On Thursday, shortly after midnight on the US East Coast, a New Zealand-based rocket company launched an orbital-class rocket from a private launch site for the first time. While relatively small, Rocket Lab's Electron launch vehicle stands at the vanguard of a new class of launchers designed to place increasingly tiny satellites into space. Facing competition from the likes of Virgin Orbit and Vector Space Systems, which are late in the development stage, Rocket Lab is the first small satellite launch company to put a full-size rocket into space.
“We’re one of a few companies to ever develop a rocket from scratch and we did it in under four years," said Peter Beck, chief executive and founder of Rocket Lab. "We’ve worked tirelessly to get to this point. We’ve developed everything in-house, built the world’s first private orbital launch range, and we’ve done it with a small team."
Although the Electron vehicle made it into space, it "didn't quite reach orbit," according to Beck. Rocket Lab did not release precise details of the launch from Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand but said the vehicle had a "great" first-stage burn, stage separation, second-stage ignition, and fairing separation. Over the coming weeks, Beck said, the company will investigate data from the launch, understand why the vehicle failed to reach orbit, and proceed to the second of three test launches before beginning commercial operations.
The Electron rocket is a relatively small vehicle, at 17 meters tall and with a diameter of 1.2 meters. Nine oxygen-kerosene "Rutherford" engines power the vehicle, each with 34,500 pounds of thrust at liftoff. (That is a little less than one-fifth the thrust of each of the nine Merlin 1-D engines that power SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket). When fully functional, the rocket will be able to send up to 150kg to a Sun-synchronous orbit 500km above the Earth.
— Rocket Lab (@RocketLabUSA) May 25, 2017
This is far less than the capacity of orbital rockets operating today, including the Falcon 9, Atlas V, Soyuz, and other commercially available rockets. But in recent years there has been an explosion in demand for the delivery of small satellites weighing anywhere from a few hundred kilograms all the way down to cubesats and a desire to not have to ride-share with larger payloads. Rocket Lab hopes to meet this demand with services costing as little as $5 million per launch.
The new class of low-cost small satellite booster companies plans to launch rapidly, and often, to meet market demand. At full production, Rocket Lab says it will launch more than 50 times a year and is regulated to launch up to 120 times a year. A chief executive of a competitor, Jim Cantrell of Vector Space Systems, recently described the market for smaller launch vehicles as "shooting turkeys in a drum," saying there was incredible demand. In the race to reach the market first with a smaller orbital vehicle, then, Rocket Lab took a big step Thursday.
Listing image by Rocket Lab