TET-1 was one of five small satellites launched July 22 on a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The others were two Russian Earth-monitoring satellites, Canopus-B and MKA-PN1; the Belarusian BKA spacecraft; and exactView-1, a Canadian maritime-monitoring spacecraft built by U.K.-based Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. (SSTL).

A spinoff from the University of Surrey's space technology school, SSTL started out in the mid-1980s catering to nations in the market for small research satellites. Today SSTL is a booming business that is wholly owned by Astrium, and is building the payloads for Europe's 22 operational Galileo satellites to be lofted starting in 2013 (see p. 42).