Skip to main content

Rocket Lab celebrates 30th launch and 150th satellite sent to orbit

Today’s launch by Rocket Lab, “The Owl Spreads Its Wings,” was as unremarkable as a rocket going to orbit can be, but it also marked a few milestones for the growing space company: 30 launches and 150 satellites taken to space.

The company’s first trip to orbit was in January of 2018, technically Electron’s second test flight but the first successful delivery of a payload to space. That was after more than 10 years of design, engineering and manufacturing since the company was founded in 2006.

It then had an unbroken streak of 18 launches, but on its 20th there was an anomaly and it lost the payload and vehicle. But as founder and CEO Peter Beck told me shortly afterwards, “no more than seconds after we realized that we had an anomaly on our hands, the team was already working it.” And they were clear to fly a month later.

The company’s ambitions have only grown since then, with plans for designing spacecraft, a trip to Venus and a bigger, better launch vehicle called Neutron that will compete with Rocket Lab’s larger peers. Of course, the way Beck tells it, this was all the plan from the get-go — they just had to nail launch first.

2022 has had nothing but successes, including the first attempt to catch a falling first stage with a helicopter. They’ll be trying that again before the end of the year, but you can relive that nail-biting moment here:

Success! Rocket Lab catches a booster in mid-air with a helicopter

Today’s launch (well… tomorrow’s, technically, since they’re in New Zealand) was for the Japanese company Synspective, which took over the whole vehicle to deliver its StriX-1 satellite to a 563-kilometer circular orbit. (Rocket Lab also delivered two other StriX satellites in February of this year and December of 2020.)

We expect to hear more about Rocket Lab’s ambitions when Beck chats with TechCrunch at our TC Sessions: Space event in December.

Rocket Lab celebrates 30th launch and 150th satellite sent to orbit by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch



source https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/15/rocket-lab-celebrates-30th-launch-and-150th-satellite-sent-to-orbit/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Max Q: Psyche(d)

In this issue: SpaceX launches NASA asteroid mission, news from Relativity Space and more. © 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/h6Kjrde via IFTTT
Post a Comment
Read more

Max Q: Anomalous

Hello and welcome back to Max Q! Last week wasn’t the most successful for spaceflight missions. We’ll get into that a bit more below. In this issue: First up, a botched launch from Virgin Orbit… …followed by one from ABL Space Systems News from Rocket Lab, World View and more Virgin Orbit’s botched launch highlights shaky financial future After Virgin Orbit’s launch failure last Monday, during which the mission experienced an  “anomaly” that prevented the rocket from reaching orbit, I went back over the company’s financials — and things aren’t looking good. For Virgin Orbit, this year has likely been completely turned on its head. The company was aiming for three launches this year, but everything will remain grounded until the cause of the anomaly has been identified and resolved. It’s unclear how long that will take, but likely at least three months. Add this delay to Virgin’s dwindling cash reserves and you have a foundation that’s suddenly much shakier than before. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

What’s Stripe’s deal?

Welcome to  The Interchange ! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up  here  so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. This will include everything from funding rounds to trends to an analysis of a particular space to hot takes on a particular company or phenomenon. There’s a lot of fintech news out there and it’s my job to stay on top of it — and make sense of it — so you can stay in the know. —  Mary Ann Stripe eyes exit, reportedly tried raising at a lower valuation The big news in fintech this week revolved around payments giant Stripe . On January 26, my Equity Podcast co-host and overall amazingly talented reporter Natasha Mascarenhas and I teamed up to write about how Stripe had set a 12-month deadline for itself to go public, either through a direct listing or by pursuin...
Post a Comment
Read more