Reusable rockets back on the agenda in 2024

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Space company Rocket Lab will continue tests to create a totally reusable rocket next year, with nine reusable missions planned for 2024.

Speaking to the Nasa Spaceflight (NSF) live podcast on X yesterday, Rocket Lab founder and chief executive Peter Beck said the company had 22 missions locked in for 2024, the majority of which would be Electron launches expected to launch from its Māhia space port.

“It’s a busy year for sure, we are very happy with that manifest,” Mr Beck said.

Of those missions, nine have been labelled recovery missions.

Mr Beck told NSF while early recovery missions had employed a helicopter to catch the Electron rocket  after re-entry from orbit, it turned out sea recovery was a better option.

“The base assumption we had was if a rocket touches the water it’s toast,” he said.

However, it became pretty obvious that with a small number of modifications it was easy enough to just “fish them out of the water”.

“The last one came down within 400m of its predicted location.”

Mr Beck said it had been a big deal to re-fly a section of the Electron rocket earlier this year.

“The next big demonstration will be a full set of nine) engines and then a re-fly of the whole vehicle.”

Mr Beck also updated progress on his “nights and weekend project” to send a probe to Venus, and the search for potential life in the planet’s atmosphere.

Nasa would be providing a heat shield for the probe, and the Rocket Lab team had a designed craft, while a second instrument team had come up with a gauge that could provide  a “yes-no gauge for life” before the probe was “crushed and melted” by the atmosphere.

The mission would be based on Rocket Lab’s recent successful deployment of the Capstone spacecraft for Nasa, which used the company’s Photon spacecraft to circumnavigate the Moon.

Responding to questions from The Gisborne Herald, Rocket Lab senior communications director Morgan Bailey said the company expected to launch the Venus mission no earlier than 2025.

“The mission will use a similar spacecraft to the one that deployed the Capstone satellite to lunar orbit for Nasa — roughly around 320kg and capable of long duration interplanetary missions.

“The Photon used in the Capstone lunar mission is no longer transmitting, which is expected given the mission duration was only six days for Photon’s role and it has been over a year since the launch of that mission. Despite the short mission duration, we did continue to get usable data from Photon for some months following launch which was very useful to our team in planning future interplanetary missions.”