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Rocket Lab is an American company with a subsidiary and head office in Auckland, New Zealand. Rocket Lab founded in 2007 by New Zealander, Peter Beck. The company is focused on delivering innovative, high quality technologies to the space industry.
Rocket Lab was the first private company to reach space in the southern hemisphere in 2009 with its Atea 1 suborbital sounding rocket. Following this success the company won contracts with aerospace giants Lockheed Martin, DARPA and Aeroject Rocketdyne.
July, 2014
Rocket Lab announced its plan to revolutionize the global space industry with the creation of a small two-stage space launcher "Electron", a lightweight, cost-effective rocket to launch small satellites into orbit.
Rocket Lab is building the world’s first carbon-composite launch vehicle at its Auckland, New Zealand facility.
The Electron launcher is 18m in length, 1m diameter and will weigh more than 10 tons. This will be the first vehicle of its class capable of delivering payloads up to 100kg into low Earth orbits (LEO).
Rocket Lab’s experience in highly innovative propulsion systems has lead to the engine Rutherford, a regeneratively cooled liquid rocket engine, and the heart of the Electron launch vehicle. With the first test fires in December 2013 began the characterization phase of the engine program.
April, 2015
Rocket Lab unveiled the Rutherford engine, revealing that the Electron launch system is the world’s first battery-powered rocket. Unlike traditional propulsion cycles based on complex and expensive gas generators, the 4,600 lbf Rutherford adopts an entirely new electric propulsion cycle, making use of high-performance brushless DC electric motors and lithium-polymer batteries to drive its turbopumps. It is manufactured by three-dimensional, additive-manufacturing techniques that include laser and electron-beam sintering, with Inconel and titanium powder as the feed stock.
Rutherford is the first oxygen/hydrocarbon engine to use 3D printing for all primary components including its engine chamber, injector, pumps and main propellant valves.
Rutherford engine:
A single Rutherford engine pumps rocket-grade kerosene and liquid oxygen from the low pressure tanks into the combustion chamber producing 13.3 kilonewtons of thrust at lift-off. The regeneratively cooled engine passes the kerosene through channels in the chamber walls, allowing Rutherford to run at temperatures far beyond its melting point and at a significantly higher efficiency.
Electron uses two variants of the Rutherford engine, a sea level and a vacuum engine. The vacuum variant differs only in nozzle shape, which is tailored to suit the vacuum conditions outside Earth’s atmosphere. The duplicate engine design for both stages makes Electron highly optimized for mass production.
Engine test
2017 May 25 -- RocketLab successfully carried out the first test flight of its Electron rocket. "It was a great flight,” said Peter Beck, Rocket Lab’s CEO. “We had a great first stage burn, stage separation, second stage ignition and fairing separation. We didn’t quite reach orbit and we’ll be investigating why.
The first stage engines were scheduled to switch off at T+plus 2 minutes, 30 seconds, followed by first stage separation around four seconds later. A single modified Rutherford engine on the Electron’s second stage was programmed to ignite for nearly five minutes to drive the launcher into an orbit between 300 and 500 kilometers above Earth.
2018 Jan. 21 -- Rocket Lab's Electron rocket entered the orbit after its succeeded second test launch. Electron carried three cubesats and test instrumentation (kick stage) on this flight.
Electron facts:
• Lift off mass: 12,550kg
• Propellant mass: 11,300kg
• Propellants: Kerosene and Liquid Oxygen
• Length: 17m
• Diameter: 1.2m
• Top speed: 27,500kph
• First stage engines thrust (s.l./vac) : 153.5 / 184.6 kN (9 engines)
• Second stage engine thrust (vac) : 22.2 kN
• Nominal orbit: 500km circular sun synchronous
• Nominal payload: 150kg
