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On Monday, Russia put 38 foreign satellites into orbit after launching a “Soyuz” missile from the Baikonur base in Kazakhstan, after the operation was postponed twice due to technical problems.
The Soyuz-2.1 missile successfully took off at 06:07 GMT in a cloudy sky, according to images carried by the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos). In the following hours, 38 satellites from 18 countries were installed, including South Korea, Japan, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Italy and Brazil.
Roscosmos said in a statement that the satellites, which will be used especially for monitoring and research, as well as for communications, have been placed one after another in three different orbits.
“One hour and three minutes after launch, the main payload, South Korea’s ground monitoring satellite from distance Cas 500-1, has been separated. The first layer has successfully completed all scheduled stages to place the 37 spacecraft remaining in the orbits target, “the Russian agency said.
Among these devices is the “Challenge-1”, which is the first satellite manufactured entirely in Tunisia by the Tunisian telecommunications group “Talnat”.
It was scheduled for Saturday, postponing the launch to the next day and then Monday morning.
The head of the Russian Space Agency, Dmitry Rogozin, said the first delay occurred after “excessive pressure” was detected before launch, to avoid “any risk”. As for the second delay, it came after the discovery of a “technical fault”, according to “Roskosmos”.
The repeated postponements of launches reflect the difficulties that the Russian space sector has faced since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Recent years have seen several corruption scandals and a series of failed launches, one of which was a manned flight that left two astronauts unharmed.
