Two very different missions but both with the same news, as the European Space Agency (ESA) announced their Venus Express spacecraft will not launch next Wednesday, due to a problem with its Russian launch vehicle. <\/p>\n
Meanwhile, SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 1 has also suffered a delay \u2013 and won\u2019t launch until the middle of November. ESA announced that during the final preparations for the launch of the Venus Express spacecraft by a Soyuz-Fregat launcher, contamination was detected inside the launcher\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fairing.<\/p>\n Starsem and ESA have therefore decided to carry out additional checks, which will postpone the originally scheduled launch date of Wednesday, 26 October by several days.<\/font><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The $150 million mission is the first to Venus, our closest neighbour, for 15 years and will help study the effects of global warming.<\/p>\n ESA have noted that a new launch date will be announced shortly.<\/p>\n The maiden flight of the Falcon 1 follows several cautious weeks of delay during engine testing. <\/p>\n SpaceX operations at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California had been held back while the US Air Force launched their last Titan rocket, carrying a classified national security payload into orbit, which launched earlier this week.<\/p>\n Due to the delays in the run up to the launch of the Titan rocket, Falcon 1 will lift off from the miniscule island Omelek of the Kwajalein Atoll, leased by the US Army as a missile test range from the Marshall Islands. <\/p>\n The island is only nine degrees from the equator, allowing launches to take more advantage of the Earth\u2019s rotation.<\/p>\n The delay \u2013 believed to be caused by minor flight software glitches \u2013 to mid-November places extra pressure on the company, with any further delay pushing the launch into next year.<\/p>\n <\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Two very different missions but both with the same news, as the European Space Agency (ESA) announced their Venus Express spacecraft will not launch next Wednesday, due to a problem with its Russian launch vehicle. Meanwhile, SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 1 has also suffered a delay \u2013 and won\u2019t launch until the middle of November. ESA announced […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42254"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42254\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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