"The Owl's Night Begins" lifts off from Launch Complex 1 at Mahia. Photo / Supplied
Rocket Lab's seventh mission of the year successfully launched and delivered its payload.
"The Owl's Night Begins" took off from Launch Complex 1 at Mahia Peninsula at 11.09pm, with the spectacular night launch seen as far away as Wellington and even Invercargill (see photos and video below).
A satellite called "StriX-α" was successfully deployed to orbit for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) provider Synspective - a Japanese company that supplies data for making 3D maps.
Synspective's radar technology can image millimetre-level changes to the Earth's surface from space, independent of weather conditions on Earth and at any time of the day or night. StriX-α is the first of more than 30 satellites planned by Synspective to form a constellation in low-Earth orbit to collate data on a daily basis that can be used for urban development planning, construction and infrastructure monitoring, and disaster response across Asia, Rocket Lab says.
Owl's Night capped a year of ups and downs for Rocket Lab.
It was the Kiwi-American company's 17th launch of its Electron rocket and its seventh of 2020 - one more than last year.
Six were successful, with the July "Pics or it didn't happen" launch failing to during its second-stage burn after what later turned out to be a faulty electrical connection (it was Electron's second failure overall, if you count the mid-flight destruction of its first flight, "It's a Test", in May 2017).
This year also saw the first use of Rocket Lab's "Photon" or "satellite bus" for getting satellites into their desired orbit, and the launch of the company's first home-grown satellite.
October saw Rocket Lab profiles on the front pages of the New York Times and Washington Post, with the latter hailing the company as "The most successful startup since SpaceX".
And during November, the company successfully retrieved a booster for the first time, after an Electron's first-stage returned to Earth by satellite then was fished out of the Pacific (last night's mission did not feature a retrieval attempt).
Rocket Lab is still some distance from Beck's aim, reiterated in June 2019, to achieve a launch frequency of one per fortnight by 2020.
It did not help that Rocket Lab's first launch from US soil - originally planned for some time between April and June this year - has yet to take place, due to Covid delays and now a hold-up with partner NASA.
"We're still waiting on NASA to certify their own AFTS [Autonomous Flight Termination System] software before we can schedule our first launch from the US," a Rocket Lab spokeswoman said this morning.
Rocket Lab's Launch Complex 2 was constructed inside NASA's Wallops Island facility in the US state of Virginia.
Once it is finally ready for action - which should be early 2021 - Rocket Lab's first North American launch will see it take a payload to orbit for the US Air Force's Space Test Programme. Founder Peter Beck says the US launch site was built to cater specifically to US government clients. Rocket Lab will continue to launch most of its missions from Mahia, where NZ's relatively empty skies and shipping lanes make for a logistically easier operation.
Rocket Lab says it will announce details of its next launch from Mahia shortly, which it says will take place "early in the new year".
2021 should also see Rocket Lab's first attempt to retrieve a first-stage booster by helicopter - with a mid-air snag, after its decent has been slowed by parachutes.
But the biggest headlines next year should be made by Rocket Lab's role partnering with NASA as it continues the build-up for its Capstone mission that will see the US return to the moon.
All going well, a Rocket Lab Photon satellite will take NASA gear on a flyby of the Moon next year.
Beck is aiming for the same technology to be used for a private research flight to Venus in 2023, after the entrepreneur's interest was piqued by the discovery of phosphine gas is the yellow planet's atmosphere. On Earth, phosphine is only produced through the biochemical processes that create life.
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