NEW YORK: Elon Musk’s private space company SpaceX launched one of its Falcon 9 rockets on Monday to deliver Turkmenistan with its first ever satellite.
The launch took place in Florida and took the satellite-based telecommunications system 22,000 miles above Earth where it will now relay television broadcasts and other services to more than 1.2bn people in central Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.
The TurkmenAlem satellite weighs about 45000 kilograms and was constructed by Thales Alenia Space.
It is an important step for the Central Asian nation who currently rents satellite capacity from Russia.
According to the country’s Ministry of Communication, the satellite will last for at least 15 years.
The launch also marks another achievement for what has been a busy six months for Musk’s commercial space company.
After raising $1billion from Google for 8.3 per cent of the business in January, the company has embarked on a number of missions to the International Space Station and a series of failed attempts at trying to land a reusable space rocket.
The company’s latest failure was on 14 April, when an attempt to drop a Falcon 9 onto a spaceport barge ended in the rocket tipping and then exploding in the sea near Cape Canaveral.
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