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After launching one of its rockets into orbit on Thursday, the small rocket lab satellite launcher managed to bring the vehicle back to Earth and gently land it in the ocean under a series of parachutes. The maneuver was part of an intricate dress rehearsal, intended to practice almost all of the steps Rocket Lab will take to recover and reuse their rockets in the future.
Rocket Lab’s main rocket is the Electron, designed to launch batches of small satellites into low earth orbit. For the company’s 15 launches so far, the Electron has been consumable, with a brand new rocket used for each new mission. But in 2019, Rocket Lab announced plans to try and save the majority of the Electron rocket after future launches, in order to reuse the vehicles for subsequent missions. And the company has been making slow progress towards this goal since then, testing new maneuvers on its missions to achieve a recovery.
Rocket Lab’s recovery plan is quite different from that of SpaceX, which lands its Falcon 9 rockets on an airstrip or on an autonomous drone after launch. For the Electron, Rocket Lab also plans to bring the rocket back to Earth in a controlled manner after a flight. But once at a certain altitude, the Electron will deploy a drug parachute and a main parachute to slow its fall. As the Electron slowly descends to Earth, Rocket Lab will dispatch a helicopter to hook up the line of parachutes, effectively catching the vehicle in the air and preventing material from hitting the ocean.
On this 16th launch, Rocket Lab practiced these steps, including the parachute deployment, after launching the Electron from the company’s main facility in New Zealand. However, the company skipped the final step of snatching the Electron out of the air, and the rocket eventually splashed into the Pacific Ocean. The goal was to see if the company could bring the rocket back intact and land it in one piece in the ocean. Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck tweeted a first photo of the Electron under a parachute, and hosts during the launch live broadcast said more photos will be shared in the coming days.
Rocket Lab plans to fish the Electron rocket out of the water and bring the material back to a factory for a detailed examination. Engineers outfitted this Electron with additional sensors to collect data during launch and descent, as the team wants to see what condition the vehicle is in after its lightning trip into space and back. Then they will better understand when they can try out the helicopter flight hook. It’s also possible that this particular rocket could fly again if it’s in good enough shape.
While the recovery has received the most attention, Rocket Lab has also launched 30 satellites into space for this mission. The satellites ranged from surveillance to communications probes, and also included a vehicle tasked with demonstrating new tether technology aimed at ridding space of unnecessary and dangerous debris. Also on this mission was a 3D printed statue of a garden gnome, provided by Gabe Newell, the founder of Valve Software. Named Gnome Chompski, the statue is modeled on an accessory from the Half life series of video games and served as a fun way to simulate mass during flight. For this mission, Newell pledged to donate $ 1 to the Starship Pediatric Intensive Care Unit in New Zealand for each person who listened to the Rocket Lab launch livestream.
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