Slashdot Mirror
New Zealand Joins Space Race With Successful Launch Of Lightweight 'Electron' Rocket (nzherald.co.nz)
"Rocket Lab: We have lift-off!" wrote long-time Slashdot reader ClarkMills on Wednesday. "History made as Electron launches successfully from Mahia." The New Zealand Herald reports:
Rocket Lab engineers have started analyzing data from yesterday's historic launch from the Mahia Peninsula that took the company to space but not able to complete its orbital mission. Lift-off at 4.20 pm was the first orbital-class rocket launched from a private launch site in the world. New Zealand became the 11th country with potential to launch cargo into space, joining superpowers and tech heavyweights. The Government hailed the lift-off as a major milestone for the country's space industry...
"We didn't quite reach orbit and we'll be investigating why, however reaching space in our first test puts us in an incredibly strong position to accelerate the commercial phase of our program," said founder and chief executive Peter Beck.
Beck added they'd developed their rocket "from scratch" in under four years, and the company's official Twitter feed is now proudly tweeting photos and videos from the launch.
"We didn't quite reach orbit and we'll be investigating why, however reaching space in our first test puts us in an incredibly strong position to accelerate the commercial phase of our program," said founder and chief executive Peter Beck.
Beck added they'd developed their rocket "from scratch" in under four years, and the company's official Twitter feed is now proudly tweeting photos and videos from the launch.
That's great but they are 60 years late. I'm not sure it is something to be proud of.
--dept
No need to say more.
Also, when I read 'Electron' in the title, I figured the author meant some new type of engine.
But When You Capitalize Every Word In A Sentence, It Makes It Really Hard To Figure Out What You Mean!
"New Zealand joins Space Race with successful launch of lightweight 'Electron' rocket."
Now that tells me you were just referring to the name of the rocket and not some new type of engine.
Stupid Title Case. I thought that they'd invented some kind of electron-rocket and I click thinking "zomg, they can launch a rocket without jet fuel? That's AMAZING". But the company is just called Electron. Click-bait! :-P
Not true — every country, including Tonga and the absurdities like Donetsk People's Republic have that potential already.
60 years and counting. Because the launch was a failure:
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
That's a proud feat for such a small country. Welcome to the club.
www.gaiageek.com
The most interesting part to me: "The booster is powered by 3D-printed Rutherford engines..."
Summer Blockbuster
Correction: the launch was not completely successful. They were targeting an orbital trajectory, but some issue left it on a suborbital heading instead. It's suspected to be insufficient thrust, perhaps an early shutdown, from the second stage, but they haven't released much info. If this had been a paying customer, it would have been deemed a failure.
Context: Electron is a very small rocket, slightly smaller than Falcon 1. Satellites no longer have to be the huge beasts they were in the 70s and 80s; you can get a useful satellite in a much smaller, lighter package. Rocket Lab hopes to tap that market, with a particular focus on small imaging or mapping satellites. They'll be cheaper than a larger rocket ($5M), much more expensive per-pound ($25K/kg vs $6K/kg for F9, $12K for Atlas) but they hope the advantage of picking your own orbit instead of having to share a launcher and resulting trajectory with
Additional info: The Rutherford engine is kind of interesting. It uses a battery-fed electric pump for the fuel and oxidizer (which is standard kerolox), rather than using a preburner and turbopump. This technically increases specific impulse considerably, but it makes for a very heavy engine. The main advantage is the sheer simplicity of it - it's very hard to go wrong. I do not expect this design to scale well to larger designs - you need to move a lot of propellant, and having enough batteries to power it would be ridiculously heavy. It quickly becomes easier to just waste a bit of fuel to run the pumps - kerosene is more energy-dense than LiPo, after all.
The design is similar to a scaled-down Falcon 9, in that it uses a single engine design for both stages, nine on the first stage, one on the second stage. This is a great way to keep development and production costs down, although if you're willing to put in the effort, you can get a much more efficient second-stage engine (Blue Origin is taking this route).
The space race ended in 1969
Rocket Lab is an American company launching from New Zealand
Never thought I'd see lightweight and electron together.
> "We didn't quite reach orbit and we'll be investigating why, however ..."
Nigel didn't wrap enough #8 bailing wire around the nose cone. Tell him to come over later I got a few extra rolls he can borrow out in my garden shed.
He joined the Nazi Party in 1937, and became an SS officer in 1940 (a process which he started in 1933, by undertaking SS paramilitary training).
The 1944 arrest was a move in a Nazi Party internal power struggle, particularly the maneuvering of Himmler to bring more weapons programs under his personal control. Von Braun was being punished/removed for being an obstacle to Himmler's personal ambition, but he had support from another faction which had Hitler's ear.
As for doubting the war's course and wishing to return to peacetime pursuits, if those were even true charges, they were hardly unusual within the Nazi Party. Hitler himself was very focused on peacetime projects and repeatedly tried to end the war, but was faced with a British Empire which would accept nothing less than their unconditional surrender.
Remember that WW2 started when Britain and France declared war on Germany, but not the USSR, when Germany and the USSR invaded Poland together. The Nazis did not want war with France or Britain (let alone America), did not initiate the war with France and sued for peace with Britain. Their territorial ambition was to unite the major populations of ethnic Germans politically, and they would have preferred to do so without war, as they did with Austria.
It's important to remember that Germany lost a lot of territory in WWI, a scant 15 years before the Nazis rose to power, and furthermore stood to lose the rest in short order if the USSR continued its march across Europe. The pre-WW2 European borders had hardly seemed some eternal fixture, and the treatment of Germany in the resolution of WWI is today generally recognized as unreasonably harsh and punitive. It is just as easy to cast the foreign occupation of their pre-WWI territories from Germany as persecution, as to cast the retaking of them as aggression.
The winners write the history books, and the Nazis have been demonized to the point of making it almost impossible for most people to think reasonably about them. Learning enough details of any Nazi's life, one thinks, "This isn't a Nazi! This is a human being!" They all were human beings, most of them with ordinary human decency and ordinary doubts and hopes. If you lose sight of that, you can learn nothing from WW2. It becomes a fantasy about demons and the heroes who slew them.
TFA tells about 11 countries "with potential to launch cargo into space". What are the 10 others?
I find it a little odd/humorous that the company is patting themselves on the back so much when the second stage effectively failed (far lower trust than expected). Don't get me wrong it wasn't a complete failure, but it wasn't a success either. It should also be noted that this "small country joining the ranks of the space-faring community" was pretty heavily financed, managed and technically supported by the US (US owned company, Boeing money, New Zealand built). I look forward to their eventual success (two more test flights are planned), but if I were them I wouldn't break out the champagne until they actually reach a decent orbit. And even then I wouldn't declare it a real success until they can do so with a decent payload, reliably, regularly, and cheaply.