Portal:Spaceflight/Selected article/Week 1 2010

In the year 2009 a number of significant events occurred in spaceflight, including Iran conducting its first orbital launch, the launch of the first Swiss satellite, and the first sounding rocket launch to be made by New Zealand. Four astronomical observatories were launched, whilst flew the final mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope, STS-125. The LRO and LCROSS missions were launched in June, with LCROSS discovering water at the Lunar south pole in October. The Chang'e-1, Kaguya and Chandrayaan-1 missions all came to an end.

Seventy eight orbital launch attempts were made in 2009, with seventy five reaching orbit. The Naro-1 and H-IIB rockets made their maiden flights, whilst the Tsyklon-3 and Ariane 5GS were retired. Three outright launch failures occurred; in February a Taurus-XL failed to launch the Orbiting Carbon Observatory after its payload fairing failed to separate, in April North Korea launched a Unha rocket and claimed that it had placed the Kwangmyŏngsŏng-2 satellite into orbit, however Western radar tracking revealed that it had fallen into the Pacific Ocean. In August, the maiden flight of the Naro-1 rocket ended in failure after the fairing malfunctioned. Two partial launch failures, affecting a Soyuz-2.1a and a Long March 3B also occurred – the latter being the first anomaly to hit a Long March launch for thirteen years. (more...)