Milestone 10th launch of the year as normal service resumes

Electron on the pad at Mahia for “The Moon God Awakens” launch planned for between 5pm and 7pm tomorrow. Picture by Rocket Lab

After a three-month break, space company Rocket Lab has confirmed a launch is good to go from Māhia, tomorrow.

It will be the company’s first launch since a failed mission in September. The failure led to the company suspending launch operations from Māhia until an investigation was completed.

“The Moon God Awakens” mission is scheduled to launch from Pad B at Rocket Lab’s Māhia space port, between 5pm and 7pm tomorrow.

It will carry a single satellite for iQPS, a Japan-based Earth imaging company.

“Named after the Japanese god of the moon, the QPSSAR-5 satellite TSUKUYOMI-I is a synthetic-aperture radar satellite that will collect high-resolution images of Earth,” a company statement said.

“The satellite will join another iQPS satellite in orbit that will ultimately be a 36-satellite constellation capable of monitoring Earth at specific fixed points, every 10 minutes.

“The mission will be Rocket Lab’s 10th launch of 2023, exceeding our previous annual launch record of nine.

“The Moon God Awakens” will be Rocket Lab’s 42nd Electron launch overall.

Last month the United States-based company completed an investigation into the failed mission in September, finding it was down to a rare scientific phenomenon.

It has since implemented two key corrective measures — one designed to improve testing on the ground and another to eliminate the possibility of comparable arcs occurring in flight should similar faults evade the new enhanced testing process.

As an additional redundancy feature, it modified Electron’s battery frame section which houses the high-voltage power supply system to enable it to maintain optimum gaseous pressure from launch through to stage separation from Electron’s kick stage.