Rocket laboratory
Life is pretty good for Rocket Lab and its founder, Peter Beck, at the moment.
With a total of nine launches last year and a whopping 15 scheduled for 2023, Rocket Lab is now flying more boosters than any company in the world other than SpaceX. In recent years, Rocket Lab’s cadence has surpassed that of United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and other major players.
This year, Rocket Lab may launch as many boosters as Russia, something that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
Clearly, Rocket Lab’s Electron vehicle is much smaller than others in the established launch industry. Electron’s capacity is up to 300 kg in orbit. But that hasn’t stopped Beck from being inventive about use cases for the little rocket. Last year, his company launched a small satellite to the moon, and Beck is working on a Venus mission.
And there’s a case for delivering a product that many customers want to fly on – and then delivering that product.
hypersonics
To that end, Rocket Lab recently announced a new venture, using Electron as a test bed for hypersonic technologies. The missile will use essentially the same first and second stages, but will have a modified kickstage that will allow Electron to deploy payloads up to 600 kg in mass in hypersonic trajectories five times the speed of sound.
Rocket laboratory
“We can do a lot of interesting things with throttles and cutouts and really fine-tune trajectory start points,” Beck said in an interview with Ars. “The whole purpose of this is a high-cadence flight capability. We all know that China and Russia and others have done a lot of flights and generated a lot of data and really made progress in hypersonics. The key to advancing the field here in the United States there are going to be a lot of flights.”
Beck would not say how many hypersonic missions the company will fly per year from the launch pad at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. However, he believes the opportunity is significant once Electron demonstrates his abilities.
According to the US Congressional Budget Office, the Army, Navy and Air Force are all developing hypersonic missiles to provide a fast-moving, maneuverable capability for rapidly hitting targets thousands of miles away. One of the research problems the military is likely to want to test is managing the extreme heat hypersonic missiles are subjected to by traveling in the atmosphere at high speeds for most of their flight. For ballistic missiles, which mainly fly above the atmosphere, this is less of a problem.
Rocket Lab is able to offer this service because, with nearly three dozen launches now completed, it has demonstrated its ability to build and launch electrons at a relatively high cadence. Beck said this was only possible through significant investment in the New Zealand-based Electron factory, quality control and software that manages the manufacturing processes known as ERP (enterprise resource planning) and MRP (material requirements planning).
Cadence is important
“The 20th rocket was 20 times harder than the first rocket, because by the time you build the 20th rocket, you’re completely dependent on your ERP and MRP and quality control systems,” Beck said. “You are completely dependent on the system to deliver a reliable vehicle.”
Since Rocket Lab launched its first Electron into orbit in 2018, Beck has seen several competitors come and go. In the purely small launch arena, Vector and Virgin Orbit have both gone out of business, and Astra has abandoned its first attempt at building a small rocket due to more launch failures than successful ones. Beck said he expects further consolidation in the small launch industry.
“I think there’s more to come,” he said. “We went through a period where the launch was frothy and huge amounts of capital were raised for all sorts of concepts and ideas, some with more merit than others. But I think at some point you really have to do what you said you were going to doing and executing. And I think you’re starting to see the shakeout of that.”
Beck’s next challenge is to take the lessons learned from Electron and develop the larger Neutron vehicle. With a planned capacity of 15 tons in low Earth orbit and a reusable first stage, Neutron is heading into the area currently occupied by SpaceX. However, there is a strong demand in the Western world for extra medium lift capability, and Neutron is one of several vehicles in development, including the Ariane 6, Vulcan, New Glenn and Terran R missiles, to come.
Besides SpaceX, with its Falcon 9 rocket, there is probably only room for one or two eventual winners. It is therefore important to deliver a quality rocket with a high cadence. Can Peter Beck repeat that feat?
“I think the beauty of the aerospace industry is that it’s the ultimate leveler, and there’s no secret to execution,” he said.
We will see.
