The Molniya were Soviet communication satellites operating from an inclined highly elliptical earth orbit of 500 km × 40000 km with 12 hour period for coverage of high northern latitudes.
The Molniya was a modification of the well-known R-7 Semyorka rocket and had four stages. The 8K78 resulted from a crash program by the Korolev Bureau to develop a booster for launching planetary probes. A larger third stage was added along with a fourth stage (Blok L) that was designed to fire in-orbit to send the payload out of LEO. The basic R-7 core was also structurally strengthened and given more powerful engines. A rushed development produced multiple malfunctions of the upper stages, which led to its being replaced by the improved Molniya-M in 1964, but there were enough 8K78s left to continue flying them into 1967.
The Strategic Rocket Forces of the Russian Federation are a separate-troops branch of the Russian Armed Forces that control Russia's land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).
WIKISub-orbital launch under Rocket Lab’s Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Test Electron (HASTE) program, details TBD.
Tenth of ten GPS III missions.
A batch of 25 satellites for the Starlink mega-constellation - SpaceX's project for space-based Internet communication system.
AST SpaceMobile’s Block 2 BlueBird satellites are designed to deliver up to 10 times the bandwidth capacity of the BlueBird Block 1 satellites, requi…
Daqi-2 (DQ-2), also known as the Atmospheric Environment Monitoring Satellite/AEMS, is the second of follow-on series of Chinese satellites to the GF…
Unknown satellite(s) for the Russian military.
A batch of 25 satellites for the Starlink mega-constellation - SpaceX's project for space-based Internet communication system.
A batch of 29 satellites for the Starlink mega-constellation - SpaceX's project for space-based Internet communication system.
8 Earth observation satellites for the Jilin-1 commercial Earth observation satellites constellation: * High Resolution-07A 02-04 * High Resoluti…
This is the 24th flight of the Orbital ATK's uncrewed resupply spacecraft Cygnus and its 23rd flight to the International Space Station under the Com…