Rocket Lab team ‘just incredible’ in lockdown
AUCKLAND: Imagine using your garage to build a rocket to send satellites into space.
That is what Rocket Lab staff had to do in New Zealand when the country went into lockdown and production had to stop at the factory.
‘‘Mega programmes’’ like going to the moon did not stop for something like Covid19, Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck told RNZ.
‘‘Planetary alignment does not stop for Covid, so you’ve got a window you have to hit and you just have to hit it.’’
One Friday afternoon the team just packed their gear up, took it home and everyone just ploughed through their work, doing what needed to be done, he said.
‘‘The team were just incredible.’’
‘‘I liken Rocket Lab to a cockroach — you just cannot stamp it out no matter what you do, no matter what spray you have you just cannot stamp it out.’’
Mr Beck, formerly of Invercargill, said the launch for Nasa of a spacecraft to the moon about April next year would be the lab’s biggest project of 2021.
‘‘It’s a very complicated mission. Going to the moon is no joke, it is tough stuff.’’
From a gravitational perspective, the moon was very ‘‘lumpy’’ but the moon orbit Rocket Lab was assisting with enabled infrastructure to go into a stable orbit, Mr Beck said.
‘‘The idea with that is you put space stations and fuelling depots and everything in that orbit so that you can go not only to the moon but you can go to
Mars and further into our solar system.
‘‘This particular spacecraft is the very first spacecraft that will go into that orbit, to test it all out and make sure it’s safe for humans to use and return to the moon in 2024.’’
A twostagetoorbit vehicle, the Electron launch vehicle carried about 300kg of satellite into lowEarth orbit and sometimes beyond, Mr Beck said.
Its first stage represented about 80% of the entire mass of the rocket.
‘‘Generally its life is around 160 seconds.’’
While its life was short, it was reusable, changing the economics of space launch and enabling Rocket Lab to produce rockets faster.
‘‘The Holy Grail here is to capture the rocket with a helicopter, swing it back to the launch site, gas it up, charge it up and go again. That’s the ultimate scenario.’’
Every 30 days a rocket came off the production line, Reusing it even once was doubling production value, Mr Beck said. Mahia Peninsula is the fourthbusiest space port in the world at the moment — the Electron rocket was the fourthmost launched rocket in the world in 2019.
‘‘The one thing about being a small island nation is not only is it a Covid beater but it’s also fantastic for going to space because you don’t have to interrupt air travel and shipping and all of those kinds of things which really severely gates launch frequency in other countries.’’
The Venus mission — with the sole purpose of finding life — was not going anywhere, Mr Beck said.
‘‘We’re not as naive to think that we’re going to do one mission to Venus and find life. However, we have the resources to try so we just absolutely have to try,’’ he said.
‘‘If you thought going to the moon was difficult, think about going to Venus. That’s a whole other gig.’’
‘‘You have to allow for light in your calculations and the margin of error to be able to launch from Earth and successfully navigate the solar system to arrive at Venus at exactly the right time, then deploy a probe and that probe be exactly at the right angle of attack into Venus’ atmosphere, sample the atmosphere at the right time and then hopefully be in the right place in the atmosphere at the right time to sample something useful.
‘‘And then maybe it will have life in it. If you stack it all up, it’s just an insanely difficult thing but it has the chance of answering the question ‘are we the only life in the universe?’ ’’