OREANDA-NEWS. May 14, 2013. Estonia's first satellite, ESTCube-1, was rocketed off to orbit the Earth.

Estonia has thus become the 41st nation to have a manmade object in space, beating out Finland and the other Baltic countries, all of which are due to launch their first satellites in the coming years.

The nanosatellite reached orbit at around 07:06 Estonian time. Launched from the Guiana Space Center, ESTCube-1 was carried by the launch vehicle Vega and was accompanied by two other satellites, Europe's Proba V and Vietnam's VNREDSat 1A.