WASHINGTON — A Rocket Lab Electron rocket placed seven smallsats for 3 customers into orbit July 17 on a launch that also brought the corporate a step closer to reusing the rocket’s booster.
The Electron lifted off from the corporate’s Launch Complex 1 on Recent Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula at 9:27 p.m. Eastern. The launch was scheduled for July 14 but postponed as the corporate made final preparations to each launch the rocket and recuperate the booster.
After an initial burn of the rocket’s kick stage, it deployed 4 NASA Starling 6U cubesats and two Spire 3U cubesats right into a 575-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit. After two more burns, the kick stage deployed the ultimate payload, Telesat’s LEO 3 satellite, right into a 1,000-kilometer orbit an hour and 45 minutes after liftoff.
The 4 Starling satellites will test the power of spacecraft to operate autonomously as a swarm, flying in formation and maneuvering without commands from the bottom. The 2 Spire satellites will join the corporate’s constellation of greater than 100 spacecraft, carrying radio occultation payloads to gather weather data.
LEO 3, the biggest spacecraft on the launch, was built by the University of Toronto’s Space Flight Laboratory for Telesat. It should allow the Canadian satellite operator to proceed tests for its future Lightspeed constellation it had been performing with one other prototype satellite that’s nearing the top of its life.
The “Baby Come Back” mission also offered Rocket Lab one other opportunity to check its efforts to recuperate and reuse the rocket’s first stage. The corporate made several modifications to the rocket and its recovery technique because it switched from earlier plans to capture the falling boosters in mid-air to allowing them to splash down within the ocean. The corporate’s webcast showed the booster retrieved by a ship shortly before deployment of the ultimate satellite.
“With this mission we’ve made big strides toward reusability with Electron and we at the moment are closer than ever to relaunching a booster for the primary time,” Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said in a press release. The corporate added that the recovered booster was in “great condition.”
Beck, in an interview last week, declined to offer a timeline for with the ability to reuse a booster beyond stating that the corporate will refly a Rutherford engine on an Electron launch later this 12 months. Through the company’s launch webcast, Wayne McIntosh, team lead for Electron reusability at Rocket Lab, suggested several more flight tests were planned before the corporate would consider reuse.
“We’re introducing minor changes for flight 39. Forty-one can have a number of more. Forty-five might be our ‘golden child,’ which goes to have all our sealing changes, and that is going to enable us to disposition the vehicle accurately for reuse,” he said. This launch was the 39th flight of an Electron.
Attracting defectors
The launch was the seventh this 12 months for Rocket Lab, which incorporates six orbital launches and a launch last month of its suborbital variant, Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Test Electron (HASTE), from Virginia.
Beck said within the interview that the corporate was maintaining earlier projections of as much as 15 Electron launches this 12 months, which incorporates orbital missions and HASTE flights. The massive challenge for the corporate’s flight rate, he said, has been customer readiness.
“We might have liked to see more launches by now,” he said. “It’s fair to say we have now a really busy season coming up here as customers push to right slightly bit.”
Rocket Lab can also be seeing the consequences of other changes available in the market, akin to the bankruptcy of Virgin Orbit. NorthStar Earth and Space, which had planned to launch its first space situational awareness satellites this summer with Virgin Orbit, signed a contract with Rocket Lab June 22 to launch its first 4 satellites this fall on an Electron.
Beck said Rocket Lab has seen interest from customers who had previously planned to launch with other providers. The NASA Starling satellites, for instance, were originally manifested to launch on Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket.
“We’ve seen defections from all the aspirational launch providers,” he said, more this 12 months than in prior years. That stems from delays by those corporations in addition to concerns about customers about being on an early flight. “The industry is shaking out.”
“After we’re all young and growing up, all of us had equal mission risk because all of us had single-digit numbers of launches, and it was a level playing field,” he said. “I believe it’s very difficult now to take that extra risk for the delta in cost.”
Rocket Lab said its next Electron launch will happen by the top of the month, and that it should release details concerning the mission within the near future.