Last month, Rafael Harillo and Marc Zaballa visited the ESA Headquarters in Paris to explore possibilities of launching the Barcelona Moon Team mission on a VEGA launcher.

VEGA is the new European small launcher that will start operations during this early 2012 from Courou, in the French Guyana. It is being developed for Arianespace jointly by the Italian Space Agency and the European Space Agency. Vega is a single-body launcher (no strap-on boosters) with three solid rocket stages, the P80 first stage, the Zefiro 23 second stage, the Zefiro 9 third stage, and a liquid rocket upper module called AVUM.

VEGA is designed to launch small payloads to complement the heavy Ariane 5 and medium Soyuz Rocket systems: its reference mission is a polar orbit bringing a spacecraft of 1,500 kilograms to an altitude of 700 kilometers. The preferred option for the team’s mission would be an elliptical orbit with the highest possible apogee and a not too low perigee that would allow some days of operations in LEO without problems with the atmosphere drag. This option is also possible with the VEGA LV.

Before starting commercial operations VEGA has a total of five VERTA missions (Vega Research and Technology Accompaniment – Programme), with two launches a year planned for the new programme, and construction of infrastructure including mission control and communications networks is currently underway.

A VERTA flight would be a good opportunity for the team, even though all the VERTA flights are preliminary assigned including launches for the new ESA’s IXV (Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle) to test and qualify new critical technologies for future re-entry vehicles. The team will continue exploring this possibility that would make possible a full European mission to the Moon.

The launch is one of the critical points on the team’s plan and intensive efforts are being made to have a final selected launcher in the next weeks. The phase A studies currently under process consider other two possibilities as an alternative to this option.