Vega failures (2019 and 2020)
Two failures of the small European launcher within sixteen months, one of design and one of integration, which illustrate the difference between a vehicle's reliability and the quality of a launch campaign.
A launch underwriter prices the vehicle's reliability first, measured by its flight record. Yet a failure can come from two very different sources: a design flaw, which threatens every unit until it is fixed, or an integration error specific to one flight, which points instead to a quality-control problem. After each failure, return to flight follows an inquiry board, and the premium of the following flights bears the mark of the cause it found. Two failures close together with different causes weigh more than a single one, because they suggest that the stated reliability overstated the reality of the industrial process.
On July 11, 2019, flight VV15 lost the Emirati Falcon Eye 1 satellite after a structural failure of the second stage; on November 17, 2020, flight VV17 lost the SEOSat-Ingenio and Taranis satellites because control cables on the upper stage had been reversed during integration.
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