The Russian-built AngoSat-1 communications satellite has been officially declared lost this week after repeated attempts to revive the crippled spacecraft had been in vain.
Read more
India’s GSAT-6A military communications satellite has unexpectedly gone silent after conducting a major engine burn on Saturday, indicating a potentially serious onboard anomaly had occurred less than two days after the craft’s successful launch atop a GSLV rocket.
Read more
Europe’s Ariane 5 appears to have gotten away with a black eye on Thursday when its 97th mission veered off course from the onset of the rocket’s climb, but still managed to deploy two innovative communications craft in a stable, but off-target orbit from where it will be up to the SES 14 and Al Yah 3 satellites to rectify the situation and maneuver into their operational slots above the equator.
Read more
Europe’s Ariane 5 launch vehicle, after 82 consecutive successes over a 15-year streak, encountered a potentially serious anomaly on Thursday when lifting a pair of cutting-edge communications satellites into a high-energy Supersynchronous Transfer Orbit.
Read more
The year 2017 saw a total of 90 known orbital launch attempts from seven nations and space ports in eight different countries. 2017 had the second most orbital launch attempts of any year in the current century, short of 92 launches in 2014 and showing a slight increase from 2016 that had 85 known launch attempts.
Read more
The failure of a Soyuz 2-1B/Fregat-M rocket launching the Meteor-M 2-1 weather satellite and 18 international secondary payloads was traced back to a software bug on the rocket’s Fregat upper stage brought on by the unique parameters for Soyuz launches out of the Far Eastern Vostochny Cosmodrome.
Read more
Russia suffered its first launch failure of 2017 on Tuesday on the second Soyuz mission carried out from the new Vostochny Cosmodrome in the country’s far east, claiming the loss of the Meteor-M 2-1 weather satellite and an international assortment of small satellites.
Read more
SpaceX suffered a minor setback when a Merlin engine designed for the upcoming Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket failed during testing last Saturday and caused damage to the test chamber at the company’s testing and development site in Texas.
Read more
A streak of 36 successful launches over a period of 18 years ended on Thursday when India’s PSLV rocket suffered an in-flight failure that left its payload – a replacement satellite for the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System – in a lower- than-planned orbit and possibly trapped underneath the rocket’s payload fairing.
Read more
More trouble appears to be brewing in Geostationary Orbit as reports emerged this week of a satellite breaking apart in prime orbital real estate – the second such incident in as many months, adding to an already significant population of debris and zombie satellites
Read more
China’s heaviest rocket lifted off from a picturesque tropical launch site on Hainan Island at sunset on Sunday, rising into sunlight shortly after blastoff before disappearing in the night on its second orbital mission.
Read more