Riding on pillars of fire and smoke, Europe’s Ariane 5 rocket blasted into the sunset over French Guiana on Friday, heading off on its final Geotransfer mission of the year with a pair of particularly heavy satellites for operators Intelsat and B-SAT
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China conducted a secretive launch from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center on Friday, involving a Long March 2C rocket deploying a trio of satellites into orbit under the designation Yaogan-30 Group 01.
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Just two and a half weeks after making its last orbital delivery, Russia’s Proton-M rocket lit up the night over the Baikonur Cosmodrome again on Thursday
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Thundering off on a hush-hush mission, ULA’s Atlas V rocket lit up the night skies over California on Saturday to deliver a classified satellite into orbit for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office
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Russia’s trusted Soyuz rocket blasted off from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in the early hours on Friday with a Glonass navigation satellite to replace a recently-failed member of the country’s Global Navigation Satellite System
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Carrying a crew of three, a Russian Soyuz FG rocket lit up the skies over the Baikonur Cosmodrome Tuesday night as it embarked on a nine-minute climb to orbit in pursuit of the International Space Station to send the Soyuz MS-06 spacecraft on a fast-track rendezvous with the orbiting laboratory with the second half of the Expedition 53 crew.
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Russia’s Proton rocket thundered into the night skies over the Baikonur Cosmodrome on Monday, carrying the U.S.-built Amazonas 5 communications satellite set to deliver TV and Internet Services to South and Central America.
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A SpaceX Falcon 9 blasted into partly cloudy skies over Cape Canaveral on Thursday, carrying into orbit the U.S. Air Force’s X-37B winged space plane on a mostly classified mission to test out new technologies in space and perform a range of experiments out of public view as part of the program’s fifth flight to space.
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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.
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Orbital ATK’s Minotaur IV rocket shot up into the night skies over Florida’s Space Coast in the early hours on Saturday, carrying out its debut launch from Cape Canaveral to dispatch the ORS-5 Space Situational Awareness Satellite
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A very lightly-loaded Falcon 9 departed its Pacific Coast launch pad on Thursday, carrying into orbit the FormoSat-5 Earth Observation Satellite for Taiwan’s National Space Organization – a contract left over from SpaceX’s Falcon 1 days that ended up creating the most colossal waste of rocket performance in recent history.
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Japan’s H-IIA rocket soared to its fourth success of the year on Saturday, deploying the third satellite in the country’s Quasi-Zenith Satellite System for navigation services augmentation in fast-paced effort to complete the four-satellite constellation
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The rumble of an Atlas V rocket returned to Cape Canaveral on Friday after a four-month gap when ULA’s workhorse rocket blasted off with a critical reinforcement for NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System, providing extension coverage to maintain the agency’s prime space communications program.
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Russia’s Proton rocket thundered off from the remote Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan Wednesday night on a hush-hush mission with a highly-capable communications satellite
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Mice, a supercomputer, small satellites and a new state-of-the-art particle detector roared into clear skies over Florida’s Space Coast on Monday aboard the twelfth regular Dragon cargo spacecraft launching atop SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.
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The tenth Vega rocket blasted off from French Guiana Tuesday night, lighting up the edge of the Amazon before swinging to the north to dispatch a pair of Israeli-built satellites into two different orbits via a complex multi-burn mission by the launcher’s upper stage.
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Iran this week launched its largest carrier rocket successfully for the first time, Iran’s official news agency reported on Thursday marking a potential major step in the country’s ongoing efforts to develop space launch vehicles capable of placing sizeable satellites into orbit.
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