{"id":13011,"date":"2019-08-12T17:02:10","date_gmt":"2019-08-12T09:02:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/rocket-lab-to-begin-booster-recovery-experiments-later-this-year\/"},"modified":"2019-08-12T17:02:10","modified_gmt":"2019-08-12T09:02:10","slug":"rocket-lab-to-begin-booster-recovery-experiments-later-this-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/rocket-lab-to-begin-booster-recovery-experiments-later-this-year\/","title":{"rendered":"Rocket Lab to begin booster recovery experiments later this year"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/enndCzvZpZk\" width=\"678\" height=\"381\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><span data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">\ufeff<\/span><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Rocket Lab\u2019s next launch from New Zealand, set for Friday, will carry a data recorder to measure the aerothermal environments encountered by the Electron launcher\u2019s first stage during descent back into the atmosphere, information engineers say is crucial to successfully achieving the company\u2019s newly-announced plan to recover and reuse the booster.<\/p>\n<p>The U.S.-New Zealand launch services company announced plans Aug. 6 to recover the Electron rocket\u2019s first stage and its parachute in mid-air using a helicopter, then reuse the booster for another mission.<\/p>\n<p>Peter Beck, Rocket Lab\u2019s founder and CEO, said the company will follow a \u201cstepping stone approach\u201d to first measure the extreme aerodynamic and heating environments the Electron booster encounters during re-entry back into the atmosphere. Then engineers will add a decelerator and parafoil to slow down future rockets, enabling a ship-based helicopter to swoop in and snag the booster with a boom.<\/p>\n<p>In the first phase of the rocket recovery effort, Rocket Lab aims to recover a full Electron first stage from the ocean downrange from the company\u2019s launch base in New Zealand, before moving on to mid-air retrievals by helicopter.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cElectron is going reusable,\u201d Beck said in the Aug. 6 announcement at the Small Satellite Conference at Utah State University in Logan, Utah.<\/p>\n<p>In an interview with Spaceflight Now after the announcement, Beck said that achieving a high launch cadence, and not cost reductions, was the primary impetus behind Rocket Lab\u2019s decision to try recovering the Electron booster.<\/p>\n<p>The Electron rocket is made of two stages and stands more than 55 feet (17 meters) tall. The launcher is sized to launch small satellites, with a lift capacity of around 330 pounds (150 kilograms) into a 310-mile-high (500-kilometer) sun-synchronous orbit.<\/p>\n<p>Rocket Lab has logged six straight successful Electron flights since the rocket\u2019s inaugural test launch fell short of orbit due to a ground tracking error.<\/p>\n<p>Headquartered in Huntington Beach, California, with a launch base New Zealand\u2019s North Island, Rocket Lab charges around $5.7 million for a dedicated commercial satellite launch. Two of Rocket Lab\u2019s U.S. government launch contracts, with DARPA and NASA, were valued at $6.5 million and $6.9 million, respectively.<\/p>\n<p>That price point is far less expensive than any other commercial launch provider currently in operation offering dedicated flights to low Earth orbit. Smallsats booking launches on rideshare missions, in which they share a larger rocket with other satellites, can often find cheaper rides, at the expense of full control over the launch schedule and target orbit.<\/p>\n<p>Beck said Rocket Lab\u2019s customers are more interested in schedule assurance than cost. The company eventually aims to launch as often as once per week. So far this year, Rocket Lab has launched three times, with another launch scheduled Friday from the company\u2019s launch base on Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOur customers come to us, and the first question they ask is when can you fly us, and the second question they ask is how much,\u201d Beck said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019re rapidly trying to do everything we can to increase launch cadence,\u201d Beck said. \u201cWe\u2019ve built four-and-a-half acres of new factories. We\u2019re really all in on increasing launch frequency, and what recoverability gives us is, even if we can use the stage just once more, that essentially doubles our production and doubles the amount of flight opportunities for our customers.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cRight now, the Electron is the only dedicated small launch vehicle flying, so we\u2019re really struggling to keep up with demand, and even though we have really invested in scaling, this is another initiative to help make more launch slots available,\u201d he told Spaceflight Now in an interview. \u201cFrequency here is just the most important thing.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The successful recovery and reuse of the Electron\u2019s first stage could also reduce costs, but that is a secondary objective, Beck said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf we can recover a stage in great condition, then there are a lot of cost savings there,\u201d Beck said. \u201cOf course, it\u2019s a great way to keep driving the market in the right direction.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Rocket Lab currently builds Rutherford engines, which burn kerosene and power both stages of the Electron launcher, at the company\u2019s headquarters in Huntington Beach. The Electron\u2019s tanks and carbon fiber structures are manufactured in Auckland, New Zealand.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cRight now, we\u2019re shipping a launch vehicle every 30 days, and we need to get that down next year to one every 15 days,\u201d Beck said. \u201cAnd if we really want to get down to to the ultimate goal of one a week, then reusability certainly aids us in that enormously.\u201d<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_35347\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-35347\" style=\"width: 1960px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-35347\" src=\"http:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/Its-Business-Time-11-November.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1960\" height=\"1141\" srcset=\"https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/Its-Business-Time-11-November.jpg 1960w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/Its-Business-Time-11-November-300x175.jpg 300w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/Its-Business-Time-11-November-768x447.jpg 768w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/Its-Business-Time-11-November-678x395.jpg 678w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1960px) 100vw, 1960px\"><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-35347\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">File photo of an Electron rocket launch from New Zealand. Credit: Rocket Lab<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Rocket Lab is also building a new launch pad at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops Island, Virginia. The Virginia launch facility should be ready for operations by the end of this year, according to Beck.<\/p>\n<p>Rocket Lab\u2019s eighth Electron launch, scheduled for 1257 GMT (8:57 a.m. EDT) Friday, will carry a data recorder dubbed \u201cBrutus\u201d to measure the environments the first stage sees when it comes back to Earth.<\/p>\n<p>On a typical Electron launch, the first stage\u2019s nine Rutherford engines fire for around two-and-a-half minutes, then shut down at an altitude of more than 250,000 feet (80 kilometers) moments before the booster jettisons from the Electron\u2019s single-engine second stage.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOur next flight is quite an important one because we have an instrument on-board, called Brutus, which is attempting to ride the stage all the way (back to Earth), even to where it breaks up, and we\u2019ll go back and recover that flight recorder (in the ocean),\u201d Beck said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s a high-fidelity data recorder,\u201d Beck in his Aug. 6 announcement at the Small Satellite Conference. \u201cWe\u2019ll have a lot more understanding of the environments, and then we can use all that information to validate our CFD (computational fluid dynamics) models and all our other trajectory models.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>On the 10th flight of the Electron rocket, expected before the end of this year, Beck said Rocket Lab plans a \u201cbig block upgrade\u201d of the launcher\u2019s first stage. The upcoming upgrade caused Rocket Lab officials to announce the recovery and reuse plans ahead of time.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOn Stage 1, people are going to see some bits on that look a little bit different, so the gig was going to be up pretty soon,\u201d Beck said.<\/p>\n<p>The upgrades to be installed on the first stage beginning with the 10th Electron flight consist only of recovery systems, Beck said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf you\u2019re flying with us, don\u2019t anybody panic,\u201d Beck said. \u201cAll of these upgrades are completely standalone to Electron. They don\u2019t interface to any of the current flight systems. They\u2019re all passive.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere\u2019s obviously telemetry that\u2019s going on-board, thermal protection systems, and you start doing the harder aerodynamic re-entries with the aerodynamic decelerators,\u201d Beck said of the first stage upgrades coming later this year.<\/p>\n<p>Beck declined to describe details of the aerodynamic decelerators, including whether Rocket Lab is developing rigid or inflatable deceleration systems. He said the rocket recovery effort is, so far, an internal research and development project within Rocket Lab.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat\u2019s one of the things we haven\u2019t disclosed too much, some of the unique technology that we\u2019re developing,\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cSo we\u2019re going to leave that under our hats for a while, but we did have to develop new things to be able to get ourselves comfortable to the point where we think this is a feasible thing.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Beck said Rocket Lab expects the addition of new recovery hardware on the first stage will result in a 10 to 20 percent reduction in the Electron rocket\u2019s payload lift capacity.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBut we also have other performance upgrades to the upper stage that will probably null that out,\u201d Beck said. \u201cNothing\u2019s for free, especially on a launch vehicle.\u201d<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_40189\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-40189\" style=\"width: 900px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-40189\" src=\"http:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/electron_1ststage.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"900\" height=\"503\" srcset=\"https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/electron_1ststage.jpg 900w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/electron_1ststage-300x168.jpg 300w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/electron_1ststage-768x429.jpg 768w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/electron_1ststage-678x379.jpg 678w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 900px) 100vw, 900px\"><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-40189\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Artist\u2019s concept of an Electron first stage re-entering the atmosphere. Credit: Rocket Lab<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Rocket Lab officials previously said the company had no plans to recover and reuse the Electron booster.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s incredibly difficult,\u201d Beck said. \u201cI\u2019ve said very publicly that we wouldn\u2019t be able to reuse because I had a fairly good understanding of the physics involved. The re-entry profile is enormously difficult. Basically, we\u2019re going from eight-and-a-half times the speed of sound to 0.01 times the speed of sound in 70-odd seconds. The energy that you\u2019ve got to dissipate is just phenomenal.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen we\u2019re entering (the atmosphere),\u201d we generate a lot of shock waves, and shock-shock interactions, and the plasma around those shock waves is equal to about half the temperature of the sun,\u201d Beck said. \u201cSo we have tremendous aerothermal loads.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The aerodynamic loads encountered by the first stage during re-entry are equivalent to the force of the weight of three elephants, Beck said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSo you have a 1.8-millimeter (thick) carbon fiber rocket with three elephants standing on the top, hitting loads half the temperature of the sun, re=entering the earth\u2019s atmosphere at eight-and-a-half times the speed of sound. We\u2019ve got to get it down safely and in one piece, so there\u2019s lots of really big challenges here to try and deal with.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Dedicated smallsat launchers, such as Rocket Lab\u2019s Electron, fly with thinner performance margins than bigger rockets. Because of that, many companies working on commercial smallsat launchers are designing expendable vehicles.<\/p>\n<p>SpaceX uses propulsive maneuvers using leftover propellant in the first stage tanks to recover the boosters of its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.<\/p>\n<p>For the Falcon 9 rocket, setting side propellant to return the first stage to a controlled landing on an offshore drone ship cuts the launcher\u2019s lift capability to geostationary transfer orbit \u2014 a popular destination for commercial communications satellites \u2014 by about 15 percent, according to performance data presented last year by Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX\u2019s vice president of build and flight reliability.<\/p>\n<p>Rocket Lab would have to increase the size of its Electron rocket to carry enough extra propellant to attempt a propulsive landing like SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 booster, Beck said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019re not doing a propulsive re-entry and \u2026 we\u2019re not doing a propulsive landing,\u201d Beck said. \u201cThe fundamental reason for that is that takes a small launch vehicle and turns it into a medium-sized launch vehicle, and we\u2019re not in the business of building medium-sized launch vehicles. We\u2019re in the business of building small launch vehicles for our dedicated customers to get on-orbit frequently.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Beck said flight data from the Electron\u2019s previous missions demonstrated to Rocket Lab engineers that recovering the first stage would be possible. He compared the Electron to a \u201cflying laboratory\u201d with 15,000 channels of data streaming on every flight.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSo we\u2019re able to get really, really good data on the vehicle \u2014 on the stage \u2014 and how it behaves, and from that data, we\u2019re able to start building on that element and CFD (computational fluid dynamics) models, and really start to either convince ourselves that this is possible or not possible,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>Early on, engineers are interested in gauging the plasma flow fields around the first stage as it re-enters the atmosphere.<\/p>\n<p>Beck would not predict when Rocket Lab might successfully recover an Electron first stage.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cGetting it through the atmosphere \u2026 is an immensely challenging task. A lot of people, when they see the animation, think that picking it up with the helicopter kind off looks like it\u2019s the difficult bit, but honestly that\u2019s quite trivial compared to actually re-entering the stage and getting it back through (the atmosphere) in one piece.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Catching the booster with a helicopter would prevent the rocket from splashing down at sea and becoming contaminated with salt water.<\/p>\n<p>While the initial re-entry experiments could begin before the end of this year, Beck said an intact recovery of an Electron booster will come some time after the 10th Electron flight.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe first approach is Flight 8 (scheduled for Friday). We have some important instrumentation to help validate our computational fluid dynamic models, and then on Flight 10 we have a block upgrade,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFrom Flight 10 onwards, there will be incremental rollouts of various systems and technologies, and w have a lot to learn,\u201d Beck said. \u201cWe\u2019re confident we can get there, but we have a lot to learn. It\u2019s a very methodical approach for us.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Rocket Lab plans to conduct the first booster re-entry and recovery attempts over the Pacific Ocean after launches from New Zealand. Eventually, the company could try similar experiments after launches from Virginia, once the U.S. launch pad is operational.<\/p>\n<p>Beck said Rocket Lab would be happy with just reusing an Electron booster one time<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf we have one (reuse), that doubles our production rate,\u201d he said. \u201cThat would be fantastic.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><b><i>Email the author.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n<p><em><strong>Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\ufeff Rocket Lab\u2019s next launch from New Zealand, set for Friday, will carry a data recorder to measure the aerothermal environments encountered by the Electron launcher\u2019s first stage during descent back into the atmosphere, information engineers say is crucial to successfully achieving the company\u2019s newly-announced plan to recover and reuse the booster. The U.S.-New Zealand [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[291,545,25,1593,1595,1596,2563,311],"class_list":["post-13011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-commercial-space","tag-electron","tag-launch","tag-launch-complex-1","tag-mahia-peninsula","tag-new-zealand","tag-peter-beck","tag-reusability"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13011"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13011\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}