space.com’s story: Vega Rocket Suffers ‘Major Anomaly’ During Launch of UAE Satellite https://www.space.com/vega-rocket-failure-major-launch-anomaly-falconeye1.html
They could spice up the launch narrations by selling sponsorships like NASCAR.
“And we have liftoff of the Gatorade Vega Rocket powered by A single RainX P80 solid rocket first stage booster. As we approach the Pepsi Max Q all systems are nominal and shortly the Red Bull liquid fueled 2nd stage will ignite hurling the Mountain Dew Arab Emirates surveillance satellite into a Taco Bell elliptical orbit....”
With a big-ass Pennzoil sticker on the side of the rocket.
Don’t give Musk any ideas.
Snicker.
Landing your rockets for reuse? Preposterous!!
They should have launched it on SpaceX.
Looks like the second stage “simply” didn’t ignite? Assuming they got a clean staging event with no damage (eg. stuck/hung clamps) then all eyes are on the 2nd stage for failure to light off. Hopefully they have enough telemetry to point to what went wrong. Otherwise you’re in the educated guessing game of what could have gone wrong with what percentage chance...
“analyzing data downlinked from the rocket in the hours after the accident”
that’s pretty amazing that they can still downlink data after the crash ...
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