After two successive postponements in the last 48 hours, a Soyuz rocket took off on Tuesday, December 1 in the evening of its launch pad in Sinnamary (neighboring municipality of Kourou) at the Guyanese Space Center at 10:33 p.m. local (2:33 a.m., Wednesday in Paris) with FalconEye, a United Arab Emirates military Earth observation satellite on board.
The chronology had been stopped Sunday evening for a risk of lightning strike in flight and Monday evening for a problem of data transmission between the launcher and the backup service responsible for its neutralization.
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Initially called FalconEye 2, the military satellite on board Soyuz was part of a program providing for the putting into orbit of two military satellites of the United Arab Emirates armed forces (FalconEye 1 and 2).
Alas, in July 2019, FalconEye 1, the first optical satellite of this program, had taken place aboard the Vega light launcher which then suffered its first failure on the occasion of its 15th firing when leaving its trajectory, the launcher to be destroyed. in flight in order to avoid a risk of fallout on an inhabited Guyanese land area.
FalconEye 2, an identical satellite in the program, was also initially to be launched, with a Vega rocket.
Now renamed FalconEye, it is this satellite which therefore took off Tuesday evening from Guyana aboard a Soyuz rocket, deemed to be more reliable than Vega, two of the last three missions of which ended in failures, the last after taking off on Sunday. November 15, 2020 in the evening of Kourou, with the key to a new exit from the trajectory, this time later than that of July 2019. The Soyuz mission, from the zero count to the separation of the military satellite from the United Arab Emirates, is scheduled for last 58 minutes and 45 seconds.
FalconEye was manufactured by the consortium led by Airbus Defense and Space and Thales Alenia Space.
The satellite is to meet the needs of the UAE armed forces and provide imagery to the commercial market.
