Vega’s European launch fails, also capping horrific 2020 for rockets

French rocket maker Arianespace confirmed on Tuesday that one of its Vega rockets failed to put two European satellites into orbit and instead fell back to Earth in a “completely uninhabited area”.

The unsuccessful launch is the ninth time an orbital mission has failed to hit its target in 2020, the most failures in a calendar year since 1971, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who meticulously monitors launches and other orbital events.

Tonight’s Vega failure is the 9th failed orbital launch attempt in 2020 – the worst year since 1971 in this regard.

– Jonathan McDowell (@ planet4589) November 17, 2020

I’ve been telling people for months now that 2020 has been a better year in space than on Earth, considering successful landmark missions like NASA DM-2, Crew-1 and Osiris-Rex, but raw data shows that 2020 hasn’t been ideal for launches either.

You might assume we’re seeing more failures as there will surely be more launch attempts in 2020, but McDowell says there isn’t.

“This is mainly the consequence of many early thefts of new vehicles,” he wrote on Twitter.

The list of attempts that did not go as hoped includes Virgin Orbit’s first attempt at send your LauncherOne into orbit; the debut of newcomer Astra from its Rocket 3.1; and a new Chinese vehicle Kuaizhou 11 which failed on its maiden voyage. Three more Chinese rockets, a Rocket Lab Electron, and an Iranian Simorgh rocket complete the list of launch flops for 2020.

As for the Vega rocket, Arianespace told reporters on a conference call Tuesday that it believed “human error” led to the failure. It appears that some cables were improperly connected to the upper stage of the rocket, causing it to fall out of control.

The rocket took off successfully from French Guiana on Monday evening, carrying two Earth observation satellites. Everything seemed normal until about eight minutes after the start of the mission, when Arianespace first detected problems. The entire mission was soon lost.

Investigations will continue into the failure of Vega. Meanwhile, there are still more than a dozen orbital launches to come on the schedule before the end of the year. Hoping that they no longer fall under the curse of 2020.