The final flight of Europe’s Vega rocket is scheduled for liftoff Wednesday night from French Guiana, carrying an important environmental monitoring satellite for the European Union’s flagship Copernicus program.
The launch is set for 9:50 pm EDT Wednesday (01:50 UTC Thursday) from the European-run spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. The 98-foot-tall (30-meter) Vega rocket will head north from the launch pad on the coast of South America, aiming for a polar orbit about 480 miles (775 kilometers) above the Earth.
The sole payload is Sentinel-2C, a remote sensing platform set to join Europe’s fleet of Copernicus environmental satellites. The multibillion-dollar Copernicus system is the world’s most comprehensive space-based Earth observation network, with satellites fitted with different kinds of instruments monitoring land surfaces, oceans, and the atmosphere.
Sentinel-2C will replace Sentinel-2A, which launched on a Vega rocket in 2015 and is nearing the end of its life. An identical satellite named Sentinel-2B has been in orbit since 2017 and will be replaced by Sentinel-2D in 2028.
The spacecraft in Europe’s Sentinel-2 series are similar to the US government‘s Landsat satellites, providing wide-angle optical views of crops, forests, and urban areas to track changes season to season and year to year. The European Commission—the European Union’s executive arm—shares all the Copernicus data free of charge to users worldwide.
The Vega launcher is powered by three solid-fueled rocket motors, firing one after the other, and a liquid-fueled upper stage called the AVUM (the Attitude Vernier Upper Module) that ignites its engine multiple times to place satellites into slightly different orbits. Vega can deliver up to 3,300 pounds (1,500 kilograms) of payload mass into a 435-mile-high (700-kilometer) orbit.
Avio, an Italian aerospace company, designed Vega and oversees an industrial consortium that manufactures solid motors, structures, and avionics for the rocket. From the start, Arianespace, the French launch service provider, has been responsible for marketing and sales for the Vega program.
The Vega rocket will be replaced by the larger Vega-C rocket, with a more powerful booster stage and a wider payload fairing. One of the primary purposes of the Vega-C will be to launch future Copernicus satellites for Europe.
“I think it was a great success,” said Giulio Ranzo, Avio’s CEO, in an interview with Ars. “It was our first launcher. It was our first experience as a major player in the launcher domain. We put it together from a clean sheet of paper, so the legacy is very, very strong. We have learned a lot.”
22 and done
However, in a dozen years of service, the Vega rocket never really took off in the commercial launch market. It averaged about two flights per year and primarily deployed satellites for the European Space Agency and other European government agencies, which prefer launching their payloads on European rockets.
In the first few years after its debut launch in 2012, it seemed that the Vega rocket might be competitive for contracts to launch small Earth observation satellites for commercial companies and government customers outside of Europe.
A Vega rocket launched an Earth-imaging satellite for Kazakhstan in 2013, and subsequent missions delivered similar satellites to orbit for the governments of Peru, Turkey, and Morocco. For those missions, the governments tapped European manufacturers Airbus Defense and Space and Thales Alenia Space to build the satellites and manage their launch contracts. Airbus and Thales chose Arianespace, another European company, to launch these satellites on Vega rockets.
Then, in 2019, a Vega rocket failed during launch with a military reconnaissance satellite for the United Arab Emirates, ending a streak of 14 straight successful flights, a remarkable record for a brand new launcher.
A year later, another Vega rocket fell short of orbit and destroyed two Spanish and French satellites. Just two years after the Vega rocket started flying, the European Space Agency (ESA) approved the development of its replacement, the Vega-C, to handle heavier payloads.
“We’ve learned a lot,” Ranzo said. “We have been able to perfect certain subsystems in Vega that are greatly improved in Vega-C. It was what it was meant to be. It was to be our first experience, and in 12 years, we’ve learned a lot and put all we have learned into a new version of the rocket.”
The Vega-C launched successfully for the first time in July 2022 but failed on its second flight five months later. It hasn’t flown since then, and engineers have redesigned the nozzle for the Vega-C’s second stage solid rocket motor to fix the problem that led to the failure in December 2022.
The Vega rocket’s struggles with reliability coincided with growing competition in the commercial launch market. Vega, based on an expendable design, was overpriced to be competitive with SpaceX, which started offering rideshare flights on its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket in 2021.
