Europe's new Vega rocket has completed a flawless first flight.

Controllers at the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana ignited the rocket at 07:00 local time (10:00 GMT), and it completed its mission 70 minutes later.

The 30m-tall vehicle has been designed to put small scientific and government satellites in orbit.

For its first outing, Vega carried nine payloads into space, including a physics experiment to test Einstein's theory of general relativity.

"A new member of the launcher family has been born," said Jean-Jacques Dordain, the European Space Agency's (Esa) director general.

Member states of Esa, together with their industries, are investing more than a billion euros in the introduction of Vega.

The vehicle is intended to guarantee access to space for an increasingly important class of satellite weighing less than 2.5 tonnes.

At the moment, these smaller spacecraft, which include many Earth observation satellites, tend to ride decommissioned Russian nuclear missiles to get into orbit.

European operators can sometimes wait many months to get a launch slot on these converted ICBMs, however.