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WASHINGTON – A Rocket Lab Electron rocket successfully placed 10 satellites into orbit for two customers who lost payloads in a failed launch earlier this year.
The Electron rocket lifted off from the company’s launch site on New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula at 5:21 p.m. Eastern on October 28. The rocket’s start-up stage deployed its payload of 10 satellites into a 500-kilometer synchronous orbit with the sun about an hour later.
The primary payload at launch, named “In Focus” by Rocket Lab, was a set of nine SuperDove cubosats for Planet, augmenting that company’s constellation of imaging satellites. The other payload was CE-SAT-2B, an imaging microsatellite developed by Canon Electronics as a technology demonstration for future satellites and whose flight was organized by the launch services company Spaceflight.
Both Planet and Canon had payloads on Rocket Lab’s Electron launch failure in July, which was also carrying a satellite for the British company In-Space Missions. Rocket Lab blamed that failure on an “anomalous electrical connection” in the upper stage of the rocket that had passed quality checks, and the company returned the Electron to flight on August 30 with the launch of an aperture radar satellite synthetic for Capella Space.
“Electron has once again delivered a smooth ride to orbit and precise deployment for our individual rideshare customers,” said Peter Beck, Rocket Lab CEO, in a statement after launch.
The launch was the fifteenth flight of the Electron. Rocket Lab said in its statement that the next Electron launch will take place “in the next few weeks” from New Zealand. The company also has an Electron awaiting launch at its new Launch Complex 2 in Wallops Island, Virginia, but has not revealed a date for that launch.
The launch, like others from the US-based Rocket Lab, was authorized by the Federal Aviation Administration. During an Oct. 27 panel discussion at the Wernher von Braun Memorial Symposium of the American Astronautical Society, Wayne Monteith, associate administrator for commercial space transportation at the FAA, noted that the Rocket Lab launch would set a record for most of the FAA licensed launches in month at six. The other launches in October include three SpaceX Falcon 9 launches, a Northrop Grumman Antares launch, and a suborbital launch of Blue Origin’s New Shepard.
The previous record of five licensed launches in a month was set just two months earlier. August also saw three Falcon 9 launches and one Electron launch, along with a “jump” test of a SpaceX Starship prototype conducted under an FAA license.
Both registrations are signs of growing commercial launch activity, Monteith argued. “We have already authorized more launches in the FAA in this fiscal year than in fiscal year ’09, ’10, ’11 or ’12,” he said. The current fiscal year began on October 1.
