Rocket Lab plans Electron test launches this year

The successful qualification of the second stage of Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket keeps the small launch vehicle on track to carry out a series of test flights later this year, the company announced April 13.

Rocket Lab said it had completed qualification testing of the second stage, powered by the company’s Rutherford engine, clearing it for flight. The company will soon begin qualification tests of the vehicle’s first stage, which uses nine Rutherford engines.

In an interview during the 32nd Space Symposium here April 13, Rocket Lab Chief Executive Peter Beck said the company remains on schedule to begin test flights of Electron from the company’s launch site on New Zealand’s North Island starting around the middle of this year.

“We have a minimum campaign of three test flights,” he said. “We’ll do the test flights and, if we have some anomalies, we’ll keep rolling them out.” Those test flights will carry instrumentation but no satellite payloads, he said.

The company is completing construction of its launch site, which Beck said should be ready by the end of May. Rocket Lab had announced last year it planned to develop a launch site on New Zealand’s South Island, near the city of Christchurch. However, Beck said difficulty in getting environmental approvals led them to shift their plans to the new location.

The new site, located on the remote Mahia Peninsula, does allow Rocket Lab to launch to a wider range of orbits than it could from its original site. “We get from sun-synchronous orbit to 38 degrees inclination out of that site,” he said. That is important, he said, since the company is hearing from potential customers who want to go to a variety of orbits.

“Traditionally the smallsat guys would want to go to sun-synchronous because there’s a lot of rides there if you’re ridesharing,” he said. “But when you given them the opportunity to choose their orbital plane, they want to go to all sorts of planes, which is very interesting.”

The new launch site has received its local environmental approvals, Beck said. Rocket Lab, with its headquarters in the United States but with most of its staff in New Zealand, is working with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration for a spaceport license for the site, as well as a commercial launch license for Electron. Both U.S. and New Zealand authorities are working together on issues like clearing airspace for launches, he added.

If the Electron test program is successful, Rocket Lab plans to start commercial launches in early 2017. Beck said the company is planning one launch a month through 2018, with most of those launches already sold. That includes a launch NASA awarded to Rocket Lab in October 2015 under its Venture Class Launch Services program, which Beck said is currently scheduled for July 2017.

“We really have to make that schedule, because we have a lot of customers now that we need to fly,” he said. “So we can’t have that test program roll out too long.”

Beck also hinted that Rocket Lab has plans to expand in the U.S. The company currently has more than 100 employees, primarily in New Zealand, and is hiring about two people a week, but is running into growth issues. “There are challenges with not being able to scale fast enough in New Zealand,” he said. “We need to be able to scale much faster“

Source; spacenews

Private Moon Landing Set for 2021-2022

Updated 02/05/2020

NASA wants private moon landers from 3 companies. Here's how they'll work. SpaceX, Dynetics and a Blue Origin-led team have different ideas for the moon.

The moon landers that three commercial teams are developing to ferry astronauts to and from the lunar surface for NASA are a diverse bunch.

NASA has selected a Blue Origin-led team, Dynetics and SpaceX's Starship to develop new moon landers for astronauts for the agency's Artemis lunar program. (Image: © NASA)

On Thursday (April 30), NASA announced that it had awarded contracts to three commercial teams, each of which will develop a human landing system for use by the space agency's Artemis program. Artemis aims to put two astronauts down near the moon's south pole in 2024 and establish a sustainable presence on and around Earth's natural satellite by the late 2020s.

SpaceX, Dynetics and a team led by Blue Origin will split a total pot of $967 million, which will fund 10 months of development work. NASA will then tab one or more of these teams to mature their systems. In the end, the space agency will procure crewed lunar transportation services from the options that are left on the table. source space

NASA is Aboard First Private Moon Landing Attempt – NASA Solar

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The first private moon landing could be just two years away. 

California-based company Moon Express, which aims to fly commercial missions to the moon and help unlock its resources, has signed a five-launch deal with Rocket Lab, with the first two robotic liftoffs scheduled to take place in 2019.

These uncrewed launches — three of which are firmly on the books, with the other two optional at the moment — will blast Moon Express' MX-1 lander into space aboard Rocket Lab's 52.5-foot-tall (16 meters) Electron rocket. The goal is to test out the MX-1 and its systems, making sure the spacecraft can land softly on the moon, move about the lunar surface, grab samples and return them to Earth.

"The holy grail of our company is to provide, to prove, a full-services capability — not just landing, but coming back from the moon," said Moon Express co-founder and CEO Bob Richards, who announced the new launch deal today  at the Space Technology & Investment Summit in San Francisco.  

If the MX-1 nails its landing on the first mission, "we're going to be inspired to try a sample-return," Richards told Space.com. "I don't know if we'll do that on the second mission, but I sure hope we're trying it by the third mission, if all is going that well."

The two optional launches provide some insurance for Moon Express in case the first three flights don't go entirely according to plan, Richards said.

The contract puts Moon Express in position to possibly win the Google Lunar X Prize, a $30 million competition to land a privately funded robotic spacecraft on the moon by the end of 2019. The first team to do this — and have the craft move 1,640 feet (500 m) and beam high-definition video and images back to Earth as well — will win the $20 million grand prize. (The second team to accomplish these goals gets $5 million; another $5 million is available for meeting certain other milestones.)

Sixteen teams remain in the running for the Google Lunar X Prize, so the outcome remains very much up in the air. For example, one team, Astrobotic, signed a contract in 2011 to launch its lunar lander aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Astrobotic representatives have said they plan to launch in 2016.

The 3.9-foot-wide (1.2 m) Electron rocket is designed to deliver a 330-lb. (150 kilograms) payload to a sun-synchronous orbit 310 miles (500 kilometers) above Earth, according to Rocket Lab's website. The two-stage rocket is not operational yet; commercial launches are scheduled to begin in 2016, say representatives of the company, which is headquartered in California but has a New Zealand subsidiary. (Moon Express will have the option of launching from Rocket Lab's range in New Zealand or from a site in the United States.)


"Rocket Lab is pleased to begin working with Moon Express to launch its spacecraft and to provide support to such an ambitious mission," Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck said in a statement. "Moon Express has used advanced orbital mechanics to enable this mission from low-Earth orbit."

Electron is quite an affordable option as far as orbital launches are concerned, with each liftoff costing just $4.9 million. Falcon 9 launches, for example, cost about $60 million each.

"We think the collapse of the price to get to the moon is going to enable a whole new market — kind of like the 4-minute-mile of space," Richards said.

The MX-1 landers that blast off atop an Electron will be relatively small, constrained by the rocket's size.. But the MX-1 is scalable, Richards said, and can be modified as needed to help the company achieve its ambitious goal of opening up the moon and its resources to commercial use.

"As the market responds, we will be able to provide the platforms to support the market," Richards said. "We're starting small; we're starting with the baby steps."

Other articles on the same theme:

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• NASA announced the next mission to Mars

• Elon Musk announced great mission on Mars. When it launches and what purpose

• Mars could support extraterrestrial life. A new image published by the European Space Agency shows the place that would have hosted life

• Back to Europa! ALIEN OCEAN NEXT NASA'S MISSION TO EUROPA

Source: space.com

The US is close to approving the first ever private Moon mission for 2017.

The US government is set to give approval to California-based space company, Moon Express, to explore the surface of the Moon over a two-week period in 2017.

Moon Express has applied to have its MX-1 lander launch to the Moon next year, land on the surface, and conduct a series of analyses that will help prepare the company for potentially carrying payloads to the Moon in the future. If approved, this would be the first time a private enterprise - not a nation - has launched a mission beyond Earth’s orbit.

So what is this MX-1 lander that could potentially take private enterprise beyond Earth’s orbit for the first time ever?

The precedent that this could set would be huge, potentially opening up space exploration to anyone in the world who has the funds and the expertise, e.g. SpaceX, which just recently announced plans to get to Mars by 2018.

"Moon Express, I think, is paving the way for commercial activity outside of Earth orbit," Mariel Borowitz from the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who is not involved with the company, told the Los Angeles Times.

Reports of the approval are coming from an investigation by Andy Pasztor from The Wall Street Journal, who announced today that the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) - which is responsible for approving all commercial rocket launches - is mulling over the terms.

It could take weeks or even months before the decision is made public, but representatives from Moon Express told Pasztor that they could not elaborate on the "groundbreaking developments", but they were "very optimistic" about the proposal.

The FAA itself disclosed that it is still ironing out the approval process, but it’s working to ensure that a "mechanism is in place that permits emerging commercial space operations, such as the one that Moon Express has publicly commented on".

That sounds pretty promising to us!

Set to launch 2017 on Los Angeles-based company Rocket Lab’s brand new Electron rocket, the MX-1 lander is powered by sunlight and hydrogen peroxide rocket fuel. Because this is essentially just an oxygen enriched water compound, Moon Express is looking into how they could use water on the Moon to supply MX-1 with fuel on its journey back home.

The coffee table-sized lander is equipped with everything it needs to drill into the surface of the Moon, collect samples, and fly them back home for analysis. Moon Express co-founder Bob Richards calls the MX-1 the 'iPhone of space'.

Of particular interest to Moon Express are platinum group metals, rare earth elements, and Helium-3, the latter which could be a safer nuclear fuel alternative, says Samantha Masunaga at the Los Angeles Times.

If the proposal is approved, Moon Express will likely be free to investigate the potential of 'Moon mining', but will still have to adhere to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which stipulates that weapons cannot be tested anywhere beyond Earth’s orbit, and forbids "anyone from sending a mission, robot or human, close to a water source in the fear of contaminating it with life from Earth".

This means if Moon Express plans on using the water ice on the Moon for fuel or other purposes, they’re going to have to be very, very careful about it.

Approvals and treaties aside, we are very excited about where this could take space exploration over the next decade and beyond. Unlike many private companies, Moon Express has the funds to actually get this done, and it could change everything if they do. And just think about it - we're talking 2017, that's next year!

"These are pioneers," Marco Caceres, senior space analyst at the Teal Group, an aerospace and defence analysis company, told the Los Angeles Times. "It might jump-start an industry. It may do nothing because it’s so hard that only that company can do it. It really just takes that first company to be successful."

source: sciencealert