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December 11th 2002, late evening. The satellite dish has been locked onto the Hotbirds at 13E, and I settle down with a can of beer to watch the flight of Ariane V157. As the link from Kourou dropped out of the test card and into the live programming, I started rolling the video tape. Little was I to guess that I was about to witness the destruction of the Hotbird 7 and Stentor satellites.
The pictures are grabbed off that tape, and are in correct time order on the web pages. I have added a few of my own comments as events unfolded.
Live from Kourou Space Centre French Guiana. This is the second attempt to launch Ariane 5 flight V157. Two weeks earlier, a software glitch had aborted the launch at about T -5 seconds, and the motors didnt fire. Rather an anticlimax, but the problems had been sorted out by the second launch attempt:
The flight was carrying 2 satellites, Hotbird 7 and the experimental Stentor:
13 minutes 23 seconds from launch, and all is looking good. The green boxes on the left hand side of the picture show all systems are green, and the launch is go at the moment. The top boxes refer to the "Launch Table" - the pad the rocket sits on. Hotbird and Stentor both have green status - the satellite engineers can throw a red at any time if their craft performance gets outside nominal for any reason. The bottom box shows there are no weather problems.
The yellow arms halfway down the rocket are the cryogenic arms - the liquid oxygen tanks are topped up right until lift off - the arms retract at about 5 seconds before lift off:
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