Rocket Lab's launch site in Māhia.
Rocket Lab’s chief executive and founder claims more rockets are being launched from Māhia Peninsula than across all of Europe, as the company celebrated its 36th rocket launch this week from its launch pad in Hawke’s Bay.
Rocket Lab CEO and founder Peter Beck, who is based in Auckland, said the company’s latest mission on Tuesday from Māhia brought them closer to a “big milestone”: making their Electron rocket reusable.
That launch saw an 18-metre-tall Electron rocket successfully sent into orbit before deploying seven satellites for various customers, including Nasa.
Part of the rocket (the booster) detached and was recovered in the ocean a few hundred kilometres off the coast of New Zealand, which was particularly pleasing to Beck.
“It is another successful recovery which ... brings us that step closer to putting a whole vehicle back on the pad and re-flying it again.”
He said they had now completed five recoveries of Electron rockets and were getting closer to reusing an entire engine (known as the Rutherford engine) for a second launch.
“The next big milestone in the programme will be to re-fly an engine, then the milestone after that will be [re-flying] a complete booster all in one piece again,” he said.
“It is one of the last long poles in the tent - to validate that we can in fact fly, recover and fly [a booster] again.”
That will save a lot of money on rebuilding entire boosters, as well as speed up the process of rocket-making.
Other companies across the world, such as SpaceX, are also working on reusable rockets.
Beck said Māhia Peninsula was becoming a famous spot for rocket launches on the world stage, and claimed it had surpassed many other countries in terms of the number of rockets launched.
“The US launches the most, then it is China, then it is Russia, then it is the Māhia Peninsula, then it is Europe.”
He said they loved their site at Māhia - which has seen 13 launches since February last year alone and has a permanent team of about 20 people - and had no plans to move away from it in the future.
Beck said the company was working on an even bigger rocket than the Electron, which it hoped to have on a launch pad in the US by the end of next year.
That rocket will be called Neutron and be over 40m tall.
“We are building a much larger launch vehicle which is designed to lift much heavier payloads.
“To put it into context, Electron lifts about 300 kilograms to orbit; Neutron will lift 13,000kg to orbit.
“It is a much more significant launch vehicle and capable of human spaceflight, and that launch vehicle will be exclusively launched from the United States.
“Unfortunately, New Zealand just doesn’t have the industrial base to support such a large launch vehicle.”
Rocket Lab, which has about 1600 employees, has its headquarters in California but currently launches most of its rockets from Māhia. It also launches rockets at a base in Virginia.
Rocket Lab also has a factory in Auckland, and most of its roughly 650 New Zealand workers are based in Auckland.
While the publicly listed company has military contracts, such as with the US, Beck said they were committed to not sending any weapons into space in the future.
“We have always been really transparent about that and the fact that we certainly don’t do weapons,” he said.
“While some don’t necessarily agree with doing anything for the military, I think it should be acknowledged that everybody uses the military space infrastructure in their everyday lives.”
For example, he said that includes GPS technology, as well as a lot of communication technology and other satellites.
Rocket Lab was founded in 2006 and the first launch from Māhia was in 2017.