Countdown stopped due to high altitude winds.

Oh no! Hopefully it'll go up tomorrow as the forescast seems reasonable: http://www.weatheronline.co.uk/weath...ND=FG&TOFD=tag

Oh FFS, is this thing ever going to get launched?

The launch window is a whole hour today so all is not lost yet.

3rd time lucky

This is the third time, so obviously not

Edit @ 23:50 Now green so maybe it IS third time lucky LOL.

still watching atm. why stopped at 7:00 is that minutes or hours?

7 minutes timbionline

Its stopped as the high altitude winds are unfavourable atm.

Still 30mins+ window open, glass 1/2 full

You'd think at 8,000 miles an hour a few cross winds at high altitude @ 40-50mph wouldn't be a problem.

Green

Countdown restarted - now GREEN ! Winds have died down.

Google Translate:
"Last Update: Le Gall, Arianespace CEO wants to manifest themselves already at 19.45 clock."
Doesn't moke much sense, but one interpretation is the CEO wants the crew ready for a "go no go" by 45mins past the hour (local time).
They are up & going.............again

Could be a jetstream doing a few hundred miles an hour!

Look what happened to poor old Challenger when she was hit by severe low altitude cross winds

Woohoo! Perfect lift off!

And clear enough for us to see the booster flameouts

i quite enjoyed that, it was the first launch i have watched

I remember one of those Ariene 5's blowing up shortly after launch years ago. Hopefully Astra will soon deploy correctly & we could then be in for some nice FTA gifts for Christmas

mid september in service at 28.2 e

That was the Cluster mission flight V501. You can find it on Youtube.. They also lost V157 with Hotbird 7 & Stentor on board,in Dec 2002 but its all been good since then

The film insert says Astra 1N should be in service at 28E in mid September, although I reckon thats a bit optimistic

Astra 1N has safely separated from the rocket composite

In the later film insert they estimated 6 days for initiation of the satelitte and one month for testing which would bring us to around mid-September.

Great launch of Astra 1N last night, at least we can all be happy that she's finally up and away now after what was a fair bit of a wait!!!!

Some interesting facts from last night. 1N will use half of its fuel getting from its current GTO to GSO.

The danger from high altitude winds is that launch debris can be blown back on to populated areas; nothing to do with impacts on the vehicle which is supersonic shortly after liftoff.

I saw that on one of the videos too, quite amazing.

What I want to know, and Analoguesat can probably tell us, is how long is it before 1N reaches it's GSO from GTO? I presume it's something like 5hrs (from snippits of info on Wikipedia)?

They said four orbits with burns at each apogee to circularise the GTO into GSO. So how long will each GTO orbit be? 24 hours? And what GSO orbital position will it start off in?

Also there did not seem to be any change in launcher characteristics for the change in 1N location and it seems to be up to the customer to move his satellite into the required orbital position, wherever that may be.