"Splashdown of Electron's first stage confirmed! Recovery ops are underway and we'll bring you more soon."
The question now is how much damage the booster sustained trying to reenter without a Falcon 9 style entry burn that gets rid of 70% of the booster's velocity before it slams into the atmosphere. There must have been lots of heat and hopefully vital expensive bits like the engines aren't totally toasted or melted.
Image from Rocketlab video from the booster before it reentered the atmosphere and video link was lost.
Rocketlab's Peter Beck posted this photo taken by a camera on the booster showing its parachute deployed after reentry and before splashdown. Peter says that it's his favorite (or favourite in his case) photo of 2020.
Rocketlab photo of the Electron booster being recovered from the sea where it landed under a parachute.
It looks like it's in reasonably good shape. But the tail end isn't shown and it came in tail-first. I want to see if there's any visible damage down there and particularly whether the engines survived.
YazataJan 15, 2021 09:23 PM (This post was last modified: Jan 15, 2021 09:37 PM by Yazata.)
Rocketlab is up for their first Electron launch of the year. They are aiming for 8:38 PM Saturday local antipodean time, 07:38 UTC (British time more or less, breakfast and rockets!), 2:38 AM EST and 11:38 PM Friday PST (I'll probably watch this evening).
Payload is a prototype of a small German/European communications satellite to be placed into polar orbit. They will be shooting it south towards the Antarctic.
YazataJan 16, 2021 08:51 AM (This post was last modified: Jan 16, 2021 09:01 AM by Yazata.)
Standing down for today in order to assess sensor data. Apparently something didn't look right to somebody during the countdown to launch, so they didn't give a 'Go!' during the launch readiness poll. The live stream didn't start on time, then it was pulled from youtube by Rocketlab and this 'explanation' was tweeted:
"We are standing down from today's mission to review sensor data. Fortunately we have a 10-day window for this mission, so we have plenty of backup opportunities in the days to come. Stay tuned for a new target launch date soon."
"We had an inclinometer showing some strange data. It's not used for flight, but we want to understand it all the same. That's part of the beauty of operating our own launch range, we have the luxury of time to roll back out when we're ready."
An inclinometer is a slope gauge, suggesting that it looked like the launch pad erector hadn't raised the rocket vertical.
Tomorrow's nsf's weekly live stream video show, will have a special guest: Peter Beck, founder and CEO of Rocketlab! Peter will actually be taking questions from the youtube chat.
YazataMar 1, 2021 09:57 PM (This post was last modified: Mar 2, 2021 09:41 AM by Yazata.)
Big Rocketlab news! First Peter Beck actually ate a tiny piece of his hat. (He once said that if Rocketlab ever tried to reuse a rocket, he'd eat his hat. Well...)
And he also said that Rocketlab wasn't going to build bigger rockets. Well... (At least no hats endangered this time.)
They just announced their new neutron rocket. (The existing one is the electron.) This will be a reusable Falcon 9 style medium-lift rocket, though a little smaller and probably less expensive to build and launch than Falcon 9. It's roughly similar in size and concept to that new reusable rocket that Roscosmos announced a while back. Like Falcon 9 it will land on an ocean platform. The real indication that Rocketlab is gunning for the big leagues is news that this new rocket will be rated for human spaceflight! Though any capsule it lofts will have to be somewhat smaller than the Dragon, more like Soyuz size perhaps. The new rocket will be 131 feet high with a 14 foot diameter payload fairing. It will be capable of putting 8 metric tons in low earth orbit, sending 2 metric tons to the Moon or 1.5 metric tons to Mars or Venus. (Peter Beck is personally interested in Venus which remains kind of a mystery while Mars gets all the attention.) This payload capacity is pretty similar to Russia's expendable Soyuz-2 booster.
Peter says that they plan to roll it out in 2024 (before Russia's new reusable rocket in the same size class is expected in 2026). Rocketlab is currently looking for a good place to build a factory to manufacture them. Initially, it will launch from Rocketlab's pad at Wallops. The plant will probably have to be in the US for ITAR reasons, but I'd love to see new Zealand become the fourth country in the world to send astronauts to space (behind Russia, US and China). (Put them on the map as the mouse that roared.)
I love these guys! Rocketlab is like a little SpaceX. They are already going to put a little satellite into Lunar orbit for nasa to map out the Moon's gravitational field. And they are working on a company funded Venus mission to drop a little cubesat sized payload into the Venusian atmosphere. And that's just the little electron rocket. Think of what they could do with the neutron! They plan to market it for deep space scientific probes among other things. Despite being smaller than Falcon 9, it will be capable of launching more than 90% of the satellites anticipated in the next few years. It will be capable of Space Station supply missions.
They are planning an IPO and will be listed on nasdaq. (Ticker symbol RKLB) They say that they currently have a proforma enterprise value of $4.1 billion. This is where they will be getting much of the money to develop neutron. Since founder/CEO Peter Beck will be retaining a nice chunk of stock for himself (they say that current owners [Beck and the investers who bankrolled him] will retain some 80% of the stock) it will make him a billionaire in the process. This is how it's done folks, start a company, turn it into a success, then take it public and get rich. That's how Elon did it. It's the Silicon Valley Way.
Of course being listed means that the SEC and other federal regulators will be snooping into everything the company does and going after you if you speak freely... as Elon already found out at Tesla. That's probably why there seem to be no plans to take SpaceX public. Elon wants a freer hand as he pursues Starship and his Mars dreams, even if that isn't the best strategy for shareholders. Gwynne has said that they do plan to eventually spin off Starlink into a separate publicly traded company though. SpaceX will probably retain ownership of a nice percentage of Starlink stock and will ride it up, both metaphorically and literally, as it becomes one of the world's largest telecommunications companies.
YazataMay 15, 2021 07:45 PM (This post was last modified: May 15, 2021 07:51 PM by Yazata.)
Rocketlab tried to launch one of their Electron rockets from Mahia yesterday, but all didn't go well. First stage fiew well, stage separation took place, but the second stage ignition suffered an "anomaly". Video seems to show the engine igniting and the stage immediately starting to tumble. Speculation (all it is at this point) is that engine thrust vector control failed and the engine ignited while gimballed over hard to one side.
One positive is that the first stage booster reentered, descended under a parachute and was recovered from the sea. It isn't immediately known what condition the booster was in.
Rocketlab is returning to flight after the above mishap.
Tonight's launch from Mahia will carry a single payload called Monolith for the US Space Force. There isn't much information on Monolith, but Rocketlab's website says this:
"Rocket lab will carry the Monolith satellite for the USSF's Space Test Program (STP) to space to explore and demonstrate the use of a deployable sensor, where the sensor's mass is a substantial fraction of the total mass of the spacecraft, changing the spacecraft's dynamic properties and testing ability to maintain spacecraft attitude control. Analysis from the use of a deployable sensor aims to enable the use of smaller satellite buses when building future deployable sensors..."
Launch will be 0600 UTC Thursday, which translates to 11:00 pm PDT Wednesday (tonight) and 2:00 am EDT Thursday morning. I'm not sure what time that will be in new zealand, probably Thursday afternoon.
There should be a livestream here starting about 20 minutes before launch
Nov 20, 2020 03:45 AM
(This post was last modified: Nov 20, 2020 04:11 AM by Yazata.)
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