Azerbaijan has joined the space club - President Aliyev
BAKU. Feb 8 (Interfax) - Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has congratulated the people of Azerbaijan on the successful launch of the country's first telecommunication satellite Azerspace-1.
"This is a big victory, a great achievement of the Azeri people. We have become members of the space club," he said in a televised message to the nation after the launch on Friday.
He congratulated the nation on "the historic event" and stressed that February 8, 2013 would go down into the history of Azerbaijan.
Aliyev followed the space launch from the control center in Baku.
On Thursday night Azerbaijan launched its first Azerspace-1 communication satellite, Interfax was told at the Ministry of Communications and Information Technologies.
"The satellite launch was incident-free and the satellite has reached its final orbit," the ministry said.
The launch was made from Kourou space center in French Guiana.
Ministry experts believe that the national satellite will permit establishing high quality and reliable communications and TV broadcasting and increasing the number of channels. If Azerspace-1 covers the territory of Europe, Azerbaijan will be able to act as a transit nation in transmitting European and Asian channels. Azerbaijan intends to use 15-20% of the satellite's capacity and offer the rest to the international market.
