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Update, April 29: Rocket Lab has delayed its There and Back Again mission to “no earlier than May 1,” citing weather conditions.
This isn’t the plot of the latest Michael Bay film: Rocket Lab will use a helicopter to catch a nearly 40-foot rocket booster out of the sky.
It may sound like an action stunt, but it’s a key step toward the Long Beach-based aerospace company’s goal of competing with SpaceX and offering fully reusable rockets. While SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket uses extra fuel to reignite its engines for a soft landing back on Earth , Rocket Lab is hoping that it can recover its launch boosters as they fall in order to save costs.
The startup’s Tolkein-themed There and Back Again mission—originally planned for Friday but now delayed to “no earlier than May 1” due to weather conditions—will launch 34 satellites into orbit for commercial customers including Spaceflight, Astrix Aeronautics and Unseenlabs. It’s what happens after the rocket is launched, however, that Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck and his investors will most closely watch.
Here’s how it will go down: The booster will detach from Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket after it lifts off from the company’s New Zealand launch site. As it descends to Earth, a series of parachutes will unfurl in waves to curb its speed. As the booster descends, a customized Lockheed Martin Sikorsky S-92 helicopter equipped with a capture line and hook will fly by and, hopefully, snatch the booster out of the air—delivering it safely home for analysis and future use.
In the past, Rocket Lab has gone the conventional route and trawled the sea for boosters that fell into the ocean after launch, but Beck and his team are betting that the helicopter catch is a more effective and efficient way to reclaim parts. Rocket Lab ran a successful test and caught a dummy booster earlier this week; now, it’s time to see if it can pull off the real thing.
Rocket Lab will air a livestream of the mission on YouTube and its website. The company also usually provides mission status updates on its Twitter page.
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The insider battle for control of El Segundo-based rocket maker and government defense contractor Aerojet Rocketdyne is heating up.
In dueling, incendiary public letters to shareholders this week, Aerojet Rocketdyne executive chairman Warren Lichtenstein and CEO Eileen Drake accused each other of attempting to seize control of the company. Lichtenstein also filed yet another lawsuit against Drake and three Aerojet board members Wednesday, adding another legal case to the acrimonious boardroom battle.
In his letter on Tuesday, Lichtenstein described Drake as a “rogue” executive who he alleged violated the law by lying to investors. Drake defended herself in a separate shareholder letter published Wednesday, in which she called Lichtenstein’s allegations “baseless personal attacks.”
Drake, who was appointed CEO in 2015, is urging Aerojet shareholders to vote to keep her as CEO and approve an entirely new board of directors without Lichtenstein and his allies, while Lichtenstein is proposing his own slate of directors that would see Drake pushed out. Aerojet shareholders are set to have their say on the company's future at a meeting on June 21—though Lichtenstein on Tuesday proposed moving back that meeting to June 27, citing the pending resolution of his previous lawsuit against Drake.
The conflict between Aerojet’s chairman and CEO escalated earlier this year, when a planned $4.4 billion merger with the world’s largest defense contractor, Lockheed Martin, fell through after the Federal Trade Commission sued to block the deal. By February, Lockheed had caved to the FTC’s antitrust pressure and the merger was dead, igniting the conflict in Aerojet’s boardroom.
Lichtenstein and three fellow board directors first sued the company earlier this year, a drama that is now playing out in Delaware’s Court of Chancery with a trial expected in May. Drake and Aerojet then hired an independent counsel to investigate Lichtenstein, and countersued him in a bid to remove the chairman from the board. Aerojet’s lawsuit alleged Lichtenstein of doing the very same deeds he has accused Drake of: plotting to take over the board if the Lockheed merger failed and using his investment firm, major Aerojet shareholder Steel Partners Holdings, as leverage to propose new leadership.
Last week, Aerojet announced its largest-ever contract for its RL10 rocket engine, an order for 116 engines from the United Launch Alliance. The engines could fly on the ULA’s Vulcan Centaur rocket as soon as the end of this year.
Long Beach-based reusable rocket startup Rocket Lab has inked a contract with satellite company HawkEye 360 to launch three payloads into space beginning as soon as December.
Using its Electron rocket, Rocket Lab will send 15 of Virginia-based HawkEye 360’s radio frequency monitoring satellites into low Earth orbit across three separate missions starting "no earlier than December 2022," the company said Tuesday. Rocket Lab did not disclose financial details of its contract with HawkEye 360.
The first launch will be a "rideshare mission," according to Rocket Lab, that will send three HawkEye 360 satellites into space along with cargo from other, as-yet-undisclosed customers. Assuming the first launch is successful, Rocket Lab will launch two more dedicated Electron rockets through 2024, each carrying six HawkEye 360 satellites.
The first mission will launch from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va.—home to Rocket Lab's Launch Complex 2, which opened in late 2019. Nearby, Rocket Lab broke ground last week on a new 250,000-square-foot rocket production facility to build its Neutron launcher, which will be its largest rocket to date and, it hopes, a competitor to SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy. The company is developing the Neutron facility with the help of $45 million in funding from the state of Virginia.
In a statement, Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck said that he is looking forward to the first HawkEye 360 flight, which will be Rocket Lab's inaugural launch from Wallops Island. Founded in 2006, the startup also operates its Launch Complex 1 in Beck's native New Zealand.
“Operating multiple Electron pads across both hemispheres opens up incredible flexibility for our customers and delivers assured access to space, something we know is becoming increasingly critical as launch availability wanes worldwide,” Beck said.
One reason why Rocket Lab's time frame for the HawkEye 360 launches remains vague—and why the company has yet to launch from Wallops Island—is because it’s still waiting on NASA to grant it access to the space agency’s Autonomous Flight Termination Unit software, which is critical for takeoff. Rocket Lab said Tuesday that it is "encouraged by NASA’s recent progress in certifying" the software at Wallops Island.
“My confidence level is high, but it was high last year, too,” Beck told SpaceNews earlier this year. “I would be extraordinarily disappointed if NASA doesn’t meet their deliveries to enable us to launch this year.”
Rocket Lab is also gearing up for an ambitious test of its ability to recover and reuse its Electron rocket boosters after launch. The company will send 34 small satellites from several commercial operators into space, and then use a helicopter to attempt to catch the falling booster. The aptly-named (and "Hobbit"-themed) There and Back Again mission is expected to launch April 22,but could take place several days later if weather conditions aren’t optimal.
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