Almost a year and a half after a launch failure, Russia’s Rockot booster returned to flight on Saturday, successfully delivering four satellites. The light-weight launcher lifted off on July 28 from Plesetsk. It carried a pair of Gonets-M communications satellites and a MiR (Yubileiny-2) remote-sensing spacecraft. Roscosmos confirmed that both Gonets payloads and MiR successfully reached the orbit.
The launch was initially planned for December 2011, then for March 2012, but it had to be postponed to May 26, June 30, then to July 13 and to July 28. The latest two-week delay was caused primarily by issues with avionics onboard Rockot’s Briz-KM upper stage.
Below, a report on the Rockot’s return and a brief view of the launch:
![A trajectory analysis that used a computational fluid dynamics approach to determine the likely position and velocity histories of the foam (Credits: NASA Ref [1] p61).](https://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/fluid-dynamics-trajectory-analysis-50x50.jpg)
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