Posted on 05/15/2021 7:35:35 AM PDT by BenLurkin
A camera mounted on the Electron's upper stage showed stage separation 2 minutes and 35 seconds into the flight, followed by what appeared to be a brief ignition and a sharp sideways motion before shutting down. Rocket Lab confirmed a loss of telemetry from the rocket four minutes after liftoff.
Saturday's launch failure follows a failed launch in July 2020, which the company traced to a single faulty electrical connection. Rocket Lab's first Electron launch in 2017 failed to reach orbit due to a telemetry issue. Aside from those flights, Rocket Lab has seen 18 successful launches.
Rocket Lab launched the 58-foot-tall (18 meters) Electron booster at 7:11 a.m. EDT (1111 GMT) after just over an hour of delays due to high upper level winds. The mission was the company's 20th flight and nicknamed "Running Out Of Toes" to mark the milestone.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
Those satellite companies should have gone with SpaceX!!
We do not need one dominant company in space.
I think competition is what we finally have now. And I think what is happening is pretty amazing.
Just watching Elon Musk land two boosters within a second of each other on two landing pads was cool.
In 50 years NASA never did anything like that. But hey when it’s tax money just destroy every booster, every launch... you can just make a new one.
Instead of using them, they set them up as static displays.
I was told this while touring a NASA facility in Alabama.
They had one of them there.
Enormous waste.
CC
I’ve never heard of Rocket Lab.
I understand that was also an issue with an early missile.
You mean you don’t want a Weyland-Yutani Space Corporation?
“In 50 years NASA never did anything like that. But hey when it’s tax money just destroy every booster, every launch... you can just make a new one.”
Well, I am as big a critic of the space shuttle as anyone, but let’s be fair. It is only recently that the control and positioning systems required for this trick became available cheaply enough and small enough to make it practical. That said, the space shuttle was nothing but a boondoggle which only served to show how stupid it is to build a spacecraft that looks like an airplane just to gain some level of reusability. OTOH, I think what NASA has done with unmanned probes is nothing short of amazing.
Hobbits
A norcal rocket company that launches from New Zealand
The technology to do this probably would have been invented sooner if they had tried.
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