The first lunar mission to lift off from New Zealand has been successfully launched.
Rocket Lab launched NASA’s Capstone microsatellite on an Electron rocket from Mahia at 9:55 p.m. yesterday. In a message, the Kiwi-American company said the launch was “flawless”.
A small spacecraft from Rocket Lab called the Photon – which also serves as the upper stage of the Electron – will now carry the microwave-sized Capstone in a series of higher and higher orbits than to the Moon.
All according to plan, on Nov. 13, it will put Capstone into an experimental halo orbit around the moon (a skewed ecliptic path that will take it as close as 1,600 miles to the lunar surface and up to 68,260 miles).
If all goes according to plan, NASA will later place a small space station in the same orbit as a precursor to the return of astronauts to the moon under the US Space Agency’s Artemis program.
The cost of Artemis is staggering – some $93 billion over 13 years.
However, the launch of Rocket Lab’s Capstone will cost NASA just $14 million as the Kiwi-American company once again aims to showcase its high-tech but low-cost smarts.
This launch is crucial for Rocket Lab because the previous Photon has been used as a “space bus” that puts microsatellites into proper orbit. This will be the first time a photon will travel to another celestial body.
It also marks an increasingly close relationship between Rocket Lab and NASA.
Rocket Lab has a number of projects in the pipeline, including a contract (for an undisclosed amount) to design and build two Photon spacecraft that will go into orbit around Mars in 2024, after being launched by a NASA-provided rocket. . The mission’s goal is to shed light on how Mars lost its once habitable atmosphere.
Rocket Lab also recently won a contract to create a radiation-hard solar panel array for NASA’s Glide spacecraft, due to launch in 2025.
Glide (an acronym for Global Lyman-alpha Imagers of the Dynamic Exosphere) will explore the exosphere, the little-understood outer layer of Earth’s atmosphere).
Rocket Lab didn’t value the Glide contract, but it’s part of an ongoing effort to diversify its revenues from rocket launches to many “space systems” business. And it was possible because last December Rocket Lab bought SolAero, a New Mexico solar component manufacturer, for $80 million ($125 million), the fourth of a series of purchases from North American space system makers.
And Rocket Lab’s new Launch Complex 2 in Virginia — soon to be launched for its first time — is in NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility.
Capstone’s launch comes after a month of mixed fortunes for Rocket Lab’s rivals.
SpaceX, owned by Elon Musk, managed to launch two Falcon 9 launches within 15 hours (a rapid-fire capability Rocket Lab hopes to match with its recently opened second launch pad on Mahia), while a failed launch by Astra destroyed two Nasa satellites.
Rocket Lab shares, which traded in reverse at $10 last August and hit $18.69 the following month, recently traded at $4.10.
While the Kiwi-American company recently reported that its advance bookings had risen to $550 million, and that it had received major funding from both the U.S. military ($34 million) and the state of Virginia ($69 million) to support its new, much larger Neuron rocket, which will first launch in 2024, has been overtaken by the general Tech Wreck 2.0 downdraft.
† By Chris Keall