Rocket Lab's second launch of 2019 a success
Sunday, 5 May 2019
Rocket Lab has successfully carried out its second rocket launch of 2019.
The company launched the 18m tall Electron rocket at 6pm, from the company's Launch Complex 1 on the Mahia Peninsula.
At 6.57pm, Rocket Lab's Kiwi founder Peter Beck confirmed it had deployed its payload on twitter.
'Perfect flight, complete mission success, all payloads deployed!' he wrote on Twitter.
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The Electron rocket was carrying three satellites for US military projects. The payload weighed more than 180kg, the heaviest Rocket Lab has yet handled.
The first satellite was the Space Plug and Play Architecture Research CubeSat-1 (SPARC-1), sponsored by the US Air Force Research Laboratory Space Vehicles Directorate in a joint Swedish-United States experiment to explore technology developments in avionics miniaturisation.
Perfect flight, complete mission success, all payloads deployed!!
— Peter Beck (@Peter_J_Beck) May 5, 2019
The second was the Falcon Orbital Debris Experiment (Falcon ODE), sponsored by the United States Air Force Academy. It will evaluate ground-based tracking of space objects, such as space junk.
The third is the Harbinger commercial satellite built by York Space Systems to demonstrate the ability of an experimental commercial system to meet government space capability requirements.
York Space System's website links to the Spacenews.com website that Harbinger is 'designed to test whether an inexpensive commercial satellite equipped with a synthetic aperture radar can quickly deliver Earth imagery to soldiers'.
Successful staging, 2nd stage ignition and faring separation of @RocketLab #Electron. Awesome nighttime views of the flight. That's one hot rocket! pic.twitter.com/Gs6XrJQSpp
— KiwiSpace Foundation (@kiwispace) May 5, 2019
Originally down for Saturday, the company delayed this launch for 24 hours.
Rocket Lab is a private New Zealand company, and operates the world's only private commercial orbital launch site, from which the company can launch its Electron rocket up to 120 times per year.
The company gives a fresh name to each of its launch missions.
This latest mission was called 'That's a funny looking cactus' with the mission badge showing a Kiwi chatting with a Roadrunner bird in the Arizona Desert, which is a nod to the military clients for the mission.
Rocket Lab has a global team of more than 400 highly-skilled engineers and technicians.
Investors in Rocket Lab include Khosla Ventures, DCVC (Data Collective), Bessemer Venture Partners, Future Fund, Greenspring Associates, ACC, K1W1, Promus Ventures and Lockheed Martin, which is excluded from the NZ Super Fund for providing services to the US military's nuclear weapons capacity.