During last week’s 17th European Space Conference, launch company Arianespace announced it had won three new contracts.

Arianespace was awarded contracts to launch PLATO, Sentinel-1D, and a pair of second-generation Galileo positioning satellites. The two Galileo craft will share a launcher.

Arianespace now has a backlog of 30 Ariane 6 launches. Eighteen of them are Amazon’s Kuiper mega-constellation of broadband satellites.

This year, however, Ariane 6 is expected to fly only five times one of which will be the Ariane 64, a heavyweight version of the core rocket and which carries four boosters instead of the usual two.

The first operational flight of the rocket is scheduled for February 26th, carrying the CSO-3 reconnaissance satellite for the French military. The next is expected to follow in August, launching the MetOp-SG-A1 satellite for EUMETSAT.

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Categories: Articles, Satellite

Tags: Ariane 6, Arianespace