(ORDO NEWS) — Starsem, Arianespace and Roscosmos launched a Soyuz 2.1b rocket for the OneWeb 12 mission. The launch from site 31/6 at the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan took place at 16:10 Moscow time on December 27.
This year, a total of five OneWeb missions have been launched from the Vostochny cosmodrome in eastern Russia, with two more from Baikonur. Vostochny is the newest cosmodrome for Russia, while Baikonur is the oldest and arose back in Soviet times.
The previous launch of OneWeb from Baikonur took place on September 14th.
The satellites will join the ever-growing satellite constellation OneWeb, ultimately providing global Internet access – similar to SpaceX‘s Starlink constellation.
The satellites are initially launched into polar orbits 500 km long and eventually ascend to their working orbit 1200 x 1200 km above the ground. The constellation OneWeb is in higher orbits than the Starlink constellation.
In total, the initial OneWeb constellation will consist of 648 individual satellites.
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