The Rocket Lab, which aims to launch satellites into space quickly and cheaply, said it had just used a helicopter to catch part of a rocket in the air. But the rocket was launched into the ocean shortly after, eventually having to be pulled out of the water.
This mission, called “There and Back”, took off at 18:50 ET on Monday.
The company’s communications adviser Muriel Baker, after initially declaring success, went on the companies’ webcast to confirm that the helicopter pilot had launched the missile “at his own discretion” after experiencing a “different load characteristic” from that. , which he had during the test releases of the catch.
Still, Baker called the initial catch a “monumental step forward.”
“We have witnessed a spectacular catch,” she said.
The webcast showed that the helicopter hooked the parachute to the rocket about 15 minutes after the launch, and applause came from the control of the mission, but moments later a disappointed sigh was heard and the supply was interrupted.
“They released it after the connection because they were not happy with the way it flew,” added Peter Beck, CEO of Rocket Lab, on Twitter.
“This requires extreme precision. Several critical stages need to be arranged perfectly to ensure successful shooting,” Baker said earlier in a webcast.
The Electron rocket, Rocket Lab’s small rocket that had launched nearly two dozen successful missions before Monday’s launch, successfully completed its main goal of deploying 34 satellite payloads to a number of commercial operators, resulting in a total of Electron satellites launched in place up to 146.
After separating from the first-stage accelerator, Electron’s second stage continued to orbit to perform satellite deployment until the accelerator fell back to Earth at almost 5,150 miles per hour. Once close enough to the Earth’s surface, the accelerator deployed parachutes to slow its descent. A helicopter was waiting to hook the amplifier’s parachute.
Capturing the rocket accelerator in the air is a big part of Rocket Lab’s potential goal of reusable missiles.
Other companies have used reusable rockets as a way to make the space business more profitable. In 2015, Blue Origin was the first company to land a reusable rocket on a landing pad. The company said the future of space tourism and people living on other planets would depend on reusable transport after sending founder Jeff Bezos into space. Elon Musk’s SpaceX uses reusable accelerators in its Falcon 9 rockets.
However, Rocket Lab says there are other reasons to focus on reusability than just profit. “Our biggest problem is building rockets fast enough to support all our customers,” Beck told CNN Business in 2019. Rocket Lab wants to launch satellite payloads more often – 50 times or more a year. This type of volume requires reuse of the rocket.
NASA has extracted spent rocket boosters from the Atlantic Ocean after launching a space shuttle. Rocket Lab plans to use helicopter technology to rebuild its accelerators. The company said Electron was not big enough to carry the fuel needed for an upright landing, and landing in salt water in the ocean could cause corrosion and physical damage.
A Sikorsky S-92 personalized helicopter, a large twin-engine helicopter commonly used for search and rescue missions and offshore oil and gas transportation, was used in the capture on Monday. Following the successful capture of the booster, the company plans to take the machine to a recovery ship at sea before moving to the company’s production complex for evaluation. But he was eventually dumped in the ocean and rebuilt there. Landing in the ocean is not optimal – seawater can cause corrosion, which is why Rocket Lab hopes to catch the booster before it encounters water.
The launch was delayed several times due to weather conditions. “For our first helicopter shooting in the air, we want perfect weather conditions so we can focus on the catch,” Rocket Lab tweeted Monday. “Just as our tolerances on launch time have increased over time, so has our tolerance of time in the recovery zone. For the former, however, we want to eliminate time as a consideration so that we can focus only on catches and maintenance operations. “
The California-based company also released a video showing a successful training session in the days before the launch, with a helicopter catching a booster as it fell to the ground.
Rocket Lab has previously caught boosters from the ocean in three of Electron’s 25 earlier missions. This was the first attempt to catch in the air.
This is not the first time people have tried to catch an object falling from space by plane. In the 1960s, the United States will use planes equipped with long hooks to catch movie boxes containing film from spy satellites from the sky. The Cold War-era technique was similar to that tried by the Rocket Lab: the film box fell to Earth from space and used parachutes to slow its descent so planes could capture the information. NASA also tried in 2004 to take into the air a capsule carrying samples of particles that flew out of the sun, but an attempt to recover the helicopter failed when the capsule’s parachutes failed to release, causing it to crash. in the Utah desert.
Since its inception in 2006, Rocket Lab has deployed satellites in orbit for customers, including NASA, the U.S. Space Forces, the National Intelligence Service and Canon.
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