WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) – Using a helicopter to retrieve a crashed rocket is such a daunting task that Peter Beck compared it to a “supersonic ballet”.
Rocket Lab, the company Beck founded, partially achieved that success on Tuesday as it tried to reuse its tiny Electron rockets. But after a brief suspension of a spent rocket, the helicopter crew was quickly forced to leave it for safety reasons and crashed into the Pacific Ocean, where it was picked up by an oncoming boat.
The California -based company regularly launches 18 -meter rockets from New Zealand’s remote Mahia Peninsula to deliver satellites into space.
On Tuesday, the Electron rocket launched in the morning and sent 34 satellites into orbit before the main amplifier unit began to fall to Earth. Its descent is slowed by a parachute to approximately 10 meters (33 feet) per second.
Then the helicopter crew began to hover from the long line under the helicopter to the parachute lines of the amplifier. The crew captured the rocket, but the helicopter payload passed the test and simulation parameters, so they dropped it again.
The pull of emotion was captured in the live stream of the event, when the people in mission control sighed and cheered as the rocket struck, but after about 20 seconds they sighed and breathed.
However, Beck praised the mission as a success, saying that almost everything was happening according to plan and the sudden loading problem was a small detail that was about to be corrected, “out of the way of things”.
“They did a lot. “He didn’t like the feeling of being overwhelmed,” Beck said after launching a conference call with the helicopter crew.
According to him, a detailed examination should reveal the reasons for the difference between the characteristics of the load. He said he still hopes that the company can save some or all of the used rockets even if they sink in salt water, which they hope to avoid.
Rocket Lab called its latest mission “There and Back Again” – a reference to the film trilogy “The Hobbit,” shot in New Zealand.
The company described the short-lived take of the Sikorsky S-92 helicopter into the air at 1980 meters (6,500 feet) as a stage. He said the increased use of its missiles would allow the company to increase the number of launches and reduce costs. Elon Musk’s SpaceX company created the first Multiple Orbital Rockets Falco 9.
Source: Huffpost
