Rocket Lab Oopsy

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PHXPhlyer
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Rocket Lab Oopsy

#1 Post by PHXPhlyer » Tue May 03, 2022 1:18 am

Rocket Lab catches, then drops booster in helicopter capture attempt

https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/02/tech/roc ... index.html

https://www.rocketlabusa.com/

Rocket Lab, which aims to launch satellites into space quickly and cheaply, said it just used a helicopter to catch part of a rocket in mid-air. But the rocket was dropped into the ocean shortly after, ending up having to be fished out of the water.

This mission, labeled “There and Back Again,” took off at 6:50 pm ET.

Company communications advisor, Murielle Baker, after initially declaring success, came onto the companies webcast to acknowledge the pilot of the helicopter dropped the rocket “at his discretion” after experiencing a “different load characteristic” than he had during test runs of the catch.

Still, Baker called the initial catch “a monumental step forward.”

“We witnessed a spectacular catch,” she said.

The webcast showed the helicopter snag the rocket’s parachute about 15 minutes after launch, and a cheer arose from mission control, but moments later a disappointed sigh could be heard and the feed cut out.


From Rocket Lab/Youtube
“They did release it after hook up as they were not happy with the way it was flying,” Peter Beck, CEO of Rocket Lab, added on Twitter.

“It demands extreme precision. Several critical milestones need to align perfectly to ensure a successful capture,” Baker had said earlier in the webcast.

The Electron rocket, Rocket Lab’s small rocket which had launched nearly two dozen successful missions prior to Monday’s launch, did successfully complete its primary objective: It deployed 34 satellite payloads for a number of commercial operators, bringing the total number of Electron-launched satellites in space to 146.

After separating from the first-stage booster, the Electron’s second-stage continued to orbit to fulfill the satellite deployment while the booster fell back to Earth at nearly 5,150 miles per hour. Once near enough to the Earth’s surface, the booster deployed parachutes to slow its descent. A helicopter waited to snag the booster’s parachute with a hook.

Catching the rocket booster mid-air is a big part of Rocket Lab’s eventual goal of reusable rockets.

Other companies have used reusable rockets as a way to make the space business more cost effective. In 2015, Blue Origin was the first company to land a reusable rocket on a landing pad. The company said that the future of space tourism and people living on other planets would depend on reusable transport after sending founder Jeff Bezos to space. Elon Musk’s SpaceX uses reusable boosters in its Falcon 9 rockets.

Rocket Lab, however, says it has other reasons for focusing on reusability than just profit. “Our biggest problem is building rockets fast enough to support all our customers,” Beck told CNN Business in 2019. Rocket Lab wants to launch satellite payloads more frequently — 50 times or more a year. That kind of volume requires rocket reuse.

NASA has retrieved spent rocket boosters from the Atlantic Ocean after a Space Shuttle launch. Rocket Lab plans to pursue the helicopter technique to recover its boosters. The company has said Electron is not large enough to carry the fuel supply needed for an upright landing, and a saltwater ocean landing can cause corrosion and physical damage.

A customized Sikorsky S-92 helicopter, a large twin-engine chopper usually used for search and rescue missions and offshore oil and gas transportation, was used in Monday’s grab. After the successful capture of the booster, the company planned to fly the machinery to an at-sea recovery vessel before moving to the company’s production complex for assessment. But, ultimately it was jettisoned into the ocean and recovered form there. Ocean landings aren’t optimal — the sea water can cause corrosion, which is why Rocket Lab hopes to snag the booster before it meets the water.

The launch was postponed several times due to weather conditions. “For our first mid-air helicopter capture, we want ideal weather conditions so we can focus on the catch,” Rocket Lab tweeted on Monday. “Just like our weather tolerances for launch have increased over time, so will our tolerance for weather in the recovery zone. For this first one though, we want to eliminate weather as a consideration so we can focus solely on the catch and supporting operations.”

The California-based company also released a video showing a successful practice run in the days leading up to launch, with a helicopter capturing a dummy booster as it fell to the ground.

Rocket Lab has previously fished boosters from the ocean in three of Electron’s 25 earlier missions. This was the first attempt at a mid-air catch.

This isn’t the first time humans have attempted to catch an object falling from space with aircraft. During the 1960s, the United States would use planes equipped with long hooks to grab film canisters containing film from spy satellites out of the sky. The Cold War-era technique was similar to the one attempted by Rocket Lab: the film canister fell to Earth from outer space and used parachutes to slow its descent so that planes could nab the intel. NASA also attempted in 2004 a mid-air grab of a capsule carrying samples of particles that had streamed off the sun, but the helicopter recovery attempt failed when the capsule’s parachutes failed to release, causing it to crash into the Utah desert.

Since its start in 2006, Rocket Lab has deployed satellites to orbit for customers including NASA, the US Space Force, the National Reconnaissance Office and Canon.

PP

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Re: Rocket Lab Oopsy

#2 Post by PHXPhlyer » Tue May 03, 2022 7:38 pm

Rocket Lab will try helicopter catch again, but it may take months

https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/03/tech/roc ... index.html

Rocket Lab this week made an ostentatious attempt to catch a rocket as it fell from space using a hook-wielding helicopter that snagged the rocket mid-air only for the pilots to intentionally drop it moments later because of safety concerns. The display is all part of the company’s plan to eventually re-use its rocket boosters, saving time and money. But it may be months before the company will make another attempt.

Despite saying the fix needed to make the rocket capture work is “trivial,” Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck told reporters at a post-flight briefing that the company will need to go back to the testing phase. The plan is to build a better replica of the rocket booster to use in simulations so that the helicopter pilots won’t be caught off guard by the physics involved with catching the real thing, as they were after Monday night’s attempt.

Beck also said the company is shifting its focus to an upcoming mission to launch a tiny satellite to the moon. Only after that mission is complete, and additional tests are carried out, will the company attempt the helicopter capture maneuver again.

Still, Beck said Rocket Lab gathered plenty of valuable information from Monday’s attempt, declaring a “massive milestone” had been reached on the company’s journey to making its $7.5 million rocket reusable.

The capture happened largely without issue, at least at first. After the first-stage rocket booster — the large, bottom portion of the rocket that gives the initial thrust at liftoff — put a group of satellites in space, it made a controlled plunge back toward the ground using a set of small thrusters to keep it oriented as it sliced back into Earth’s atmosphere.


Rocket Lab catches, then drops booster in helicopter capture attempt
“This is really important because if you don’t have the stage orientated perfectly with the heat shield down, then basically as the reentry process begins, it’s like a big ball of plasma [and] it’ll basically shred the stage,” Beck said, noting that before reentry the rocket is traveling at about seven times the speed of sound, or more than 5,300 miles per hour (8,600 kilometers per hour).

When the rocket made it to a low enough altitude, it slowed to just two times the speed of sound, and deployed a small parachute, called a “drogue chute,” to further slow its descent.

Meanwhile, the helicopter — a massive twin-engine Sikorsky S-92 helicopter of the type typically used for search and rescue missions — waited nearby, using computers to keep precise tabs on the rocket booster’s whereabouts.

When a larger parachute deployed, Beck said the rocket slowed to just 22 miles per hour, or 10 meters per second, allowing the helicopter pilots to match its speed. Then the helicopter made its approach, using a 150-foot line of rope from its belly with a hook at the bottom to intercept rocket. On Monday, that worked almost flawlessly.

The only problem was that, for the helicopter pilot, the capture created an uncomfortable “load” on the helicopter beyond what they had experienced during testing. So they dropped the rocket into the ocean, something the company hoped to avoid because sea water is corrosive and damaging to electronic components.

“We didn’t want to bite off more than we could chew,” Beck told reporters after the flight. “The pilots were well briefed: If anything was different from the simulation that they felt that they weren’t happy with, then the most important thing is everybody’s safety. … And that’s exactly what they executed. So they got a great catch. And and they just didn’t like the way the the load was feeling.”

In the post-flight briefing, Beck emphasized the difficulty of executing the maneuver.

In this image supplied by Rocket Lab, the Electron rocket blasts off for its "There And Back Again" mission from their launch pad on the Mahia Peninsula, New Zealand, Tuesday, May 3 local time. The California-based company regularly launches 18-meter (59-foot) rockets from the remote Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand to deliver satellites into space. (Rocket Lab via AP)

“It’s kind of a three dimensional problem, if you will,” he said. “There’s a tremendous number of things that have to go perfectly, and it really is an incredible ballet of logistics and moving pieces.”

The company waited for nearly perfect weather and visibility conditions for Monday’s attempt, and Beck said it doesn’t currently have plans to attempt such a capture at night. So, even when and if Rocket Lab does master this rocket recovery technique, it’s possible the company won’t be able to use it on every mission.

Regardless, Beck said it’s still well worth the time and money to figure it out.

He noted that the first-stage rocket booster makes up about 80% of the cost of a brand new rocket, so figuring out how to safely capture and re-use them after launch will save the company a bundle of cash. And compared to the millions of dollars it takes to manufacture a new rocket, renting the helicopter to attempt recovery only costs about $4,000 or $5,000 per hour, Beck noted.

Beck said he hasn’t ruled out attempting to re-use the rocket booster from Monday’s mission. It only took a brief dunk in the ocean before it was recovered by a ship, and it made a very gentle landing.

A lot remains unclear about how Rocket Lab will ultimately reuse its rockets. It took SpaceX, for example, several years to figure out how to safely and efficiently recover, refurbish and re-fly its first-stage rocket boosters. And Beck cited the company as a model for how Rocket Lab will proceed.

“It’s an iterative process,” he said, sounding cautiously optimistic before pivoting, almost immediately, to signal that he believes Rocket Lab can correct what went wrong on Monday quite easily.

“Now that we have the data,” he said, “we can go back and reconstruct it and, like I said, this will be fixed very quickly.”

PP

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