Rocket Lab successfully recovers booster after splashdown

The Baby Come Back mission launches from Mahia yesterday. Picture by Rocket Lab

Rocket Lab’s latest mission from Māhia met with “100 percent mission success”, company founder Peter Beck said on Twitter yesterday.

The mission successfully launched seven payloads into orbit, after blasting off from the United States-based company’s Māhia spaceport.

The mission also parachuted the rocket’s main stage back down to Earth for a “splashdown” in the Pacific Ocean where it was recovered by ship.

Rocket Lab communication director Morgan Bailey said the rocket would be taken to Rocket Lab’s Auckland production complex to be assessed for re-flight.

“It’s all part of our programme to make our Electron rocket the world’s first reusable small rocket.

“Today’s mission is a big deal, not just in New Zealand but internationally. We’re getting tantalisingly close to reusable rockets.”

The mission, called Baby Come Back, launched commercial payloads for NASA, Space Flight Laboratory and Spire Global.

NASA’s Starling mission is a four CubeSat mission designed to advance technologies for cooperative groups of spacecraft, also known as swarms. Spacecraft swarms refer to multiple spacecraft autonomously coordinating their activities on orbit. Once positioned in orbit around Earth and spaced about 64km apart, Starling’s spacecraft will demonstrate the ability to autonomously fly together while keeping track of each other’s relative positions and trajectories. The mission will test whether the technologies work as expected, what their limitations are, and what developments are still needed for CubeSat swarms to be successful.

Space Flight Laboratory’s (SFL) Telesat’s LEO 3 demonstration satellite will provide continuity for customer and ecosystem vendor testing campaigns following the decommissioning of Telesat’s Phase 1 LEO ( Low Earth orbit) satellite, which will serve an important role for low-latency customer applications testing, and for supporting LEO antenna and modem development efforts in advance of the Telesat Lightspeed network deployment.

Spire Global’s two 3U satellites were carrying Global Navigation Satellite System Radio Occultation (GNSS-RO) payloads to replenish its fully deployed constellation of more than 100 multipurpose satellites. The data acquired by the payloads provide global weather intelligence that can be assimilated into weather models to improve the accuracy of forecasts.