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Rocket lab has just delivered a satellite passel to orbit and has taken a big step towards reusing booster packs.
Two stages of Rocket Lab Electron booster took off from the company’s New Zealand launch site today (Nov. 19) at 9:20 p.m. EST (2:20 a.m. GMT on November 20), carrying 30 spacecraft into low-earth orbit on a mission called “Return to Home ‘sender”.
About the name: once his part of the flight was over, the first stage of the Electron came back down for a guide, splashdown assisted by parachute in the Pacific Ocean, about 650 kilometers off the coast of New Zealand.
Then, about two hours after takeoff, Rocket Lab staff fished the drink booster with a salvage vessel. The company will transport it to land for analyzes that will inform its quest to make the first stage of Electron reusable.
Related: Rocket Lab and its electron booster (photos)
The view of the main chute from Electron’s first floor upon its return to Earth. https://t.co/3YcSvrYIGiNovember 20, 2020
“Once we bring him back to the factory it’s like a CSI [crime scene investigation], really, “Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck told reporters in a teleconference on Nov. 4.” We’re going to take it all apart and really, really dig into the performance of each of the sub-assembly components.
Achieving the reusability goal will likely make Electron missions a lot cheaper for Rocket Lab and its customers, Beck said. But the main benefit envisioned is an increase in rocket production rates and launch frequencies.
“Even though it’s economically neutral, the fact that we don’t have to build more vehicles in the same plant is a really big advantage,” Beck said on the Nov. 4 call.
Rocket Lab is ultimately planning to recover electrons falling from the sky using helicopters, a technique it demonstrated last March during a drop test with a dummy booster. 18-meter-tall Electron is too small to perform motorized touchdowns like SpaceX’s first floors Falcon 9 rockets; Electron cannot carry enough fuel to have the amount needed for the landing, Beck said.
Rocket Lab guided the first stages of Electron to Earth in a controlled manner during previous operational launches. But “Return to Sender” – the 16th Electron flight – marks the first time the company has done it with a parachute, and the first time a booster has been recovered after the flight.
As exciting as the splash and recovery were, the main focus of Return to Sender was to get all 30 payloads up. And it happened: the satellites were all deployed in a circular orbit about 500 km above Earth an hour after takeoff, Beck said via Twitter Thursday evening.
Twenty-four of the satellites mounted today are tiny “SpaceBees” that will be operated by California-based Swarm Technologies. Swarm is assembling a constellation of 150 SpaceBees that will provide communication services to “Internet of Things” devices around the world.
Also aboard “Return to Sender” were two satellites for TriSept Corp.’s Drag Racer mission, based in Virginia. Drag Racer will test the ability of long tethers to effectively deorbit satellites, potentially demonstrating technology that could dampen Earth growth. junk space problem.
Unseenlabs also had two small spaceships on “Return to Sender”, the second and third members of the maritime surveillance constellation of 20 satellites planned by the French company. The Unseenlabs network will “improve the monitoring of activities at sea, such as illegal fishing and anti-environmental behavior, ”wrote Rocket Lab in a Description of the “Return to sender” mission.
Another satellite, called Waka Āmiorangi Aotearoa APSS-1, was built by students of the Auckland Program for Space Systems at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. The spacecraft will study a possible link between earthquakes and disturbances in Earth’s upper atmosphere, representatives of Rocket Lab wrote.
Finally, “Return to Sender” also featured a 3D printed depiction of Gnome Chompski, a garden gnome from the Half-Life video game series. The 6 inch tall (15 centimeter) titanium gnome will not stay in place for long: throughout the mission, it will remain attached to Electron kick step, which sends satellites into precise orbits and then performs a suicide dive into Earth’s atmosphere to avoid becoming a piece of space debris.
Mike Wall is the author of “Over there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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