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<\/p>\nFlight VA268 | Amazon Leo LE-02 | Ariane 6 | Arianespace – YouTube
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Watch On <\/a><\/p>\n Europe’s most powerful rocket will roar into action early Thursday morning (April 30), and you can watch the action live.<\/p>\n An Ariane 6<\/a> heavy lifter topped with 32 Amazon Leo satellites is scheduled to launch from Europe’s Spaceport<\/a> in Kourou, French Guiana on Thursday, during a 49-minute window that opens at 4:08 a.m. EDT (0808 GMT; 5:08 a.m. local time in Kourou).<\/p>\n You can watch it live here at Space.com courtesy of Arianespace, the French company that operates the Ariane 6. You can also watch it directly via Arianespace<\/a>.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n \n An Ariane 6 rocket launches 32 Amazon Leo satellites to orbit from French Guiana on Feb. 12, 2026. (Image credit: ESA\/CNES\/Arianespace-ArianeGroup\/Optique Video du CSG-P. Piron)<\/p>\n Amazon Leo, previously known as Project Kuiper, is Amazon’s answer to SpaceX<\/a>‘s Starlink broadband megaconstellation. It won’t be as big, however; Amazon Leo will eventually consist of about 3,200 satellites, whereas Starlink<\/a> has more than 10,000 spacecraft (and counting).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Those 3,200 satellites will be lofted over the course of more than 80 launches, sent up by a variety of rockets \u2014 the Ariane 6, SpaceX’s Falcon 9<\/a> and United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V<\/a> and Vulcan Centaur.<\/p>\n Just 10 of those missions have lifted off to date. The most recent one occurred on Monday<\/a> (April 27), when an Atlas V carried 29 Amazon Leo satellites to orbit.<\/p>\n Thursday’s mission, which Arianespace calls VA268, will be the seventh-ever flight of the Ariane 6 and the second of its most powerful variant, known as the 64, because it features four strap-on solid rocket boosters.<\/p>\n The first-ever Ariane 64 launch occurred in February<\/a>, when the rocket delivered 32 Amazon Leo satellites to low Earth orbit<\/a>. VA268 will attempt to do the same thing.<\/p>\n “For this mission, the launcher will carry the 32 satellites under its 20-meter-long fairing and deploy them into low Earth orbit following a mission lasting less than 2 hours from liftoff to separation of the last spacecraft,” Arianespace representatives said in a statement last month<\/a>.<\/p>\n There will be many more of these launches to come \u2014 16, in fact. Amazon booked a total of 18 Ariane 6 flights for the constellation buildout.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Flight VA268 | Amazon Leo LE-02 | Ariane 6 | Arianespace – YouTube Watch On Europe’s most powerful…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":403648,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,69,147,392],"class_list":["post-403647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=403647"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403647\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/403648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=403647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=403647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=403647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"a](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/oWM29BHfjZMESxoHb6Cem9.jpg\")
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