Avio slips Vega C launch toward Christmas as satellites arrive late

Avio Chief Executive Officer Giulio Ranzo said on Nov. 11, 2026, during Avio’s third-quarter earnings call, that late deliveries of customer satellites have pushed the third Vega C launch of 2026 toward Christmas Day, weeks later than planned.

Speaking on Avio’s third-quarter earnings call, Ranzo said the company was waiting for the last few customer spacecraft and described the mission as coming close to Christmas Day. The flight will carry six different spacecraft for Italy’s IRIDE Earth observation constellation, the program whose spacecraft are arriving late. “It’s an interesting mission, six different satellites. They’re coming in a little bit late, so we are coming very close to Christmas Day,” he said.

The Thales Alenia Space-built satellites arrived in French Guiana on Nov. 9, 2026, by air and moved from Félix Éboué Airport to the S3B payload preparation building at the Guiana Space Centre on Nov. 10, 2026. CNES published photographs of the shipment, and Avio was still waiting for the final customer spacecraft as of the Nov. 11 earnings call.

He also said more than three Vega C flights could have happened in 2026 had that satellite arrived on time. European Spaceflight puts the slip at roughly two to three weeks against the earlier plan. Ranzo’s September 10 remarks indicate customer delivery timing repeatedly shaped Avio’s 2026 Vega C plan before the November slip.

On the Nov. 11 call, Ranzo said Avio is working toward four launches per year and then five, provided customer spacecraft arrive on schedule. In May 2026, he suggested up to five Vega C launches in 2027, one launch below the medium-term goal of six flights annually, the same cadence Avio described as its target. In November, he tempered that outlook toward a gradual rise to four and then five launches annually, possibly four flights in 2027, if customers maintain their deadlines.

At an industry summit in Paris, satnews.com reported, Ranzo said Avio is scaling manufacturing and assembly operations for a near-term rate of six Vega C flights annually, with an ultimate capacity of nine flights per year. The November guidance likewise makes that growth dependent on customer punctuality, the same issue behind the Christmas slip.

Tech Times reports that Vega C’s second flight, in December 2022, failed when erosion of a carbon-carbon throat insert from a Ukrainian supplier caused a Zefiro-40 second-stage pressure drop, destroying two Airbus Pléiades Neo satellites. A June 2023 static-fire test failure extended the grounding to nearly two years, and Vega C returned to flight on Dec. 5, 2024, with Sentinel-1C aboard.

Four more successes followed: Biomass in April 2025, CO3D and MicroCarb in July 2025, KOMPSAT-7 in December 2025, and SMILE in May 2026. That makes six successes in seven attempts since the 2022 debut. SMILE was the first launch with Avio operating as full launch service operator, and Vega C had seven attempts and one failure going into the September 2026 flight.

The flight deployed ESA’s FLEX satellite and the European Commission’s Sentinel-3C satellite, one of two Vega C launches flown in 2026. satnews.com dates that liftoff to Sept. 14, 2026, at 9:21 p.m. Eastern Time at Kourou’s Guiana Space Centre on Vega-C VV30, an instantaneous launch window. Tech Times places it on September 14. European Spaceflight dates the flight to Sept. 15.

Before the slip, Tech Times reported, Avio’s manifest included three additional Vega C flights before the end of 2026: IRIDE Mission 2, Space Belt, and IRIDE Mission 1. Avio describes the delayed mission as the third Vega C launch of 2026, carrying six IRIDE satellites.

SpaceX rideshare services undercut European launch pricing for small-to-medium payloads, Tech Times reported, in competition around Vega C’s September flight carrying FLEX and Sentinel-3C. The slip lengthens the wait for Italy’s IRIDE constellation program, whose six satellites are aboard the delayed flight.