Rocket Lab gets boosters that fall from space by helicopter

Rocket Lab delivers most of its work under an oddball name. It’s called “There and Back Again”, a nod to augmenter recovery as well as the subtitle of JRR Tolkien’s novel “The Hobbit”. The Hobbit trilogy, directed by Peter Jackson, was filmed in New Zealand.

Rocket Lab’s Enhanced Hunting is the latest advancement in an industry where rockets are too expensive for single use. Reusing all or part of one will lower the cost of transporting payloads into space and can speed up launch speeds by reducing the number of rockets that need to be built.

“Eighty percent of the cost of the entire rocket in that first stage, in terms of materials and labor,” said Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, in an interview Friday.

SpaceX pioneered a new era of reusable rockets, and now regularly lands and flies the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket over and over again. The second stage of the Falcon 9 (as well as the Electron Rocket Lab rocket) is still neglected, and usually burns up as it re-enters Earth’s atmosphere. SpaceX is designing its next-generation super rocket, Starship, to be fully reusable. Competitors such as Blue Origin, United Launch Alliance and companies in China are developing missiles that are at least partially reusable.

NASA’s shuttles are partially reusable, but require labor-intensive and expensive work after each flight, and don’t live up to their promise of aircraft-like operation.

For the Falcon 9, the boost rocket is fired several times after it separates from the second stage, slowing its journey to a quiet location either on a floating platform at sea or a location on land. Electrons are much smaller rockets, which makes them more difficult to reuse.

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