NASA Spaceflight by Chris Gebhardt November 29, 2020
Arianespace was preparing to use — with Russia’s support — a Soyuz ST-A rocket to launch a joint military and civilian Earth imaging satellite for the United Arab Emirates Armed Forces from the Guiana Space Centre near Kourou, French Guiana.
Liftoff on Sunday night local time at the launch site was scrubbed at T-7 minutes due a lightning weather violation.
The Falcon Eye 2 satellite for the United Arab Emirates now has a single-second launch window at 20:33:28 EST on Monday, 30 November (01:33:28 UTC on Tuesday, 1 December) to ensure it reaches the proper sun-synchronous orbit.
The mission was originally scheduled to launch on a Vega rocket, like its predecessor — Falcon Eye 1 — did in July 2019. That mission ended abruptly 14 seconds after stage two ignition when the Vega rocket suffered the first of its two failures to-date.
Shortly after separation of the launcher’s first and second solid propellant stages, the forward dome on the Z23 motor (second stage) suffered a “thermo-structural failure†leading to a “violent event†that “led to a breakup of the launcher†— an engineering way of saying that the thermal protection system at the top of the Z23 stage failed, causing the destruction of the rocket and payload.
Following the failure, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Armed Forces asked for Falcon Eye 2’s launch to be changed to a Soyuz rocket with a Fregat-M upper stage so as not to launch on Vega again and allow for a smoother and more timely launch not subject to Vega’s return timeline.
Launch was rescheduled for 20 February 2020 before moving to 5 March. That day, teams found an issue with “one of the liquid propellant small thrust engines†on the Fregat-M upper stage of the Soyuz during day-of-launch checkouts. Later reports indicated the issue was a leak of oxidizer.
More:
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2020/11/arianespace-emirati-military-civilian-imaging-satellite
