With its latest mission \u201cThey Go Up So Fast,\u201d Rocket Lab<\/b>\u2019s Electron rocket has now deployed 104 small satellites. The launch marked a milestone for the company that has set out an ambitious path to grow into an end-to-end space solutions company with turnkey satellites and spacecraft components, on-orbit operations, data services and addition to launch services.<\/p>\n
The Electron launch took off from Launch Complex 1 on New Zealand\u2019s Mahia Peninsula at 22:30 UTC on Monday, March 22. The mission deployed an Earth Observation (EO) satellite for BlackSky Global<\/b> through Spaceflight Inc<\/b>; two Internet of Things (IoT) nanosatellites for Australian startups Fleet Space<\/b> and Myriota<\/b>; a test satellite built by the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Canberra Space in collaboration with the Royal Australian Air Force<\/b>; a weather monitoring cubesat for Care Weather Technologie<\/b>s; and a technology demonstrator for the U.S. Army<\/b>\u2019s Space and Missile Defense Command (SMDC).<\/p>\n
Customers confirmed that they connected with their satellites after the launch. After the satellites were deployed by Rocket Lab space tug Kick Stage, the Kick Stage reconfigured into the second on-orbit Photon spacecraft. This Photon, dubbed Photon Pathstone, is testing technologies that will be used on NASA<\/strong>\u2019s upcoming Capstone mission to the Moon.<\/p>\n Rocket Lab is currently going through the process of becoming a publicly traded company through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) merger. In a recent interview with Via Satellite<\/em>, CEO Peter Beck talked about how the deal will help fund Rocket Lab\u2019s medium-lift rocket Neutron, and future deals. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s giving us all the access to capital to go after programs like Neutron, but also other strategic directions within space applications and our space systems division,\u201d Beck said. \u201cIt also gives us the public currency to go and do other deals. We found in the past that not having public currency, it\u2019s very difficult to make significant acquisitions and moves. We tried to do some deals last year as a private company, but when you\u2019re competing with public companies, it\u2019s almost impossible to do the kind of deals you want.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With its latest mission \u201cThey Go Up So Fast,\u201d Rocket Lab\u2019s Electron rocket has now deployed 104 small satellites. The launch marked a milestone for the company that has set out an ambitious path to grow into an end-to-end space solutions company with turnkey satellites and spacecraft components, on-orbit operations, data services and addition to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":57834,"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":[],"class_list":["post-57833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57833"}],"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=57833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57833\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}