The final flight of Europe's Vega rocket lifted off Wednesday night from French Guiana, carrying an important environmental monitoring satellite for the European Union's flagship Copernicus program.
The 98-foot-tall (30-meter) Vega rocket took off at 9:50 pm EDT Wednesday (01:50 UTC Thursday) from the European-run spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. The launcher headed 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 was 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.
About an hour after liftoff, the Vega rocket's upper stage released Sentinel-2C into an on-target orbit. Then, Sentinel-2C radioed its status to ground controllers, confirming the satellite was healthy in space.
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 a few hours before Wednesday night's mission. "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 have been able to perfect certain subsystems in Vega that are greatly improved in Vega-C," Ranzo said. "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.
A dedicated launch on a Vega rocket sells for approximately $40 million. On its rideshare missions, SpaceX sells capacity on the Falcon 9 rocket for less than a quarter of the price per kilogram on a Vega launch. Falcon 9 has also proven more reliable with greater schedule certainty than Vega.
These factors have made the Vega rocket and the follow-on Vega-C used almost entirely by customers in Europe, primarily ESA and the European Commission. Stéphane Israël, CEO of Arianespace, acknowledged this during a press conference before the final flight of the Vega rocket.
"We are here to guarantee autonomous access to space," Israël said.
Fielding a homemade launcher for European satellites was one of the early goals of the Vega program. It also led to greater investment in European launchers by the Italian government, joining a sector previously dominated by France and Germany.
ESA's member states have spent close to $2 billion on the development of the Vega and Vega-C rockets since the late 1990s. Nearly two-thirds of the money has come from Italy, where Avio, Vega's prime contractor, has its factory.
Avio, which was owned by the Italian automaker Fiat until 2003, is now taking over marketing and sales for the Vega program from Arianespace. In a request backed by the Italian government, Avio solicited ESA for approval to separate the Vega rocket from Arianespace in a bid to build its launch business outside the confines of Europe's traditional launch arrangements. ESA member states agreed to the proposal earlier this year.
With this decision, Avio has positioned itself to take a more independent role in the European launch market. Last year, the Italian government agreed to provide 340 million euros ($376 million) to Avio to develop a new methane-fueled first-stage engine and a demonstrator for a new partially reusable rocket to eventually replace the Vega-C.
Ranzo said Avio's takeover of marketing will make the Vega-C program more cost efficient because Arianespace will no longer take a cut of each sale. "We think that concentrating all activities in one company is only natural because any manufacturer wants to sell its own product," he said.
According to Israël, Avio took charge of marketing and sales for the Vega program at the beginning of this month. Arianespace will continue to be responsible for actually launching six more Vega and Vega-C rockets, including the mission Wednesday night with Sentinel-2C, a flight designated "VV24" on Arianespace's launch manifest.
Israël said Arianespace has booked customers for 15 more Vega flights after Wednesday night. Arianespace will work with those customers, almost exclusively ESA or the European Commission, to hand over the contracts to Avio.
Arianespace will continue overseeing marketing, sales, and operations of the heavier Ariane 6 rocket, which debuted in July. The second Ariane 6 flight is on track for December.
Meanwhile, Israël said the Vega-C rocket is scheduled for its return to flight in late November with the European Commission's Sentinel-1C satellite, a radar Earth-imaging platform. The Vega-C can loft about 50 percent more payload mass into orbit than the "classic" Vega rocket. Ranzo, Avio's CEO, said Vega-C is on track to launch for the same cost as a Vega rocket, translating to a reduction in the cost per kilogram of payload.
Upper stage tanks
One thing many in-the-know observers closely watched during Wednesday night's launch was the performance of Vega's liquid-fueled upper stage, called the AVUM. The upper stage fired its small RD-869 engine, made in Ukraine, two times to place the Sentinel-2C satellite into the correct orbit for deployment.
Late last year, Avio discovered two of the four AVUM propellant tanks for the final Vega launch were missing. Officials found them crushed in a landfill, according to a report published by European Spaceflight. The AVUM tanks contain hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide propellants for the upper stage engine.
The situation put Avio in a dilemma because the company had no more tanks available that would fit the Vega upper stage, and the tank supplier was in Russia, complicating any attempt to buy new ones, according to Ranzo. The only options were to use a set of tanks used during ground testing before the Vega rocket's inaugural launch more than a decade ago or use a larger set of tanks earmarked for the so-called AVUM+ upper stage that flies on the Vega-C rocket.
Ranzo told Ars that Avio decided to go with the latter solution, and the company completed tests to qualify the larger tanks to fly on the final Vega launch. The tank switch required some modifications to the structure of the upper stage.
"It's a configuration that we know well that we use in Vega-C," Ranzo said. "It wasn't really a big challenge to do. We had the spare tanks. We found an elegant solution to get out of it."
It turns out the solution worked, and Vega ended its checkered career with a successful launch.
This story was updated at 1:20 am EDT after confirmation of a successful launch.
