The Russian Soyuz rocket, operated by the European company Arianespace, has launched 34 new satellites of the British operator OneWeb, which is deploying a constellation to provide high-speed Internet around the world.
The rocket took off “successfully” at 22:13 GMT on Saturday from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, a statement from the Russian space agency (Roscosmos) said.
This is the fifth launch of OneWeb satellites this year.
With these 34 satellites, OneWeb now has 288 satellites in orbit.
OneWeb, owned by the British government with Indian Bharti, plans to launch a global internet by the end of 2022 with a network of 650 satellites.
In September 2020, OneWeb and Arianespace signed a contract under which the European group will launch until December 2022 the remaining satellites to complete the constellation.
Currently, there are several satellite constellation projects for the World Wide Web.
American billionaire Elon Musk, founder of the space company SpaceX, has already launched more than 1,500 satellites from his Starlink network into orbit.
The founder of Amazon, the American Jeff Bezos, also has a similar project called Kuiper.
mp / ia / zm / li
“Beeraholic. Friend of animals everywhere. Evil web scholar. Zombie maven.”