Rocket Lab is about to attempt a first stage of recovery

Rocket Lab said Thursday that it will attempt to recover the first stage of its Electron rocket for the first time with its next mission, scheduled to take off in mid-November.

This step follows a series of tests during which Rocket Lab focused towards a full recovery. During these first tests, the engineers deployed the parachutes from the first stage to maximum load and collected data when two previous rockets returned through “the wall,” which is what the company calls the high heat and pressure of re-entry at speed. supersonic.

Company founder Peter Beck said during a conference call with reporters that he wasn’t sure what the company would fish from the ocean. It could be an almost intact first stage or, he admitted, “a smoking stump”. The key to this test, he said, was to collect data on the parachute system.

Beck announced the company’s plans to begin using its small Electron rocket just over a year ago, saying the goal was to effectively double the vehicle’s production in the face of customer demand. “We are seeing production lead times getting shorter and a stage is rolling out of the factory every 30 days,” he said. “But in reality, we are nowhere near keeping up with our customer demand.”

His engineers developed a plan whereby the first stage would launch and separate from the second Electron stage, as usual, at an altitude of 80 km and then use the thrusters of the reaction control system to reorient the re-entry vehicle, with the engine section at the forefront. Unlike SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, Electron’s nine first stage engines will not fire. (SpaceX is the only company to successfully recover a first phase.)

As the Electron rocket descends further down into the atmosphere, a drogue parachute will deploy, followed by a main parachute. Hopefully, the rocket should splash into the ocean at less than 10 meters per second.

At least that’s the plan. With the upcoming mission, dubbed “Return to Sender,” the company will retrieve the vehicle from the ocean and return it to its factory in New Zealand to see what the first phase is in.

“Parachutes aren’t trivial things to fix,” Beck said. “Whenever you throw away a piece of fabric at a speed slightly below the speed of sound, it’s always a little interesting. I’ll stop being nervous once we get it back to the factory.”

The company will likely need to fine-tune Electron’s hardware and software, Beck said, and that should improve future recovery efforts. Once the company is able to bring back the first stage, the final step will be to take the vehicle in mid-air, using a helicopter: this will avoid water damage to the vehicle from the ocean. The company has already successfully practiced this maneuver by capturing a mock rocket stage with a helicopter.

“I’m sure there will be a lot of work on the heat shields and various parts that we will need to fix,” he said. “When we have reached the point where we have something that is in a condition where we really care that it doesn’t get wet, we will start carrying the helicopter.”

This may take several flights, but the company has many commercial missions to test this technology on. Beck said the cost for Electron’s carrying capacity to incorporate a parachute, heat shield, reaction control systems and other measures is only 15 kilograms.

The “Return to Sender” mission will deliver 30 small satellites to various orbits, and the two-week launch window opens on November 15th. The downstream recovery attempt will take place approximately 400 km from the launch site, in the Pacific Ocean.