Rocket Lab is gearing as much as launch a mission from the U.S. East Coast in the following few days, but you will not have the ability to look at it live.
NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia announced via Twitter on Tuesday (June 13) that it’s “scheduled to support a Rocket Lab launch between June 15-20 within the evening.”
California-based Rocket Lab commonly webcasts launches of its Electron orbital rocket, but we cannot get to see this liftoff online: “There is no such thing as a livestream planned for launch, and the Wallops Visitor Center won’t be open for launch,” Wallops officials added within the Tuesday tweet.
Related: Rocket Lab launches 1st Electron booster from US soil in twilight liftoff
So, what could this unusually hush-hush mission be? It’s unclear, however the circumstantial evidence points to the first-ever liftoff of Rocket Lab’s recent suborbital testbed rocket.
That launcher is known as HASTE, short for “Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Test Electron.” As that name suggests, HASTE is derived from the workhorse Electron and is designed to assist test technologies for hypersonic craft — highly maneuverable vehicles able to flying at the least five times the speed of sound.
HASTE can haul as much as 1,540 kilos (700 kilograms) of payload aloft, whereas Electron can deliver a maximum of 660 kilos (300 kg) to low Earth orbit. The suborbital rocket also encompasses a modified version of Electron’s “kick stage” specialized for the deployment of hypersonic payloads, Rocket Lab said in an April 17 statement that announced HASTE’s existence.
The suborbital rocket is scheduled to make its debut right about now, on a mission whose details are hard to come back by, in keeping with that statement.
“HASTE provides reliable, high-cadence flight test opportunities needed to advance hypersonic system technology development, with the inaugural launch scheduled to happen in the primary half of 2023 for a confidential customer,” Rocket Lab representatives said within the statement.
HASTE shall be operated primarily by Rocket Lab National Security, an entirely owned subsidiary of the corporate dedicated to launching missions for the defense and intelligence communities of america and its allies.
The brand new suborbital rocket will launch only from Rocket Lab’s pad at Wallops, the April 17 statement added. (The corporate also has a launch complex on the Mahia Peninsula, on the North Island of Latest Zealand.)
So it seems likely that HASTE is the mystery vehicle flying from Wallops in the following few days. We’ll keep our eyes and ears open for any confirmation from Rocket Lab that this indeed the case.
