While the continent prepares for the maiden launch of Ariane 6, a small company from the Netherlands is getting ready to perform what could be Europe’s first rocket launch of 2024.
T-Minus Engineering is preparing to launch a pair of its DART rockets from the Esrange Space Centre in Sweden. The two rockets will be carrying payloads for the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology (KTH).
DART is a single-stage suborbital solid fuel rocket that stands at around 3.5 metres tall. It features a booster with a diameter of 118 millimetres and a dart-shaped payload compartment with a diameter of 35 millimetres. It is capable of carrying 0.5 kilogram payloads to an altitude of up to 120 kilometres.
The KTH payloads that will be aboard the two flights are a wave propagation experiment and a Langmuir probe, both of which are used to determine the electron density in the highest layers of the atmosphere. If successful, the easily deployable DART rocket equipped with this suite of sensors could prove to be a valuable add-on to other atmospheric physics missions, enabling teams to access the background conditions of the atmosphere before the launch of an experiment.
The T-Minus flights are slated to be launched from Launch Complex 3 (LC-3) next week. LC-3 was inaugurated in January 2023 as the first orbital launch facility on the European mainland. While no launch provider has yet expressed formal interest in utilizing LC-3 to launch payloads into orbit, it is expected to host the first hop tests of the ESA Themis reusable booster demonstrator, which is being developed by ArianeGroup.
As ArianeGroup prepares Themis for its initial hop tests, LC-3 has remained unused since its inauguration. It is, as a result, no surprise that the Swedish Space Corporation, a government-owned company that manages the launch site, is opening it up to its core business. Despite its orbital launch complex being brand new, Esrange has been hosting the launch of suborbital rockets and weather balloons since the 1970s.
T-Minus will utilize the brand-new LC-3 launch vehicle integration building to prepare the two rockets for launch. It will also erect its mobile launch platform atop Pad 3A, which will host both flights. While T-Minus has launched DART many times before, it is the first time the company will be doing so in arctic conditions. As a result, it has had to make a number of modifications to both its equipment and processes, like the installation of heaters.
Although the two T-Minus DART flights may well be the first European launches of 2024, a pair of DLR MORABA missions are also in the race. The two DLR flights are also expected to be launched from Esrange.
