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.

Comments

Re:3D printed engines

[Gravis Zero]

They probably use the same DMLS process that SpaceX uses for it's engines because it results in the strongest parts. Effectively, you add a layer of metal powder then melt the parts you want to use. Rinse and repeat. Thousands of layers later, you take your print out of the metal powder that surrounds it, clean it off and finally heat it up. The purpose of the heat is to cause every spec of metal to unite as a single chunk of metal. Since there isn't any stress on the metal after it's made into a single piece, the print is stronger than if you tried to machine it (much of which is no longer possible with modern designs).

Corrections, additional info

[gman003]

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).

Re:Low expectations unreached

[DanDD]

The first stage ignited and flew to deploy the second stage. The first stage was not a failure.

The second stage ignited, but failed to reach the intended altitude.

The electric pumps functioned well enough for the 2nd stage to reach space.

The 3D printed components did not fail catastrophically, nor did the electrical system, or the electric fuel pumps.

While the overall mission was not a success, a vast majority of the individual systems worked as intended. Many milestones were crossed. In the long run the electric pumps might not pan out, but if you don't try you'll never know. Also, this alternate method of pumping fuel into the engine might lead to more capability and flexibility in controlling thrust, which could make landing and re-use even easier.