Rocket Lab reveals result of investigation into first test launch, which failed to reach orbit

Rocket Lab has revealed the result of its investigation into its May 25 test launch, which saw one of its low-cost Electron rockets successfully take off, only to be terminated before launching orbit (as first-reported by NBR).

The short story: The rocket was fine, and performed as expected.

The problem was with some “misconfigured” ground equipment supplied by a third party. A contractor failed to enable forward error correction, leading to the rocket to be reported at an incorrect position.

Four minutes into the flight, at an altitude of 224 km, the misconfiguration lead to the equipment losing contact with the rocket temporarily and, according to standard operating procedures, range safety officials
terminated the flight.

Rocket Lab's own telemetry systems at the time reported the Electron was in fact following its planned trajectory. Subsequent investigations backed up that finding.

However, in a statement, Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck says he understands why safety officials took the action they did.

Shaun O’Donnell – vice-president of New Zealand operations for the $US1 billion-valuation Kiwi-American company – won’t name the contractor but tells NBR Radio it is still part of the team.

“Everyone has their bad days,” he says.

Admittedly, most mistakes don’t involve the destruction of a $US5 million rocket.

Nevertheless, Mr O’Donnell says that after reviewing 25,000 channels of data, Rocket Lab is happy the reason for the flight not reaching orbit is readily explicable and readily fixable.

He says the second test flight should take place from Rocket Lab’s Mahia Peninsula launchpad in about eight weeks.

Mr O'Donnell also expects it to go smoothly. Without the ground equipment contractor’s duff calculation “We’re confident we could have got into orbit,” he says.

Rocket Lab managed to get almost all the test data it required from the first test flight, he says, adding that getting into orbit would have been “the cherry on top” (not to mention a commercial requirement for the Electron, which is designed to launch small satellites into low earth orbit).

If necessary, a third test launch will also take place.

Earlier, Mr Beck intimated to NBR that one of his company’s commercial clients required launches before the end of the year. Mr O’Donnell would not be drawn on that point

But the operations vice-president did add that Rocket Lab is sufficiently confident that it has four more Electrons in production (for a total of six including the first test flight and the pending second).

Like the first test flight, the second effort will be closed to the public and not livestreamed but video is expected to be released after the fact.