It’s getting to the point where there are so many rocket launches day in, day out, that I can’t keep up. In this case, we have a rocket that I’ve never covered before, the ESA’s “Vega” booster, and a pretty nice launch from the Guyana Space Centre.
Vega is a somewhat unique rocked in that it uses 3 solid fueled stages, and one liquid fueled upper stage, to put its payloads into orbit. As you can see in the below video, the use of solid stages gives the booster quite the “rush” at launch compared to more conventional rockets slow lift from their pads. Cheap and effective, solid rocket motors seem to do the job nicely here as primary propulsion systems where orbital insertion accuracy can be managed by the liquid fueled upper stage. Since solid rocket motors can’t generally be shut down after they are started, a rocket like Vega is suited more for high-altitude launches than other rockets – just get it up there and let the upper stage put it into its proper orbit.
In this case, the payload, the Sentinel-2B satellite, was put into a sun-syncronous polar orbit, opposite the Sentinel-2A satellite, the pair designed to study Earth resources for agriculture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlaIZCL8-xI