New Zealand aerospace company Rocket Lab is going to the Moon and then Venus! Rocket Lab is taking steps towards a bigger and better future for space exploration from the world’s only private orbital launch site, located on the Mahia Peninsula, Hawke’s Bay.
Rocket Lab was Founded in 2006 by Peter Beck right here in New Zealand.
Rocket Lab has locations all around the world. Its first launch site, Launch Complex 1, is on the Mahia Peninsula, while its second is on Wallops Island in Virginia, United States.
Rocket Lab has a headquarters and manufacturing facility in Long Beach, California, while New Zealand is also home to assembly and testing facilities. Rocket Lab also produces satellite components in a dedicated lab in Toronto, Canada.
Rocket Lab has a lot of big goals for the next few years. These goals will be met with new technology and determination.
So, what sets Rocket Lab apart from other large space companies? Well, Rocket Lab launches satellites into space, not people.
We all rely on satellites to live our lives here on Earth. Satellites connect us, keep us safe, help us understand our planet and manage our impact on it, and enable us to innovate and explore. Whether it’s plugging your next destination into your phone or car’s GPS, or checking the weather, or catching up on your favourite TV show - satellite technology plays a big role in everyone’s day-to-day life.
For a long time, satellites were huge bus-sized machines that cost billions of dollars to build and hundreds of millions to launch. Thankfully, satellite technology has shrunk, just like how more technology can be packed inside a cellphone than ever before. The satellites of today are getting smaller, doing more, and costing less. They’re having a major impact on modern research, science, and technology, and there are endless possibilities for what we can achieve with these satellites now that Rocket Lab provides better access to space for small satellite operators.
Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket is the first of its kind in the world and has been used in all its missions to date. Rocket Lab’s Senior Communications Advisor, Murielle Baker said, “Electron is made of carbon-composite fiber, which is a type of material that allows vehicles like sports cars, racing yachts, and rockets to travel really fast and remain very light while also being incredibly strong. In fact, the thickness of the wall of Electron is about the same as a credit card!
Electron is also the only fully carbon-composite rocket to ever reach space.” Electron is powered by 3D-printed engines. The first of their kind in the world, the engines are named after NZ physicist Ernest Rutherford! The engines can be printed in 24- hours, making it faster to build and launch rockets.
Rocket Lab is now thinking more about what happens to their Electron rockets after the mission is complete. Rather than using each rocket once, they’re working to make them reusable so they can fly lots of missions each. Murielle said, “Our most recent launch called Return To Sender was the very first time we brought an Electron booster back to Earth."
Returning a rocket to Earth is incredibly difficult. There have only been two companies ever that have recovered a rocket from space after launch. One is SpaceX and the second is Rocket Lab.
For the Return To Sender mission, Electron’s first stage was subjected to intense pressure and heat, experiencing temperatures over 2400 °C and reaching speeds of 2350 m/s. Despite all that, the rocket’s booster held up remarkably well – not bad after experiencing the trip to space and back in just 13 minutes.
Rocket Lab brought the booster back to Earth under a parachute after the rocket deployed its satellites during the mission in November 2020. “We'll use what we learned from that mission and apply that to future recovery attempts. So as a test, it was successful and exciting.”
This year Rocket Lab will launch even more recovery missions, with the first one for 2021 expected to be very similar to Return To Sender, including another parachute deployment and splashdown in the ocean.
All this exciting innovation has led to Rocket Lab’s latest mission for NASA that’s scheduled to launch this year.
The mission is named CAPSTONE and will test how stable a particular orbit around the Moon is where NASA wants future astronauts to pass through before they land on the Moon. For this mission, Rocket Lab will use their Electron rocket to launch their own satellite, called Photon, which will carry an even smaller satellite for NASA that will test this lunar orbit.
The purpose of this mission is that NASA wants to send the next man and first woman back to the Moon’s surface. Before they get there, they are sending this CAPSTONE satellite with Rocket Lab to test a particular orbit around the Moon.
Some people don’t know that the orbits around the Moon can be quite lumpy. This can cause problems with communication. The Capstone mission will collect data and test how well we can communicate between the Moon and Earth.
The CAPSTONE mission is set to launch in 2021.
If the Moon wasn’t cool enough for you, how about Venus? No space company has ever launched their own private mission to Venus before.
In our solar system, Venus is the planet located right next to Earth closer to the sun. There has been a recent discovery of a gas called Phosphine in the clouds of Venus. This could be a sign that there once was life on Venus! Murielle said, “Researchers want to know more. That's one of life's greatest questions, if life exists elsewhere in the universe."
"We're funding our own mission, in partnership with these researchers to send a probe there." The mission will follow a very similar format to the CAPSTONE mission. The Electron rocket will launch with a Photon satellite onboard that will carry an even smaller satellite for tests.
Rocket Lab is launching this mission for a very low cost. By keeping the price low, they can launch more often. The mission to Venus will be launching in 2023. The idea behind a 2023 launch date is because of how the planets will be positioned. The distance between Earth and Venus will be at its smallest. This is great for maximising fuel efficiency and making the rocket’s trip much easier.
It’s easy to miss all this exciting work happening in our own backyard. It’s important to remember that new innovation is possible here in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Rocket Lab started as an idea from Pete — so nothing is impossible.
Story by Makayla Wallace-Tidd. Photography and videos courtesy of Rocket Lab.
Wallace-Tidd, Makayla. Rocket Lab’s out of this world: Let’s go to the Moon and Venus. MOTAT Museum of Transport and Technology. First published: 29 January 2021. URL www.motat.nz/interactive/rocket-labs-out-of-this-world
