Rocket Lab

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PHXPhlyer
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Rocket Lab

#1 Post by PHXPhlyer » Fri Nov 04, 2022 10:09 pm

Helicopter misses rocket booster in wild attempt to recapture it after flight

https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/business ... index.html

Rocket Lab, a start-up building small orbital rockets, kicked off another successful mission on Friday — but it failed in its efforts to recapture its rocket booster as it tumbled down toward Earth. The company deployed a helicopter with a hook attachment, but it wasn’t able to catch the booster.

The wild spectacle is all part of the company’s plans to save money by recovering and reusing rocket parts after they vault satellites to space.

The primary mission goal hit its mark without a hitch. The company’s $7.5 million Electron rocket took off from its launch site in southern New Zealand at 1:27 p.m. ET Friday. The spacecraft carried a science research satellite to orbit for the Swedish National Space Agency.

Then, after the rocket’s first-stage booster — the tallest, bottommost portion of the rocket that gives the initial thrust at liftoff — finished firing and detached from the rocket’s second stage, it began plummeting back toward Earth and deployed a parachute to slow its descent. Rocket Lab positioned a modified Sikorsky S-92 helicopter to intercept it mid-descent, aiming to snag the booster by its strings.

The pilot of the helicopter had just about 10 minutes from the time the booster’s parachute deployed to attempt to swoop in for the capture, said Murielle Baker, Rocket Lab’s communications manager, on the launch live stream.

But the rocket never came into view, and Baker confirmed on the live stream that the helicopter pilots said the booster wouldn’t be returning to the factory dry. In a tweet, the company reported that there was a data loss issue during the rocket’s reentry.

“We do have the backup option of an ocean splashdown,” Baker said. “We will bring you updates on that ocean operation in the hours to come.

“If we did that today that would not be a failure for our recovery program. In fact, we’ve performed several of them across our missions to date, and most recently we were able to re-fire a Rutherford engine that had been returned from the ocean,” Baker added.

Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck has noted that it’s preferable to catch the rocket midair to keep it dry.

02 rocket lab launch
Rocket Lab catches, then drops booster in helicopter capture attempt
This event marked the company’s second attempt to use its newly devised helicopter-catch method. After the first attempt, in May, the hook-wielding helicopter did successfully snag the rocket midair only for the pilots to intentionally drop it moments later because of safety concerns.

“Our first helicopter catch only a few months ago proved we can do what we set out to do with Electron, and we’re eager to get the helicopter back out there and advance our rocket reusability even further by bringing back a dry stage for the first time,” Beck said in a statement ahead of Friday’s launch.

He had said after the May attempt that it would still be well worth the time and money to figure it out.

And he noted earlier this year 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 reuse them after launch would save the company a bundle of cash. Compared with 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.

A lot remains unclear about how Rocket Lab will ultimately reuse its rockets.

It took SpaceX several years to figure out how to safely and efficiently recover, refurbish and refly its first-stage rocket boosters. Beck cited the company as a model for how Rocket Lab would proceed.

Rocket Lab catches, then drops booster in helicopter capture attempt

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

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.

“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.

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Re: Rocket Lab

#2 Post by TheGreenAnger » Sun Nov 06, 2022 1:25 pm

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.
A euphemism for a WTF moment, I guess. Peter Beck, the CEO, is a helicopter pilot and fan, so go figure.

Their last effort resulted in the rocket being hooked but later released to drop into the sea (noted as a success)?


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Re: Rocket Lab

#3 Post by PHXPhlyer » Thu Jan 26, 2023 1:48 am

Rocket Lab launches Electron rocket from the US for the first time

https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/25/world/ro ... index.html

Rocket Lab, a prolific launch company that routinely blasts its towering Electron rockets out of New Zealand, conducted its first liftoff from US soil on Tuesday.

The mission, nicknamed “Virginia is for Launch Lovers,” took off from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia’s northern coast at 6 p.m. ET. The launch of the 60-foot (18.3-meter) rocket delivered three small satellites to orbit for the Earth-imaging company HawkEye 360, which uses a network of spacecraft to pinpoint radio frequencies on Earth in support of military and business projects.

Rocket Lab is among the most successful aerospace start-ups of the modern era. Unlike Elon Musk’s even more prolific rocket company, SpaceX, which builds larger rockets capable of hauling tens of thousands of pounds to orbit, Rocket Lab builds lightweight launch vehicles designed solely to lift small satellites — as compact as a loaf of bread or a refrigerator — to space.

Though the company has been headquartered in the United States since its inception, all of its prior launches have taken place at a pad near Ahuriri Point, located on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island.

But Rocket Lab has sought for years to bring some of its launch operations stateside, in part so that it can provide services to the US government and military, which make up a lucrative slice of the global launch business customer base.

The NASA Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island in Virginia’s Accomack County is one of the oldest launch sites in the world. The first rocket flight took off from the site in 1945, before the creation of the space agency. More recently, the facility has been home to Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket, which launches cargo resupply missions to the International Space Station.

Before selecting Wallops as its second launch location, officials at Rocket Lab did evaluate whether to move into one of the United States’ other prime launch locations, including Florida’s Space Coast, the busiest launch port in the nation.

Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck told the press in 2018, when Rocket Lab chose Virginia as its launch destination, that the state was the obvious choice because it allowed the company to rapidly build up its infrastructure.

The company also chose to set up production of a larger rocket it has in its development pipeline, called the Neutron. Rocket Lab is setting up a manufacturing complex in close proximity to the launch pad at Wallops.

“Neutron is a new generation of rocket that will advance the way space is accessed, and Virginia makes perfect sense as a significant site for Neutron’s early development,” Beck said in a February 2022 statement. “Its position on the eastern seaboard is the ideal location to support both Neutron’s expected frequent launch cadence and the rocket’s return-to-Earth capability of landing back at its launch site after lift-off.”

Rocket Lab has made headlines for its attempts to reuse its first-stage rocket boosters, the largest part of the spacecraft that gives the initial burst of thrust at liftoff. Rather than attempting to steer the rocket to a pinpoint landing on the ground, as SpaceX does with its Falcon vehicles, Rocket Lab is aiming to figure out how to snag its boosters mid-air using a hook-wielding helicopter.

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Re: Rocket Lab

#4 Post by TheGreenAnger » Thu Jan 26, 2023 6:12 am

Rocket Lab has had an impressive launch history and while the company is registered in the USA, it has a deep connection with New Zealand (CEO Peter Beck is a New Zealander), and the New Zealand government is a big stakeholder as well, and the company has a purpose built launch facility Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 located close to Ahuriri Point at the southern tip of Māhia Peninsula, on the east coast of New Zealand's North Island.

The success of the outfit shows prescience on part of both the company's directors, and to an extent the New Zealand government in leveraging US capital, US financial acumen and existing US space and vehicle manufacturing and launch know how to fulfill missions in the niche cube sat market in both the Southern and Northern hemispheres.

The success of this multi-national enterprise stands out in stark contrast to the dismal UK space strategy and launch history to date, despite its competence in the satellite manufacturing industry.
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