ESA has successfully launched the new Vega-C space rocket, now it looks to the future

While little encouraging news arrived from the front of the collaboration between ESA and Roscosmos, with the now certain end of the collaboration between the two space agencies for the ExoMars mission, the launch of the new Vega-C space rocket with a lot on board “Italy”. A new step forward for the independence of the launches for Europe, fundamental in this period.

In recent weeks (and days) there has also been talk of the arrival in the coming years of European reusable launchers but it must be considered that development will take some time and Europe cannot depend on more or less reliable partners (from Russia to the United States). . This is why the success of the mission VV21 it is also encouraging for the prospect of the inaugural mission of the larger and more powerful Ariane 6 (expected between the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023).

ESA Vega-C was successfully launched from French Guiana

The mission VV21 took off from the South American spaceport at 15:13 today with an overall duration for the release of the payload of 2 hours and 15 minutes while the mass was equal to 474 kg with about 296 kg attributable to LARES-2 while the remaining weight was due to six CubeSat and related adapters and transport structures.

As pointed out byspace agency ESA, Vega-C allows to bring several improvements over the previous Vega (which started flying in 2012). Thanks to a new architecture of the first and second stage and an improvement for the fourth stage, we have gone from being able to launch a payload of 1.5 tons (for Vega) up to 2.3 tons in polar orbit at 700 km for this latest evolution. The overall height is 34.8 m.

The first stage of Vega-C, called P120C, is based on Vega’s P80 while Zefiro-40 of the second stage is completely new with the third stage Zefiro-9 which is instead borrowed from the previous Vega. Of particular importance is the upper stage which has a re-ignitable engine useful for correcting the trajectory and allowing to release more payloads in different orbits. AVUM + it uses liquid propellant and allows to extend the duration of the missions.

It must also be considered that the development of this vector was also useful to supply the P120C engines to Ariane 6 (which will use them as a booster with solid state propellant in two or four units).

As written, the payload included LARES-2 which serves to measure what is called frame-dragging effect linked to Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (and for this reason it has an orbit with a particular inclination at an altitude of almost 6000 km). Then there are three Italian CubeSats with AstroBio which is used to detect biomolecules in orbit, Greencube which incorporates an experiment for the growth of plants in microgravity and ALPHA which is instead linked to measurements of the magnetosphere. The other three CubeSats are Trisat-R (Slovenia), MTCube-2 (France) and Celesta (France).

But this is only the beginning. Even if the Vega-C space rocket has just begun its operational life already we are looking at Vega-E which should start operations in 2026 which will not have the separation between third and fourth stage but only a third stage with cryogenic propellant such as oxygen and methane (with M10 engine made by Avio).

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