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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.
That's a proud feat for such a small country. Welcome to the club.
www.gaiageek.com
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).
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
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 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.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
Putting stuff in space is still useful, and they are building modern rockets of their own design rather than copying 60 year old designs, so I wouldn't say they are 60 years late. IF BMW design a new car, you wouldn't call them "late" either. Also, designing and manufacturing rockets is still bloody hard, so yeah I'd say it's something to be proud of. As for how useful this is vs. buying launch slots elsewhere, I don't know. If they can do it cheaper, great. If they can find clients willing to pay for launches, great. If they learn something in the process that they can apply elsewhere, swell. If they come up with innovations that advances the field of spaceflight for everyone, even better.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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.