Successful VA-222 Launch !

The VA-222 flight already rescheduled twice was planned to lift-off from Centre Spatial Guyanais (CSG) ELA-3 on 26/04/2015 @ 16:38 (local time). This dual launch was delivering today in GEO orbit THOR 7, a Norwegian Broadcasting Satellite (manufactured by Loral) and SICRAL 2 an Italian Ministry of Defense and French DGA Satellite (manufactured by Thales Alenia Space).

The MSG-4 team decided to attend the VA-222 Launch from the Kourou beach. 

View of the Kourou beach towards the Pointe des Roches

As the flight had a delay of about 30 minutes,  there was enough time  to observe few typical birds of the guyanese seashore...

Identification to be provided later

… and few other migrating birds. As they were equipped with professional camera equipment one may assume that there were dedicated "rocket hunters" or "rocket paparazzi". Let us know if you have more :-). En passant, a huge thank to Ben and Matthijs for the great job they did to prepare for the arrival of the MSG-4 team in S1.

But suddenly crossing the Kourou sky, one could observe the rocket of the VA-222 mission just over our heads. The sound came in fact very late and the low frequencies are always impressive. Today the Ariane 5 was beautifully heading to Moon. Note also that day launches are not so frequent. We were then particularly lucky.

V-222  roughly two minutes after lift-off!

Few minutes later, as usual, the exhaust smokes were making live art in the Guyanese sky which had by chance cleared up in the afternoon. The separation of the two spacecrafts from the rocket concluded the mission of the launcher successfully.

VA-222 exhaust smokes

This day is in fact an important date for all the space community working with Arianespace and CNES at the CSG because this now leaves the floor free for the next Ariane 5 launch to come: VA-223. This new launch planned on mid-May 2015 is in fact the last Ariane-5 launch before "our" VA-224 (MSG-4/StarOne C4) launch expected on 02/07/2015. But before the MSG-4 launch, the light European launcher VEGA will put in orbit Sentinel 2, another ESA spacecraft. As you can imagine, the workload on the CSG is extremely important at this moment with an intensive use of all the resources to meet customer needs.
Today, let's warmly congratulate our predecessors and all teams who contributed to the success of the VA-222 launch!