Reuters) – A technical problem Thursday delayed for the second day running the scheduled launch of an Ariane rocket carrying two satellites, the Arianespace company said.
“We once again had a no-go linked to a problem of the pressurization of the lower stage of the launch vehicle,” Jean-Yves Le Gall, Arianespace president said at the European Space Agency’s launch center in Kourou, French Guiana on the northeast coast of South America.
“So the countdown has been halted and we will investigate and understand what happened,” Le Gall said.
Wednesday, a first attempt to launch the rocket was also halted when an unexpected pressure drop was detected in the rocket’s upper stage.
The Ariane-5 rocket was slated to launch Arabsat-5A, a telecommunications satellite designed for broadcasting to the Middle East and North Africa, as well as Coms — a multimission satellite for South Korea’s Aerospace Research Institute.
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