ROCKET LAB

The History of Rocket Lab

Muhammed Yusuf Kaya 15012062

YILDIZ TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY

BUSINESS ENGLISH
Hi, I am Muhammed Yusuf Kaya, I am student at the YTU. My department is Electrical Engineering.

I chose Business English in this season. So I should prepare report about my department’s
famous companies. I chose a company. It Works in aerospace sector. It is called Rocket Lab.

Rocket Lab is American aerospace company. It is a rocket launch service provider with a New
Zealand subsidiary. It explored sub - orbital sounding rocket. The company’s founder is engineer
Peter Beck. He is still Ceo of the company. He established head Office in California in 2013.

History

Rocket Lab was founded in June 2006 by New Zealander Peter Beck, the company's CEO and CTO.
The launch took place off the coast of New Zealand, in the private island (the Great Mercury Island)
of Michael Fay, a New Zealand banker and investor. New Zealand’s entrepreneur and business
investor Stephen Tindall was Rocket Labs’ one of the first investors.

In December 2010, Rocket Lab was awarded a U.S. government contract from the
Operationally Responsive Space Office (ORS) to study a low cost space launcher to place CubeSats
into orbit. This agreement with NASA enables the company to use NASA resources such as personnel,
facilities, and equipment for commercial launch efforts.

In 2013 the it moved its registration from New Zealand to USA, and opened head office's in
Huntington Beach, California.

2020 Rocket Lab moved its headquarters to Long Beach, California.

Launch Vehicles
Atea
The first launch of the Ātea (Māori for 'space') suborbital sounding rocket occurred in late
2009. The 6-metre (20 ft) long rocket weighing 60 kilograms (130 lb) was designed to carry a 2 kg (4.4
lb) payload to an altitude of 120 kilometres (75 mi). It was intended to carry scientific payloads or
possibly personal items.

Ātea-1, named Manu Karere or Bird Messenger by the local Māori iwi, was successfully
launched from Great Mercury Island near the Coromandel Peninsula on 30 November 2009 at 2:23
pm (01:23 UTC) after fueling problems delayed the scheduled 7:10 am liftoff. The rocket was tracked
by GPS uplink to the Inmarsat-B satellite constellation; it splashed down approximately 50 km (31 mi)
downrange.

The payload had no telemetry downlink, but had instrumentation including the launch
vehicle's uplink to Inmarsat. Payload was not required to be recovered, being only a dart, and the
company advised that should it be encountered by vessels at sea, the payload should not be handled
as it was "potentially hazardous" and contained delicate instruments. However, performance
characteristics were completely determined by the boost stage, which did have downlink telemetry
and was recovered. A second launch of Ātea-1 was not attempted.

Electron
Electron is a two-stage launch vehicle which uses Rocket Lab's Rutherford liquid engines on
both stages. The vehicle is capable of delivering payloads of 150 kg to a 500 km Sun-synchronous
orbit, the target range for the growing small satellite market. The projected cost is less than US$5
million per launch.

The Rutherford engine uses pumps that are uniquely powered by battery-powered electric
motors rather than a gas generator, expander, or preburner. The engine is also fabricated largely by
3D printing, via electron beam melting, whereby layers of metal powder are melted in a high vacuum
by an electron beam rather than a laser.

By March 2016, the 22 kN (5,000 lbf) second-stage Rutherford engine had completed firing
tests. The first test flight took place on 25 May 2017 at 04:20 UTC from Mahia Peninsula in New
Zealand's North Island. After reaching an altitude of about 224 km (140 mi), the rocket was
performing nominally but telemetry was lost so the decision to destroy it was made by range safety.

On 21 January 2018 at 01:43 UTC, their second rocket on a flight named "Still Testing"
launched, reached orbit and deployed three CubeSats for customers Planet Labs and Spire Global.
The rocket also carried an additional satellite payload called Humanity Star, a 1-meter-wide (3 ft)
carbon fiber geodesic sphere made up of 65 panels that reflect the Sun's light. Humanity Star re-
entered Earth's atmosphere and burned up in March 2018. On 11 November 2018, the first
commercial launch (third launch in total) of Electron occurred from Mahia Peninsula carrying
satellites for Spire Global, GeoOptics, a CubeSat built by high school students, and a prototype of a
dragsail.
 Facilities
Manufacturing
In October 2018, Rocket Lab anounced their new manufacturing facility in Auckland, New
Zealand. It is intended for the production of propellant tanks and stage builds, and is in charge of the
overall integration of launch vehicles for Launch Complex 1. The company's headquarters in Long
Beach, California, produce the Rutherford engines and avionics.

Launch Complex 1
After encountering difficulty in obtaining resource consent for the Kaitorete Spit launch site,
Rocket Lab announced in November 2015 that its primary launch site would be on the Mahia
Peninsula, east of Wairoa in the North Island, New Zealand. The site is licensed to launch rockets
every 72 hours for 30 years. The Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 (LC-1) was officially opened on 26
September 2016 (UTC; 27 September NZDT)

Launch Complex 2
In October 2018, after several months of search, the company announced their selection of
the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility as their second launch
site. The site was chosen for a number of factors: the speed and ease in which the new pad could be
built due to infrastructure readiness, the low number of launches from other companies, and the
location's ability to supplement orbital inclinations provided by LC-1. It is expected to be capable of
monthly launches serving US government and commercial missions. The Launch Complex 2 (LC-2) is
located within the fence line of MARS Launch Pad 0A. In December 2019, construction of the launch
pad was completed and Rocket Lab inaugurated the LC-2. First flight of Electron from LC-2 is
expected in Q2 2020.