Arianespace buys 10 Russia Soyuz launch rockets from for its Galileo programme
22 Sep 2008
Sochi, Russia: The commercial arm of the European Space Agency, Arianespace, will buy 10 Russian Soyuz booster rockets under a $300-400 million contract signed Saturday, Russian news agencies reported. The launchers will be used to orbit the European Galileo satellites from its Kourou facility in French Guiana.
The deal was signed by Arianespace chairman Jean-Yves Le Gall and the head of Russian space agency Roskosmos, Anatoly Perminov, after a French-Russian governmental cooperation commission meeting in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.
The new launchers would be deployed from the second quarter of 2009, said an Arianespace statement.
The signing is a follow-up to the European Parliament giving the go-ahead for the deployment of the European Union's Galileo satellite navigation programme, a purely civilian system that will match the US GPS and Russian Glonass systems, which are dual-use civil and military systems.