Rocket Lab rocket launch fails and startup loses satellite; watch

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Rocket Lab suffered its second rocket launch failure in a year. According to the startup, the company’s twentieth mission – called “Running out of Toes” – suffered an “anomaly” shortly after the second stage ignited, losing the company’s Electron rocket and Earth observation satellite charges. BlackSky.

Although the images suggest that the second stage may have ended as part of an automatic response to the failure, the Rocket Lab team continues to investigate the causes.

As expected, the first stage fell into the ocean and Rocket Lab hoped to recover the vehicle. The second stage continued along the planned flight corridor and posed no risk to anyone.

Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck apologized to BlackSky and promised that the company would identify the causes of the failure.

The team planned to be “safely back in the field” as soon as possible, he said. As usual, the Rocket Lab has several vehicles in production and should not face a long delay. Rocket Lab resumed the flight weeks after the crash in July 2020.

Although it recorded two failures in one year, the company has been very successful so far, with 17 of its missions reaching orbit.

This latest edition will not help the company in the short term, however, and is a reminder that space flight startups tend to have problems at the start, regardless of their engineering skills – competitor SpaceX has taken years to fix the flaws on their reusable rockets and there were months of failed launches before the starship landed whole a few days ago.

Check out the flaw in the launch of the Rocket Lab’s twentieth mission: