In 2014, the maiden flight of the

Angara A5 The Angara rocket family (Russian: Ангара) is a family of launch vehicles being developed by the Moscow-based Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center. The launch vehicles are to put between and into low Earth orbit and ar ...

Antares 120 Development The NASA COTS award was for and Orbital Sciences expected to invest an additional $150 million, split between $130 million for the booster and $20 million for the spacecraft. A Commercial Resupply Service contract of $1.9 bi ...

and Antares 130 took place. A total of 92 orbital launches were attempted in 2014, of which 88 were successful, two were partially successful and two were failures. The year also saw seven EVAs by ISS astronauts. The majority of the year's orbital launches were conducted by

Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-eigh ...

, the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., federal district, five ma ...

and China, with 34, 23 and 16 launches respectively.

Overview

Ariane 5 Ariane 5 is a European heavy-lift space launch vehicle developed and operated by Arianespace for the European Space Agency (ESA). It is launched from the Centre Spatial Guyanais (CSG) in French Guiana. It has been used to deliver payloads in ...

ES launched the ''

Georges Lemaître Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître ( ; ; 17 July 1894 – 20 June 1966) was a Belgian Catholic priest, theoretical physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Louvain. He was the first to th ...

Automated Transfer Vehicle The Automated Transfer Vehicle, originally Ariane Transfer Vehicle or ATV, was an expendable automated cargo spacecraft, cargo spacecraft developed by the European Space Agency (ESA), used for space cargo transport in 2008–2015. The ATV desi ...

, the last one of the series, which also marked 60 successfully completed Ariane 5 launches in a row. On 22 August 2014,

Arianespace Arianespace SA is a French company founded in 1980 as the world's first commercial launch service provider. It undertakes the operation and marketing of the Ariane programme. The company offers a number of different launch vehicles: the heavy- ...

launched the first two Full Operational Capability Galileo satellites for the European

satellite navigation A satellite navigation or satnav system is a system that uses satellites to provide autonomous geo-spatial positioning. It allows satellite navigation devices to determine their location ( longitude, latitude, and altitude/ elevation) to hi ...

system. A number of significant events in planetary exploration occurred in 2014, including the entry of the

Rosetta Rosetta or Rashid (; ar, رشيد ' ; french: Rosette ; cop, ϯⲣⲁϣⲓⲧ ''ti-Rashit'', Ancient Greek: Βολβιτίνη ''Bolbitinē'') is a port city of the Nile Delta, east of Alexandria, in Egypt's Beheira governorate. The ...

spacecraft into orbit around the

comet A comet is an icy, small Solar System body that, when passing close to the Sun, warms and begins to release gases, a process that is called outgassing. This produces a visible atmosphere or Coma (cometary), coma, and sometimes also a Comet ta ...

67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (abbreviated as 67P or 67P/C–G) is a Jupiter-family comet, originally from the Kuiper belt, with a current orbital period of 6.45 years, a rotation period of approximately 12.4 hours and a maximum velocity of . Ch ...

in August 2014 and the deployment of the Philae lander to its surface in November, which marked the first orbit of and landing on a comet, respectively, and featured prominently in social media. Another notable occurrence was the entry of India's

Mars Orbiter Mission The Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), also called ''Mangalyaan'', was a space probe orbiting Mars since 24 September 2014. It was launched on 5 November 2013 by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). It was India's first interplanetary missio ...

into Martian orbit in September, making

India India, officially the Republic of India ( Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the ...

the first Asian nation to reach

Mars Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun and the second-smallest planet in the Solar System, only being larger than Mercury. In the English language, Mars is named for the Roman god of war. Mars is a terrestrial planet with a thin atmos ...

. On 5 December 2014, a

United Launch Alliance United Launch Alliance (ULA), legally United Launch Alliance, LLC, is an American spacecraft launch service provider that manufactures and operates a number of rocket vehicles that are capable of launching spacecraft into orbits around Earth, ...

Delta IV Heavy The Delta IV Heavy (Delta 9250H) is an expendable heavy-lift launch vehicle, the largest type of the Delta IV family. It is the world's third highest-capacity launch vehicle in operation, behind NASA's Space Launch System and SpaceX's Falcon He ...

launched the first

Orion spacecraft Orion (officially Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle or Orion MPCV) is a partially reusable crewed spacecraft used in NASA's Artemis program. The spacecraft consists of a Crew Module (CM) space capsule designed by Lockheed Martin and the Europ ...

test mission for NASA, Exploration Flight Test 1.

Orbital launches

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