Orbital Sciences (OSC) air-launched its fifteenth Pegasus booster over the Atlantic Ocean on 21 April, placing Spain's first science satellite, the MiniSat, into low-Earth orbit.
It was only the tenth fully successful Pegasus mission. Since 1990, there have been six successful and two partially successful launches of the standard Pegasus and four successful and two failed flights of the XL, plus a flight in which the payloads failed to separate.
The third stage of the XL, deployed from the OSC Lockheed L-1011, which had taken off from Gando AB, Canary Islands, carried a secondary payload for the US Celestis company.
The Celestis payload consisted of 24 lipstick-sized containers holding 7g of ashes of deceased persons, including Gene Roddenberry, the creator of space-fiction series Star Trek. A similar launch on an OSC Taurus booster is planned for September.
Source: Flight International