8 Month Launch Roundup: Europe Lags Behind, South Korea Achieved Major Breakthrough and India Suffered a Setback

by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor

While the United States, China and Russia have conducted a total of 105 launches with 102 successes, the rest of the world is lagging far behind. Europe, India, South Korea and Iran have combined for only seven orbital launches with six successes with more than eight months of 2022 in the rearview mirror. Japan has yet to conduct a single orbital launch this year.

One reason for the low totals is that Europe and Japan are in transition to new launch vehicles. Development delays with the Vega-C and Ariane 6 boosters, which will replace Vega and Ariane 5 rockets, have contributed to Europe launching only twice. (A third launch of an Ariane 5 booster is scheduled for this evening.) Ariane 6’s maiden flight has been postponed to 2023.

Japan’s new H3 launcher, which will replace the H-IIA booster, is also running far behind schedule. The booster’s maiden flight is now scheduled for the first quarter of next year.

India is having a mixed year as it has successfully launched its workhorse booster twice but suffered a failure with its new small satellite launcher. South Korea made a major breakthrough with the launch of its first domestically produced rocket. And Iran launched a small satellite.

Let’s take a closer look at who launched what from where.

Indian Launches
2022: 2-1
2021: 1-1

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launched its Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) twice. Payloads included three Earth observation satellites and one spacecraft each devoted to ionospheric research, technology demonstration and education. In a first for India, the second PSLV flight included an experimental module with six hosted payloads on the rocket’s upper stage.

Indian Launches
Jan. 1 – Sept. 5, 2022

ISRO had less luck with its new Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV), which failed during its maiden launch on Aug. 7. The fourth stage, known as the Velocity Trimming Module (VTM), failed to fire as planned. The failure left two small satellites in a 356 by 76 km (221 x 76 mile) high orbit, causing them to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.

ISRO lost the EOS-02 Earth observation microsatellite in the failed launch. The second payload was AzaadiSAT, a student-built Earth observation spacecraft supplied by Space Kidz India.

In a video posted on the agency’s website, ISRO Chairman Shri S. Somanath said the fourth stage’s on-board computer did not realize a crucial sensor on VTM had failed, so it was unable to take corrective action needed to allow the stage to fire as planned.

Somanath said ISRO was happy that SSLV’s first three stages had performed nominally on SSLV’s first flight test.

SSLV is capable of placing payloads weighing 500 kg (1,102 lb) into LEO or 300 kg (661 lb) into SSO. The rocket is designed to be assembled and launched quickly and inexpensively.

European Launches
2022: 2-0
2021: 6-0

The highlight of Europe’s launch year was the successful maiden flight of the Vega-C rocket on July 13. The upgraded version of the Vega booster can place 2,200 kg (4,850 lb) into a 700-km (435-mile) high polar orbit. Vega, which began flying in 2021, is limited to 1,500 kg (3,307 lb).

Vega-C is equipped with a more powerful P120C first stage and a new Zefiro-40 second stage. The re-ignitable AVUM+ upper stage has increased liquid propellant capacity that will enable the delivery of payloads to multiple orbits.

European Launches
Jan. 1 – Sept. 5, 2022

The primary payload on the maiden flight was the Italian Space Agency’s LARES-2 satellite, whose path is being tracked from ground stations by lasers.

“The purpose of the mission is to measure the so-called frame-dragging effect, a distortion of space-time caused by the rotation of a massive body such as Earth as predicted by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity,” the European Space Agency (ESA) said in a press release.

The rocket, built by Avio of Itlay, also carried six CubeSats as secondary payloads.

“AstroBio CubeSat (Italy) will test a solution for detecting biomolecules in space. Greencube (Italy) carries an experiment to grow plants in microgravity. ALPHA (Italy) aims to help understand phenomena related to Earth’s magnetosphere, such as the Northern and Southern Lights,” ESA said. “Three other CubeSats – Trisat-R (Slovenia), MTCube-2 (France) and Celesta (France) will study the effects of a harsh radiation environment on electronic systems.”

While they were ecstatic about the success of the flight, ESA and Avio were grappling with another problem caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The AVUM+ upper stage uses an engine built by the Ukrainian company Yuzhmash; the war put future deliveries of the vital component on indefinite hold.

In April, ESA Director Josef Aschbacher said Avio had taken delivery of six Ukrainian engines to cover Vega C launches through the end of 2023. ESA and Avio are examining several options in case Ukraine cannot deliver additional engines. One possibility is to accelerate development of the M10 liquid oxygen/methane engine that would replace the AVUM+ and Zefiro-9 stages on the upgraded Vega E booster.

Europe’s also launched an Ariane 5 rocket that orbited the GSAT-24 and MEASAT-3d geosynchronous communications satellites for India and Malaysia, respectively.

GSAT-24 was built by ISRO and leased through the space agency’s commercial arm, NewSpace India Ltd., to direct satellite broadcaster Tata Play. NewSpace India was established in 2019 to advance the commercialization of the nation’s government-dominated space industry.

MEASAT-3d was built by Airbus Defence and Space for Malaysia’s MEASAT Global Berhad using the Eurostar 3000 satellite bus. The spacecraft is providing communications services to Malaysia and nearby nations and has an expected lifetime of 18 years.

Meanwhile, Ariane 5’s successor suffered additional delays. Aschbacher said Ariane 6’s maiden flight will not take place until sometime next year.

Collateral Damage from Ukraine Invasion

Europe’s Arianespace conducted the launch of a Russian Soyuz ST-B rocket with 34 OneWeb broadband satellites aboard from French Guiana on Feb. 10 under a joint program with Russia. Arianespace was to have overseen the launches of six more Soyuz rockets carrying OneWeb satellites this year. The flights would have completed deployment of OneWeb’s 648-satellite constellation.

Russian invaded Ukraine two weeks after the Soyuz ST-B launch. In the face of Western sanctions, Russia demanded that London-based OneWeb give assurances that the constellation would not be used for military purposes in order to launch a batch of 36 broadband satellites from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on March 5. It also demanded that the UK government, which imposed sanctions on Russia over the invasion, divest its ownership of OneWeb.

After OneWeb and the British government refused, Roscosmos removed the Soyuz rocket from the launch pad at Baikonur and took OneWeb’s satellites off the booster. Russia said the company would not receive a refund of its money. Russia kept the satellites.

Arianespace indefinitely suspended cooperation with Russia on subsequent Soyuz launches as a result of European sanctions imposed over the Ukraine invasion.

With Ariane 6 delayed and a limited number of Ariane 5 launchers left, OneWeb was forced to look outside of Europe for launch services. The company reached an agreement with SpaceX to launch satellites on Falcon 9 rockets beginning later this year. OneWeb also announced a deal with NewSpace India to launch satellites on the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark III.

In March, ESA canceled plans to launch the joint European-Russian ExoMars mission aboard a Proton rocket in September. The launch would have placed the Rosalind Franklin rover on the surface of the Red Planet.

ESA must now find a new ride to Mars but also replace a Russian-supplied landing platform. With favorable launch windows occurring only every two years, the launch of Rosalind Franklin rover is not expected before 2028.

Other Launches

South Korea achieved a major breakthrough with the successful launch of its Nuri (KSLV-II) booster on June 21. The first orbital-class rocket produced entirely in South Korea carried a performance verification satellite, dummy payload, and five CubeSats into orbit. It was the booster’s second flight. A Nuri booster failed during its maiden launch in October 2021 due to a design flaw in its third stage.

Launches by South Korea and Iran
Jan. 1 – Sept. 5, 2022

Nuri is designed to launch 2,600 kg (5,732 lb) into a 300-km (186-mile) high low Earth orbit or 1,500 kg (3,307 lb) into a 600-800 km (373-497 mile) high orbit.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard launched a Noor-2 reconnaissance satellite aboard a Qased rocket. It was the second success in as many attempts for the solid-fuel small satellite launcher. Qased is capable of launching 10-50 kg (20-110 lb) to LEO.

Launches by Spaceport

Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou and India’s Satish Dhawan Launch Center each hosted three launches. South Korea launched from the Naro Space Center and Iran from the Shahrud Missile Test Site.

Indian, European, South Korean and Iranian Launches
Jan. 1 – Sept. 5, 2022

Japan’s Uchinoura and Tanegashima space centers have yet to host any orbital launches. Uchinoura has hosted two suborbital flights of the S-520 sounding rocket.

Wikipedia lists an Epsilon rocket carrying eight technology demonstration satellites scheduled for launch from Uchinoura on Oct. 7. The list also shows a H-IIA launching the Japanese IGS-Radar 7 reconnaissance satellite at an unspecified date later this year.