Chinese Long March Launches Venezuela's First Satellite

摘要

A Chinese Long March 3B rocket successfully placed Venezuela's Venesat-1 Simon Bolivar telecommunications satellite into orbit Oct. 30 in what Venezuelan government officials said marks the beginning of the end of a Latin American dependency on foreign telecommunications capacity. The 5,100-kilogram Venesat-1 was successfully placed into a geostationary transfer orbit by the Long March 3B, operated from the Xichang spaceport in southwest China's Sichuan Province. Venesat-1 was built by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CAST) and is the third of the high-power DFH-4 platforms to be built. Both the first and second models, the Sinosat-2 launched in October 2006 and the Nigcom-sat-1 spacecraft launched in May 2007, for Chinese and Nigerian satellite operators, respectively, have suffered major in-orbit failures due to their solar-array deployment systems. An official with the China Great Wall Industry Corp. said China would be launching a replacement satellite for Nigcom- sat-1, orbited in May 2007, in compensation for the failure of the satellite's solar array drive mechanism, which orients the array toward the sun. The official said CAST engineers have determined the cause of the Sinosat-2 and Nig-comsat-1 failures and are confident that Venesat-1 will not see a recurrence of the problem.