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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.
Aye, as compared to the dramatic public failures of the early US space program, and the undoubtedly equally dramatic secret failures of other programs, this was a good first launch, great even.
I'm wondering aloud now, did the 2nd stage falter for something as simple as the LiIon battery packs getting too cold? They say they have 20,000 channels of data to analyze, will be interesting to compare how that kind of monitoring affects progress. Certainly you would expect fewer dramatic failures, but will it make things go faster or slower with respect to overall development progress in time and/or money. In other words, they might be burning less time and money with failed launch attempts, but is the cost of collecting and analyzing all the data even higher? I'm sure it can be overdone, and underdone and that there's a sweet spot somewhere in the middle.
I have a small connection to this story. One of the co-founders of the company was the internet entrepreneur and space-nut Mark Stevens who changed his name to Mark Rocket. He was one of our tenants and a neighbour to us. I still remember him feeding left-over food to our hens. CEO Peter Beck set up Rocket Lab in 2006 with funding from rocket-mad angel investor Mark Rocket who became a 50% owner until he exited in 2011. Mark Rocket is booked to fly into sub-orbital space with Virgin Galactic and was the first New Zealander to book a flight.
http://www.markrocket.com/