It has been reported that customers on the Thaicom 5 communications satellite have been moved to other satellites following a telemetry issue that is preventing control of the spacecraft. The nearly 14-year-old spacecraft was coming to the end of its design...
Having been successfully launched by a Proton M/Breeze M rocket on 9 October – along with its MEV co-payload – the Eutelsat 5 West B suffered a fault during deployment to one of its solar arrays (the array is deployed but has a major problem). The fault, if not fixed,...
After the US$416 million loss of the Falcon Eye 1 in a Vega launch failure, it was reported that the Chinasat-18 (Zhongxing-18) satellite has suffered a similar demise – albeit after a successful launch by a Chinese Long March 3B/G2. The launch took place at...
There is a key moment in the movie Waterloo (1970) when Napoleon – played by the late Rod Steiger – realises that the battle is lost as the shout goes round that the Imperial “Old Guard” has broken. And there was a similar shock in space...
As the 50th celebration of the Apollo 11 astronaut moon landing gets underway, some less well-known aspects of the mission have been revealed. One was that during the late 1950s the UK briefly considered starting a project to mount its own Apollo-11-style human lunar...
Launch vehicles usually have their first failure during their first ten flights, but the Avio-built Arianespace-operated Vega launch vehicle waited until its 15th flight to have its first. After what seemed to be a successful launch from Kourou in French Guiana at...
