Watch Rocket Lab launch satellite, catch booster with a helicopter Friday

November 3, 2022

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Rocket Lab will launch a satellite to orbit and attempt to catch a falling booster with a helicopter on Friday (Nov. 4), and you’ll watch the motion stay.

Rocket Lab plans to launch a mission known as “Catch Me If You Can” on Friday from its New Zealand website, throughout a 75-minute window that opens at 1:15 p.m. EDT (1715 GMT; 6:15 a.m. on Nov. 4 native New Zealand time).

You may watch it stay right here at House.com, courtesy of Rocket Lab, or directly via the company (opens in new tab). Protection will start 20 minutes earlier than liftoff.

The primary purpose Friday is to loft a analysis satellite for the Swedish Nationwide House Company (SNSA) utilizing an Electron rocket, however most viewers will in all probability be extra all for a secondary goal — the restoration of the Electron’s falling first stage.

Associated: Rocket Lab and its Electron booster (photos)

Rocket Lab goals to grab the booster out of the sky with a helicopter, a method designed to maintain the car from getting dunked in corrosive seawater and to assist ease its supply again to terra firma for evaluation and eventual reuse.

The 59-foot-tall (18 meters) Electron, a small-satellite launcher with 31 missions underneath its belt to this point, is presently a totally expendable car. Restoration and reuse of the primary stage would enable Rocket Lab to spice up its flight fee and cut back prices, firm representatives have mentioned.

Electron is simply too small to carry out powered vertical landings, as SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters do; it would not have sufficient gasoline left over after launch for such maneuvers. So Rocket Lab determined to go together with the helicopter, which grabs ahold of Electron’s parachute line with a hook because the booster descends.

Rocket Lab has made some progress towards its reusability purpose. For instance, it has already carried out one helicopter restoration, on a mission in Could of this 12 months known as “There And Back Again.” (Rocket Lab likes to present its flights playful names, as you’ll have observed.)

Throughout that Could mission, the helicopter — a Sikorsky S-92 — efficiently snagged the Electron’s however by chance dropped it into the drink shortly thereafter.

Rocket Lab fished the rocket out of the ocean and hauled it again to shore by boat. The corporate analyzed the flown booster, then refurbished and examined one in every of its 9 Rutherford engines, with promising outcomes.

“The refurbished engine handed all the identical rigorous acceptance exams we carry out for each launch engine, together with 200 seconds of engine hearth and a number of restarts,” firm representatives wrote within the press package for “Catch Me If You Can,” which you’ll find here (opens in new tab). The exams confirmed that the engine produced full thrust and “carried out to the identical commonplace of a newly constructed Rutherford engine,” they added.

Nonetheless, Rocket Lab would like to maintain its boosters out of the water. On “Catch Me If You Can,” the corporate goals to maintain the captured booster secured beneath the chopper for the complete flight to its Auckland Manufacturing Advanced.

The helicopter catch will happen rather less than 19 minutes after liftoff, if all goes in response to plan on “Catch Me If You Can.” The satellite, known as MATS (“Mesospheric Airglow/Aerosol Tomography and Spectroscopy”), might be deployed about 41 minutes later.

MATS “is the premise for the SNSA’s science mission to research atmospheric waves and higher perceive how the higher layer of Earth’s atmosphere interacts with wind and climate patterns nearer to the bottom,” Rocket Lab wrote within the mission press package.

MATS was initially alleged to launch atop a Russian rocket, however the SNSA and its predominant contractor for the satellite, OHB Sweden AB, nixed that agreement (opens in new tab) after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and rebooked on an Electron.

Mike Wall is the writer of “Out There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a e-book in regards to the seek for alien life. Observe him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Observe us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or on Facebook (opens in new tab).