This medium-lift vehicle is intended to compete with SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and will have the capability to land both back at the launch site and upon a drone ship down range. So Rocket Lab engineers have had to be creative about their approach.īeck told Ars that the company is learning what it can from Electron as it designs and develops a larger orbital rocket, named Neutron. So why not land on a barge? Electron is small enough that the mass penalty for attempting to vertically land the vehicle, in terms of propellant, landing legs, and other structures, would remove its capacity to lift any payload to orbit at all. Finally, the company has decided the most workable method was to splash the Electron first stage into the ocean and then quickly recover the vehicle to prevent saltwater intrusion. Rocket Lab has been taking tentative steps toward reusing its Electron rockets in recent years, first by gathering data about the vehicle's fiery return through the atmosphere and then attempting to catch the rockets with a helicopter as they fell beneath a parachute. ![]() However, both of these companies struggled with consistent success, and Virgin Orbit went bankrupt earlier this year. In the six years since Electron's debut, a handful of other companies have reached orbit, including Astra and Virgin Orbit. To date, Rocket Lab is the only company in the world with a small launch vehicle that has successfully and repeatedly flown. Learning to fly a second timeĮlectron is a small launch vehicle that made its debut in 2017 and has a first stage that is powered by nine Rutherford engines. "The data is in, perfect performance from the reused engine and the stage," Beck said on X, the social networking site formerly known as Twitter. Shortly after the Electron mission, which launched a satellite for Capella Space on Thursday morning from New Zealand, Rocket Lab chief executive Peter Beck confirmed that the Rutherford engine performed well in its second flight. With Rutherford, Rocket Lab has now also flown a rocket engine that landed in the ocean for the first time. In terms of orbital rockets, only NASA's space shuttle and SpaceX's Falcon 9 vehicles have demonstrated the capability of re-flying an engine. As part of the mission, the launch company reused a previously flown Rutherford engine on its first stage for the first time. Rocket Lab launched its 40th Electron mission this week and achieved an important milestone in its quest to reuse orbital rockets.
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