Rocket Lab Completes First Launch From U.S. Soil
Rocket Lab completed its first launch from U.S. soil as an Electron rocket roared off its launch pad in Virginia and placed three signal collection satellites into orbit.
Electron lit up the night sky as it headed north along the East Coast after lifting off from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) at 6 p.m. EST. The rocket successfully orbited the Hawk 6A, Hawk 6B and Hawk 6C satellites for HawkEye 360.
“100% mission success, huge congratulations to the Rocket Lab team, @NASA_Wallops @Virginia_Space @FAANews @hawkeye360. Looks like everything works in the northern hemisphere also,” CEO Peter Beck tweeted.
The only drama came in the form of a delay in confirming that Electron’s kick stage had fired as planned and deployed the three satellites. Problems with a ground station in Australia meant controller had to wait until the stage made contact with a ground station on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.
It was Rocket Lab’s first launch of 2023. The company set a record of nine launches last year.
Electron’s successful launch means Rocket Lab now has three active launch complexes in two nations. The company conducted all 32 of its previous launches from Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand where the company has two launch pads. Rocket Lab began as a New Zealand company, but it later incorporated in the United States.
Rocket Lab has said that the new launch complex at MARS will allow it to better service its U.S. customers, who will no longer have to ship their satellites to New Zealand.
Rocket Lab did not attempt to recover the Electron first stage for later reuse as it has on previous flights. Two attempts by a helicopter to capture first stages as they descended under parachutes failed. The stages were later recovered from the Pacific Ocean.
The successful launch raised Electron’s record to 30 successes and three failures. The rocket has placed 155 satellites into space since the first successful launch on Jan. 21, 2018.
In addition to launching Electrons from MARS, Rocket Lab will also build its larger Neutron rocket at a production facility near the launch complex.
MARS is run by the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority, a state agency also known as Virginia Space. The spaceport is part of NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility.
Northrop Grumman launches Antares and Minotaur orbital rockets from Wallops. NASA also conducts suborbital sounding rocket flights from the facility.
11 responses to “Rocket Lab Completes First Launch From U.S. Soil”
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Knock on wood, but I really think RL is going to be the tent-pole for Wallops. NG has no ambition at all.
Well, NorGrum has enough ambition to be trying to gin up a new version of Antares with Firefly. The two annual launches of Cygnus to ISS shouldn’t get in Rocket Lab’s way much, even assuming RL still intends to launch Neutrons from the same pad. But NorGrum may even harbor ambitions of finding non-ISS commercial business for its new Antares that failed to materialize for its previous versions. Perhaps Antares 330 could find a bit of business for DoD if the rules for NSSL Phase 3 allow for ala carte task orders.
I really wanted NoGrum’s OMEGA or Athena III in place of Vulcan for the downselect.
Yes Vulcan is in my state—-but I want solid industry as healthy as can be.
Solids are a poor fit for rapid, low-cost reuse.
poor choice for rapid…do you know what ICBMs are made of here?
Reuse is the salient point. ICBMs are by definition not reusable.
Re-use is like recycling…a religion even Musk himself ignores from time to time.
A want at least a few big all solids like Athena III in silos in Florida to launch on warning in case we get another Ouamuamua…not even Falcon could scramble that fast.
Reuse is not a religion. It’s the norm for nearly all forms of transportation. It isn’t in spaceflight because of a rush for geopolitical concerns, which set a poor paradigm henceforth.
There are numerous other ways to accomplish rapid interceptions, few of which require solids. Far better than keeping a few SRBs for warnings is having a vast space infrastructure, with numerous launches from Earth and many facilities in cislunar space and beyond, that can both build and service spacecraft. That’s a far more forward-looking investment by far.
Better to have a fueled up Starship in LEO ready to go.
That wouldn’t have been OmegA. Nothing solid about it except the fuel grain. Athena III wasn’t in the running for NSSL Phase 2 because it was abandoned as a concept back in the 1990s. It was pretty dinky anyway. Compared to either of those, Vulcan looks pretty good.
The game is afoot!