[ad_1]
WASHINGTON – The first launch of Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket from a site in the United States will not take place until 2021 due to problems with the flight termination system that NASA requires for use of the rocket.
Rocket Lab planned to conduct the first launch from its Launch Complex (LC) 2 on Wallops Island, Virginia this year. The company completed the launch site in December 2019, saying it currently plans to perform the first launch there, of a U.S. military space test program mission called STP-27RM, in the second quarter of 2020.
Preparations for that launch were slowed by the pandemic, but Rocket Lab said it was planning a spring launch in the fall. The company performed a dress rehearsal of the launch in the spring, including a static fire test of the rocket’s nine first stage engines.
One reason for the delay, Rocket Lab said, was that it was waiting for NASA to certify the autonomous flight termination system (AFTS) that will be used on the rocket to ensure range safety. NASA monitors the launch range at the Wallops Flight Facility, where the LC-2 is located. “There is a very long certification process that, frankly, we probably underestimated how long it would take,” Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck said in an interview in August.
That certification process is ongoing. In a November 10 speech at a Maryland Space Business roundtable webinar, David Pierce, director of NASA Wallops, mentioned preparations for the first Rocket Lab launch as part of an overview of the facility’s activities. “We are really proud of our work with Rocket Lab,” he said. “We are working hard to support Rocket Lab with a launch in ’21.”
Asked later about AFTS certification, Pierce said the engineers had been on schedule with system development over the summer despite the pandemic. “When they sent the unit in for software review, we encountered some errors,” he said. That review involved teams at NASA’s Katherine Johnson Independent Verification and Validation Facility, the Federal Aviation Administration, Vandenberg Air Force Base, and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
Engineers are now working to address those problems, the number or severity of which they haven’t investigated. “We expect that, with the current rate of code development and error correction, we should be ready to certify that unit in the first half of ’21,” he said.
That unit, he added, will also be available to other companies launching from Wallops. “We are in this for the long haul,” he said. “We recognize that this is a revolutionary technology, so we want to do it and release it to private industry as soon as it is safe to do so.”
Rocket Lab spokesperson Morgan Bailey confirmed on November 12 that completing the AFTS is the final step before the company is ready for launch from Wallops. “The launch vehicle and platform are ready for launch,” he said. “The final step is NASA’s certification of their AFTS and the timing for this to be completed is guided by NASA.”
Rocket Lab’s upcoming milestone is the company’s first attempt to recover Electron’s first stage after launch. That mission, called “Return to Sender,” is now scheduled to launch no earlier than November 18 from the company’s LC-1 launch site in New Zealand.
The company plans to conduct recovery efforts, as part of its plans to reuse the Electron first stage, initially only at its launch site in New Zealand. However, Beck said the company plans to catch up on early stages as well during LC-2 launches.
“The plan is to work through all the development of the initial recovery up to LC-1 because it’s just a much simpler range,” he said. “But once we’ve got it all sorted out, there’s no reason why we don’t bring it to LC-2 as well.”
Source link
