Rocket Lab Announces Reusability Plans For Electron Rocket
HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif., August 6, 2019 (Rocket Lab PR) — Rocket Lab, the global leader in dedicated small satellite launch, has revealed plans to recover and re-fly the first stage of its Electron launch vehicle. The move aims to enable Rocket Lab to further increase launch frequency by eliminating the need to build a new first stage for every mission.
Work on Rocket Lab’s Electron first stage reuse program began in late 2018, at the end of the company’s first year of orbital launches. The plan to reuse Electron’s first stage will be implemented in two phases. The first phase will see Rocket Lab attempt to recover a full Electron first stage from the ocean downrange of Launch Complex 1 and have it shipped back to Rocket Lab’s Production Complex for refurbishment.
The second phase will see Electron’s first stage captured mid-air by helicopter, before the stage is transported back to Launch Complex 1 for refurbishment and relaunch. Rocket Lab plans to begin first stage recovery attempts in the coming year.
A major step towards Rocket Lab’s reusability plans was completed on the company’s most recent launch, the Make It Rain mission, which launched on 29 June from Launch Complex 1. The first stage on this mission carried critical instrumentation and experiments that provided data to inform future recovery efforts. The next Electron mission, scheduled for launch in August, will also carry recovery instrumentation.
Rocket Lab Founder and Chief Executive Peter Beck says reusing Electron’s first stage will enable Rocket Lab to further increase launch frequency by reducing production time spent building new stages from scratch.
“From day one Rocket Lab’s mission has been to provide frequent and reliable access to orbit for small satellites. Having delivered on this with Electron launching satellites to orbit almost every month, we’re now establishing the reusability program to further increase launch frequency,” says Mr. Beck.
“Reusing the stage of a small launch vehicle is a complex challenge, as there’s little mass margin to dedicate to recovery systems. For a long time we said we wouldn’t pursue reusability for this very reason, but we’ve been able to develop the technology that could make recovery feasible for Electron. We’re excited to put that technology into practice with a stage recovery attempt in the coming year.”
52 responses to “Rocket Lab Announces Reusability Plans For Electron Rocket”
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“Reusing the stage of a small launch vehicle is a complex challenge, as there’s little mass margin”. Gosh small systems have so many handicaps when it comes to reuse. This is going to be interesting to see. They are already a unique system with their battery powered pumps. Can’t wait to see what the imaginative Kiwi’s have come up with.
One way you know you are successful is when everyone starts imitating you.
Check out Tim Dodd’s (Everyday Astronaut)YouTube chan he covers the story and goes into some depth on the sequence of Rocket Lab events.
It’s the Lock-Mart technique of plucking Vulcan engine pods off a parachute canopy with a helicopter. My bet is they use the same ship LM will use for the engine recovery. The US East Coast is going to be running mad with reusable rockets. The NOTAMs will be fun to read. Times are def not what they were 20 years ago in the launch community.
I’ll bet there’s already a Chinese program in the making that’ll be doing the same soon.
ULA is planning to pluck Vulcan engine pods out of the air with a helicopter, not LM. But it isn’t planning to do so until the mid- or late-2020’s. Rocket Lab is looking to start snagging stages from mid-air next year.
Further, the Electron S1’s dry mass is only a fraction the mass of a notional Vulcan engine pod so Electron’s reuse scheme can get by with a much smaller helo and a much smaller recovery ship.
Plus, RL’s two pads are in NZ and Wallops Island, VA. ULA launches out of Canaveral. No helo sharing. No ship sharing.
That said, you are quite correct that this is not your daddy’s Space Age. The entire last decade has been hugely different from the one that preceded it. The upcoming decade is going to make the one just finishing look like a warming-up exercise.
As for the Chinese, they’ll do their usual thing of waiting to see what works, then stealing that.
Is not LM a partner in ULA? Is not LM a large investor in Rocket Lab? Notice I did not speculate that the chopper would be common between them. I ran some basic numbers for the engine pod years back, and you’d want something like a Sea Knight, or V-22 Osprey.
a Sea Knight…
A V-22 might make more sense from a required range standpoint. We’ll have to see what the Vulcan flight profiles look like.
they will probably have to practice that a few times (if they can get a V22)…it has odd characteristics of the down wash…
I’m sure you’re right. To catch something coming down on a chute the optimal approach might have to involve putting the props/rotors in some intermediate position between straight up and straight ahead as one closes in – sort of a mid-air flare.
If the Vulcan is like the Atlas V in having the first stage burning longer and reaching a higher speed than the F9 S1 does, especially for heavy lifts, because strap-on solids will handle much of the first 90 seconds or so of flight, then the engine pod is going to be correspondingly further downrange than is the case for a typical F9 droneship recovery. And I think even droneship range is typically beyond what most helos can handle. It could very well wind up being the V-22 – maybe even with drop tanks in some cases – or punt.
There are giant Russian helos with more than sufficient lift capacity, but even they probably lack sufficient range. In any case, after all the hoo-raw about the RD-180, the last thing ULA should want to do is wind up dependent on some other bit of Russian hardware.
ULA was created by LM and Boeing with each parent company still owning a huge share of ULA. ULA is independent of its parents in its day to day operations.
Of course LM is a partner in ULA. It’s role, like that of the other partner, Boeing, seems to be exclusively to collect profit-sharing checks. ULA is developing Vulcan, not LM and not Boeing. So I found the attribution weird.
You indeed did not suggest shared use of a helo, just the ship. I pointed out that both could be quite a bit smaller in the case of Rocket Lab’s launches. In case I didn’t make myself sufficiently clear, the Rocket Lab setup – helo and ship – will be far too small for shared use with ULA anent Vulcan.
I also mentioned that the two companies will be operating from different spaceports a goodly distance apart. Given that RL intends to work toward a bi-weekly or perhaps even weekly launch cadence – and plans to achieve this years before Vulcan’s recoverable engine pod Mk.2 design reaches operational status, if it ever does – RL’s recovery assets are going to be far too busy to allow any side trips all the way to FL to support Vulcan launches even if, as I suspect, those prove infrequent.
Anent recovery assets, ULA is going to have to shift for itself – assuming it’s even still around by the time its partial recoverability scheme is due to go live.
Most of Rocket Lab launches are out of a quiet part of NZ, where the NOTAM hassles are much reduced – don’t even have to worry about the Auckland to Sth America flights, only a couple a day to/from Australia (which can route around easily enough).
Is there no NOTAM system in New Zealand? You need to protect the mariners too. The East Coast of the US is going to get busy.
If they launch due east, they are aiming at the rocket graveyard in the middle of the South Pacific, where the closest land is Pitcairn Island and that isn’t close at all. There is nothing to exclude from your exclusion zone out that way.
Of course there is (and for marine traffic, a violator delayed an earlier launch). It’s just that you don’t get push back from Airlines and other operators for blocking out a slice eastwards from Mahia for a few hours each day for a few consecutive days every couple of weeks. Which is why the launch sir is there. An earlier proposed site was south of Christchurch, which gives similar features.
they have it …there is just not that much air traffic to deal with 🙂
Anything that can spread the significant fixed costs of launcher production over multiple uses is good.
in the announcement he showed a picture of a hat and said he would have to eat it .. because he had stated he was not going to do reusable.
there are going to be a lot of different ideas in terms of reusing a first stage…which probably has some financial viability in terms of reuse…and someone will make a go of it in terms of significantly lowering cost
Yes. I am particularly eager to see what companies with vehicles intermediate in size and capability between the Electron and Falcon 9 come up with. Right now, that would be Firefly, Relativity and ABL. Future reusability plans for the notional Firefly Beta vehicle, if any develop, should prove especially fascinating.
“Cool” seems to have played no part in the Rocket Labs reusability decision. It was decided on the basis, first, of superior logistics and reduced manufacturing asset requirements for a given launch cadence and, second, to provide more margin against competitors, current and future.
If other smallsat launcher builders elect to follow SpaceX, Exos and Rocket Lab, in whatever way proves optimal for them, it will be because the economics and logistics of doing so prove superior to the status quo, not because it’s what all the cool kids are doing.
All that are needed are small thrusters to flip the stage so it’s pointing Earthward, arse-end foremost. RL seems to have left this step out of its animation. The engines aren’t needed for this purpose and won’t be used even as dynamic TPS because there won’t be any remaining propellant. That’s one of the major differences between RL’s notional recovery scheme and that in use by SpaceX.
There are minuses as well as pluses. But Mr. Beck’s presentation made it very clear that the pluses have been determined to vastly outweigh the minuses in this case, else RL would not have elected to proceed as it announced it intends to do. Global optimization of any system is always a matter of seeing how the pluses and minuses net out and not becoming tunnel-visioned anent one or the other..
Until they get hardware back and see how much refurbishment is required, they will not really know how much money they can save with this scheme. It’s a good test, but the outcome is far from certain.
There are few certainties in life. The real question is what size are the error bars. Rocket Lab seems to think they’re small enough in this case to justify making the move to reusability.. Are they certain to be right? No.
Being in business is like surfing. Paddling out is pretty predictable. Things get very real-time and dynamic once you’re actually up on the board. Elon is trying to surf the wave of the future. So far, he’s been the second coming of Mickey Dora. Now Peter Beck is looking to show us all some moves.
Mr Beck offered to eat a RocketLab cap. He fully admits the contradiction.
Edit: Whoops, Vlad made that point below and I did not see it.
We shall likely never know. Their success may have attracted more investment and upset the original experiment. Electron was developed with Falcon refurb in full view. What was also in full view was SpaceX not offering a small sat batch launch service when they very well could have. I think that variable should also be considered as well.
If the initial development money was much greater than estimated I’d have expected RocketLab to simply charge more money for a launch. With a reasonably paced launch schedule they could make back a inflated R&D investment. They’ve had a near monopoly on small sat boutique launch for 3 years now. Considering that with SpaceX you’re riding on a bus with everyone else, RocketLab still offers a boutique product that they can monopolize.
Businessmen and engineers are not immune to groupthink, and are prone to following fads. Business men are especially vulnerable to following a fad. That’s in plain sight to see everywhere. Starting a major development cycle after having just completed another is either long term thinking, falling into a fad, or seeing a major savings that will return the investment yet to come. Beck gives a fast rundown of vehicle production in New Zealand and the USA. It seems they can meet the current real world launch rate no problem. However at the end of presentation he suggests that re-use will double RocketLab’s effective production rate, as if he foresees a time when demand will exceed supply. Is that foresight based on current negotiations, or wishful thinking?
Meanwhile, in the spirit of moving the goal post. It’s being reported that next week’s 200 meter hop will be Starhoppers last flight. Then the Starship MK1 with three Raptors comes up to bat. ?
The Gorilla is flexing it muscles as it wakes up – Old Space beware. ??
that was an enormous investment for not much data
Probably not that expensive of an investment the way SpaceX is run. And it appears that it was able to tell them what they needed to know. Or will need to know if it’s next flight is successful.
Starhopper was built out of stainless steel sheet and tube and a bunch of parts from decommissioned F9 boosters. It’s a Flying Bedstead, not an LM.
packing our bags for mars wagons ho
Didn’t cost that much. Literally a water tower company put it together. They did a lot of ground work to exercise TVC, tank pressurization, valves as well. Same platforms and jigs are being used for Mk1 SS.
then someone made some money on it…goodfor them. we got our 45 foot tower from a company that was installing one for a helicopter base camp down the street and it turned out it was to small…they found that out before they had put it up but it was all “made” ready to go…so we bought it from them for a goodprice and they put it up 🙂
Interesting. I would have figured on one or two additional hops for Starhopper. Things must be proceeding even faster than I thought they would. Wouldn’t be the first time SpaceX has caught me out like that. Damn, this is fun!
its been a long time getting from there to here…and sadly the time has not almost come, its still a bit more to go 🙂
ALL trends toward reusability are good, as true reusability is essential to getting cost down to some level lower then now. How low one can go is dependent on the technology and how far it can be stretched and the money there to do it, ie the customer base
the big question here is 1) is their the customer base that pays for all this 2) can the mix of technologies and operational modes be found which makes it cost effective.
so far we are no where near to reusability but refurbishment and its unclear (SpaceX fans explode) that the cost have been worth it…but at some point they will be..
the challenges here are interesting, the first stage probably masses out less then 1/2 of the fairings of SpaceX and they have the chance of a more down range operation which changes the boostback numbers..
anyway…good luck
Then your nose needs servicing. Rocket Lab’s business plan has hardly “failed.” It is, instead, being improved based on experience. That’s what good companies do once they start actual operations and gain some experience. Business plans, like war plans, tend not to survive initial contact with the enemy.
I have no idea who you might be talking about anent electric cars. The only stand-out entrepreneur in the field is Elon Musk and he is most emphatically neither a wannabe nor a snowflake. He’s also middle-aged now so he’s not young either.
There is apparently some nascent electric truck company looking to compete with Tesla – I don’t recall its name and know nothing of its founder. I’ve seen pictures of a prototype pickup but, as far as I know, there is no production yet underway. And I won’t be particularly surprised if there never is. There are all sorts of little companies that turn out concept vehicles for the auto show circuit. Some have been around for decades. That doesn’t make them car companies.
All the other non-Tesla electric cars come from long-established players in the ICE automotive business. If there are a whole gaggle of new, copycat electric car companies out there, they have certainly escaped my attention.
Come to that, there was no stampede toward hybrid rockets 15 years ago or any other time either. Gilmour in Australia is the only other company I know of besides Virgin Galactic doing any serious work with hybrids these days.
Your opinion may have some validity anent certain categories of business, but electric cars and hybrid rockets aren’t two of them.
Yes, that is normative for Silicon Valley companies. And Silicon Valley has a history going back about seven decades now. The companies that have made a success of this approach are now household names and represent a very disproportionate total of the market cap on major stock exchanges.
In businesses for which that model works, it works very well. One of the most important things about SpaceX, Tesla and Amazon is that they have all shown that a Silicon Valley-style business is capable of success in fields other than electronics or software – aerospace, automobiles and retailing, respectively
Things change. Companies that can swing with their times, succeed. Those that can’t, fail. Imagining that one can figure out the future down to three or four decimal places before starting out is an almost certain recipe for early disaster.
Not censored, just started it from after that point.
I didn’t mention SpaceDev because it is now long gone and was, in any case, the original motor supplier to Virgin Galactic.
I’ll take your word for it that there are a lot of hybrid rocket outfits in Europe and even elsewhere. I hadn’t heard of any of the ones on your list. Couldn’t find anything at all about AeC. Copenhagen Suborbital’s website has no technical details at all so they could be using Mentos and diet soda for all I know.
Are any of your more than 40 papers available on-line?
Francesco:
If you hang around here long enough, you will come to realize duheagle thinks he knows more about every subject on the face of the earth than even those who are in the profession (any and every profession) and have been doing something most of their professional lives. Subject doesn’t matter, pick anything. He will debate you and imply you have no idea what you are talking about. You could have been doing something for 30 years, and have the process tweaked down to the fastest possible time and the lowest possible cost, but Eagle would happily tell you you have no idea what you are doing. But at least he claims not to be pompous, so I guess in his own mind he doesn’t really realize what an argumentative ass he can be. Just get a BIG bowl of popcorn and sit back and enjoy the hilarity of it all. Otherwise it will drive you nuts!
Francesco,
Lee has that impression because I disagree with him so often and because he so seldom has a rational response to make. I’ll offer his above comment as evidence.
There are actually plenty of people who frequent these forums that I generally agree with. That applies without reference to whatever their professional experience has been or what their academic credentials are – neither of which I typically know in any case.
But I will readily admit to having no patience with attempts at argument from authority. No matter what one’s profession or credentials, reliance on those alone to make a case is to make no case. It also strongly implies that there is, in fact, no logical case to be made. In short, I have little tolerance for arrogance, pomposity and poses of high dudgeon as substitutes for facts and logic when making any sort of case on any sort of subject.
Point proven. He even thinks he knows more about why we disagree than I do, and why I feel the way I do about him. Pretty much a classic case of unchecked hubris. Now I’m sure he’ll tell us all that I don’t know what hubris means. So to save him the trouble, here’s the definition:
hubris
—noun
excessive pride or self-confidence; arrogance.
Pretty much fits him to a tee.
The acid test for actual hubris is whether the allegedly hubristic person is right or not. “Pride (hubris) goeth before a fall” as the Good Book says. No fall, no hubris. When I’m wrong, I ‘fess up. Others seem to prefer whinging and name-calling. That’s called “blaming the messenger” where I come from.
Wrong. The *definition* of hubris is quoted above. No further qualifiers are required. Your very reply above just further proves your hubris.
I did find some references to eAc. But they started in hybrid rocketry almost 25 years ago, long before SpaceShipOne was a thing. The company seems to have tied up with an outfit called Cesaroni Technology, Inc. at one point to jointly make small N2O-plastic hybrid engines, but nothing seems to have come of this as the website for their joint venture hasn’t been updated in over 15 years. Cesaroni still seems to be in business making solid motors for the sport rocketry market – the sorts of things one gets into when one has outgrown Estes.
Whether the product of the pursuit of “cool” or some other motivation, makers of hybrid rockets have generally stuck to rather small engines. The biggest one eAc ever seems to have made was only 30 cm in dia. – a foot in Imperial units. Even Gilmour’s biggest motors produce less than a third the thrust of the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo motor.
The bigger a hybrid motor gets the more it seems to suffer from combustion instabilities. The SpaceShipTwo motor’s serial difficulties in this respect have been behind most of the decade-plus delay in that vehicle entering commercial service.
Big liquid-fuel rocket engines have also been subject to scale-related combustion instablilities, but at least three solutions have been found for these. I am unaware of any comparable development anent hybrids. Perhaps you are aware of current work to address this issue?
You are quite correct that there is certainly no question that the future – even the near future – is likely to produce surprises in the rocket/space fields. The history of SpaceX alone is enough to validate this thesis.
As more innovative people that self finance become interested. I expect that there will be considerable disruption outside the SpaceX bubble. There are a lot of space systems that are done a certain way because it worked once and financially conservative operation dictates that going out on a limb is risky. Most successful businessmen are somewhat risk averse when they reach the stage of being able to afford aerospace investment.
I have participated in a few conceptual concepts on engine and spacecraft tech that would be game changing IFthey worked. Cheaper and higher performing engines than the SpaceX offerings. Super high Isp vacuum only systems. Asteroid diversion techniques and such. I do not have the credibility, field experience, or finances to find which of them do and do not work. Someone that can afford the risk and can assemble the technical talent to investigate will find better ways of doing almost everything over a period of years and decades.
To give one example that probably no one believes at this time. A human with acceleration couch and life support for a couple of days masses under 500 pounds. If launch prices drop to $500.00 a pound, it should be possible to launch to LEO and land humans for +=$250K at some point with a reasonable vehicle design.
As I noted to Francesco above, the number of people with the talent to step out onto the first ice floe in the river, then nimbly step from one to another to finally cross with feet dry is a rare breed. There are far more people capable of doing the first step, but by the time of the third or fourth step, most have already fallen into the river, frozen and drowned. It’s only the exceptional who get across.
Couldn’t agree more, except for the “will be a lot” part. There have always been far more failures than long-term successes in any business sector based on “hot” new technology – cars, airplanes, radios, TV sets, etc. I was a computer journalist back in the day and the first decade or so of the PC business was a feast of overnight sensations that quickly crashed and burned. There is certainly no rational argument that NewSpace, in general, won’t turn out the same way. And, as we have seen, it already is turning out the same way.
A modest fraction of such firms fail because they were scams. Most fail because their engineering just isn’t up to snuff. Even firms with good engineering can fail if the founders lack the requisite business acumen to handle the non-engineering aspects of running an entrepreneurial business. Life is tough. Life as a business founder is tougher.
Too many of the commenters on space forums don’t seem to draw much, if any, distinction among the various classes of NewSpace failures. Many of these same folks also seem inclined to the belief that Elon Musk – in particular – has simply been unreasonably fortunate rather than uniquely exceptional.
This is what I call the, “He was lucky – anybody could have done that,” school of business commentary. There was a lot of this tripe peddled during the PC boom of the 70’s and 80’s too. It was crap then and it’s still crap now. If just anybody could do this stuff, then a lot of anybodies would be doing this stuff. It’s not as though “this stuff” doesn’t pay well, after all.
The fact that there is no such army of do-ers extant should suggest, to anyone with even a modest amount of sense – that “anybody” can’t do this stuff and that the vanishingly few who can do this stuff are exceptional.
And it is that fact alone which precludes there ever being a lot of disrupters.
Well, you seemed to imply something like that in a couple places so I gave you credit for it. I did so by way of complimenting you, by the way. But I’ll take it all back if you really insist.