Can’t win 'em all:
After a second stage failure, Rocket Lab loses seven satellites
Rocket Lab had been doing pretty well, with 11 flawless launches in a row. But space is hard, and their 13th launch failed.
It’s not clear why yet, but from the feed it’s apparent the engine shut down at some point. The speed stops increasing, and the altitude only increases slightly (coasting upward) before decreasing again. The failure happened shortly before the scheduled “battery hot swap”, so it’s possible the problem was related to that.
As a reminder, the Electron rocket uses electric pumps for the propellant, and lithium batteries to power them. The second stage has two sets of batteries, jettisoning one of them when depleted. The switch is called a hot swap.
It appears the rocket continued telemetry even after the failure, so hopefully the problem will be relatively easy to diagnose. Rocket Lab is one of the few newspace startups that seems likely to survive.
Rocket Lab’s problem likely ‘baked in’ months ago
Peter Beck seemed to share the sentiment I expressed above:
Beck said the Electron was heavily monitored by instruments and because it had failed ‘‘gracefully’’ (in other words it didn’t blow up) there were tens of thousands of data channels that were intact and available to analyse.
‘‘The good news is that we had huge amounts of data. Sometimes in this industry there’s kind of an abrupt end - everything is fine and then it’s not and it’s very hard to piece together what happened but this wasn’t the case for us.’’
Still no real news but hopefully they can make rapid progress. My money’s still on the battery hot swap, even if the timing doesn’t quite seem right. I think it’s likely the hot swap is an extended process and it failed at one of the early stages. A graceful shutdown of thrust basically means the pumps stopped, and there are only so many possibilities there.
kiwis in space now? wow they’ll let anyone in the joint these days eh? brings new meaning to there goes the neighborhood 