As AEROSPACE goes to press, an Arianespace Ariane 5 rocket is scheduled to launch from Kourou in French Guiana at the end of July with the Northrop Grumman Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV)-2. It will dock with its customer Intelsat's 1002 satellite early next year to extend its life. For decades after the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in 1957, satellites were untouchable once the rocket ascended from the launch pad. Racing around the planet at more than 17,500mph, they worked until they malfunctioned, or the Earth's gravity pulled them down to a fiery end. In 1984 this fateful solitude ended when NASA's space shuttle Discovery brought the first telecommunication satellites back from orbit. The shuttle also serviced the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) five times but, for the more than 2,600 satellites the Union of Concerned Scientists says were flying in space up to 1 April this year, only software changes could be beamed to these spacecraft; nothing else could be done to maintain them.
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