The Kiwi-American company then used its Photon spacecraft - or "satellite bus", housed in the Electron's third stage - to lift Capstone into progressively higher orbits over six sets of manoeuvres.
An artist impresion of Capstone in orbit around the moon. Image / Nasa
Last night's final burn saw the microwave-size Capstone separate from the Photon and deployed on its ballistic lunar transfer trajectory to the moon. That's a 1.3 million km journey that will take until November 13 and be managed by two US firms: Advanced Space and Terran Orbital (which designed and built Capstone)
Capstone's halo orbit will be a lopsided elliptical path that will take it as close as 1600km to the lunar surface and as far away as 68,260km.
Researchers expect this orbit to be a gravitational sweet spot in space – where the pull of gravity from Earth and the moon interact to allow for a nearly stable orbit.
That allowed physics to do most of the work of keeping a spacecraft in orbit around the moon.
If successful, the same orbit will be used by Nasa's Gateway, a planned small space station that the US space agency intended to use as a staging post for its Artemis programme to return astronauts to the moon's surface.
The Capstone mission, which Rocket Lab carried out for a keen $14 million, also marked an increasingly close relationship between Rocket Lab and Nasa.
Rocket Lab has a number of projects in the pipeline for the US space agency, including a contract (for an as-yet-undisclosed sum) to design and built two Photon spacecraft that will go into orbit around Mars in 2024, after being carried to the red planet by a Nasa-provided rocket.
The mission's aim is to shed light on how Mars lost its once-habitable atmosphere.
Rocket Lab will also co-lab with Nasa on the US space agency's 2024 "Escapade" mission to place two Rocket Lab-made spacecraft into orbit around Mars to study its atmosphere. Photo / Supplied
Rocket Lab also recently won a contract to make a radiation-hardened 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 survey the exosphere, the little-understood outermost layer of Earth's atmosphere).
CAPSTONE was our first lunar mission, but we ticked off plenty of other firsts too! The mission heritage gained on CAPSTONE sets us up well for upcoming missions to Mars and Venus ✨🛰️ pic.twitter.com/S99dZfZwGz
Rocket Lab did not put a value on the Glide contract, but it's part of an ongoing push to diversify its revenue from rocket launches to a lot of business in "space systems" too.
And it was possible because Rocket Lab bought SolAero, a New Mexico maker of solar components, for US$80m ($125m) last December, the fourth in a series of purchases of North American space system makers.
An artist impression of the Photon spacecraft that Rocket Lab will send to Venus next year. It will drop a probe into the planet's atmosphere to support the search for life. Image / Supplied
Beyond its Nasa-backed jaunt to Mars, Rocket Lab has a second interplanetary flight planned: its privately-funded mission to drop a probe into the atmosphere of Venus in a bid to confirm observations that indicated the potential presence of phosphine, a gas typically produced by living organisms.
