The Vega rocket lifted off Dec. 3 from Kourou, French Guiana, at 1:04 a.m. local time, placing the spacecraft into an elliptical parking orbit. The spacecraft will later maneuver to the Earth-sun L-1 Lagrange point to carry out its mission to demonstrate technologies that could be used by future spacecraft to detect gravitational waves (ESA photo)

Arianespace has finalized the payload for a Vega launch later this year that will carry more than 40 small satellites, the first in what the company hopes to be a series of dedicated rideshare missions.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...