For this mission it will lift off from New Zealand on its way to a sun-synchronous orbit 520 kilometers high. The Electron is 18 meters tall the bottom 12 meters are the first stage. It’s not a foregone conclusion that the first capture attempt will be a success.” “We’ve practiced and practiced all of the individual puzzle pieces, and now it’s putting them together. “You have to position the helicopter in exactly the right spot, you have to know exactly where the stage is going to be coming down, you have to be able to slow it enough,” she says. They reason that because this isn’t a game of horseshoes, close is not good enough. The team, in its determination to minimize its odds of dropping the ball, so to speak, has pushed back the launch several times in order to wait out inclement weather. It will then be brought back to base, seared by the heat of reentry but inwardly intact, for possible refurbishment and reuse. Iits next flight will carry 34 commercial satellites-and instead of being dropped in the Pacific, the spent first stage will be snared in midair by a helicopter as it descends by parachute.
SpaceX has famously been landing its Falcon 9 boosters on drone ships off the Florida coast- mind-bending to watch but very hard to pull off. Making those boosters reusable-saving them from a saltwater grave, and therefore saving a lot of money-has been a goal of aerospace engineers since the early space age. Earth’s gravity is so stubborn that, by necessity, two-thirds of the rocket is its first stage-and it has historically ended up as trash on the ocean floor after less than 3 minutes of flight. Rocket Lab, a company with two launch pads on the New Zealand coast and another awaiting use in Virginia. Take, for example, the Electron booster made by The longest journey begins with a single step, and that step gets expensive when you’re in the space business.