Saturday 20 March 2021

Start is delayed
Soyuz rocket launches 38 satellites

Cargo is valuable – and international: 38 satellites from different nations are about to carry a Russian Soyuz rocket into space. However, the start will be postponed on short notice. The exact reasons for this have not been known.

Due to technical problems, Russia has postponed the launch of a rocket with 38 satellites from the Baikonur spaceport in Kazakhstan. The new start date has been set for this Monday, the Russian space agency Roskosmos announced in the evening in Moscow. A commission has now postponed the start, which was initially postponed until Sunday, March 22. Accordingly, a Soyuz rocket will bring satellites from 18 countries, including Germany, into space.

Roscosmos gave no information about the exact reasons for the innings. “The reasons are technical, something like this happens in practice,” said a spokesperson for the television channel Roskosmos TV. According to Russian sources, the satellites also include a Japanese device called Elsa-D, which is believed to collect the remains of the first used satellites. Given the vast amount of space junk, it acts as a fixture in the universe, it said.

The Technical University of Berlin reportedly has several radio satellites on the mission. Several space bodies from individual countries, including Saudi Arabia and South Korea, are used for Earth exploration and are believed to send images and data from the planet to ground stations.

According to Roskosmos, these are small satellites in various formats with a mass of up to 200 kg. They were placed in different classrooms. Countries represented include Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Slovakia, Hungary, Brazil, Canada, Israel and Great Britain.