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First Launch of new heavy-lift Ariane 5 rocket

Posted by Hemos on from the heavy-lifter dept.

obiwan2u writes "In the article Europe's super-rocket rides high, BBC talks about the Feb 12th launch of Arianespace's new bigger/better Ariane 5-ECA. The new rocket can lift multiple satellites totalling 10 metric tons (10K kilograms or about 11 olde english tons) into geosync orbit. The price will hopefully around $15K-$20K per kg. The first launch included a communications satellite and a science experiment called (I'm not making this up) SloshSat , designed to investigate the dynamics of fluids in microgravity. "

4 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. Tons by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    10 metric tons (10K kilograms or about 11 olde english tons)

    Hang on a moment, if you're being literal, than an "olde english" ton is not the same as a US ton (2000 pounds). The imperial ton is is 2240 pounds, which would make the sentence:

    10 metric tons (10K kilograms or about 9.8 olde english tons)

    Thank you, and have a good day.

    1. Re:Tons by PhilHibbs · · Score: 3, Informative

      The old English tonne was 2160lb, though.

  2. This is a dupe! by marat · · Score: 3, Informative

    02/12 version of this story got mysterious lost, but thanks to redundancy on slashdot it finally reached us now just two days later.

  3. Not the first launch by magsilva · · Score: 3, Informative

    This isn't the _first_ launch of the Ariane 5 ECA. The first was on december 2002. Unfortunately, the vehicle was self-destroyed after three minutes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5) due to a software bug.