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: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.