Electron - Rocket Lab

Today I want talk about the rocket labs electron rocket a small rocket that just launched out of new zealand yesterday it's only 17 meters tall 1.2 meters in diameter 10 and a half tons and it can launch a hundred and fifty kilograms into orbit for the low low price of 5 million dollars. 

it is the opposite of the proton rocket if you think about it it is small where proton is big it is knew her proton is old it launches from the southern hemisphere well proton is in the north and while proton is fueled by hideously toxic hypergolic fuels the electron is a nice and environmentally friendly using electric rocket engines ok that last point maybe pushing facts just a little it still obviously needs rocket fuel it uses kerosene and liquid oxygen but this is the first orbit capable rocket which uses an electrically powered turbo pump.

The Rutherford engine developed by rocket labs is a real trailblazer first of all all of the major components are 3d printed and this of course makes manufacturing of them a lot easier.

There are nine of these on the first stage of the electron and they generate just under two tons of thrust at launch thespecific impulse 

At sea level is 303 seconds which is better than SpaceX is Merlin which only gets 282 

although it's not quite as good as the rd-180 used on the Atlas 5 which gets 311 and that is quite amazing performance for such a small and cheap engine.

 part of the reason for this high specific impulse is that it doesn't have an open cycle preburner that is essentially dumping low pressure fuel all over the site like with the SpaceX Merlin 

instead is using a bank of batteries which is generating something like a mega watt of electrical power to drive all the turbo pumps and this offers many other advantages such as engine startup being much much simpler they can control the throttle much easier but the big downside is those lithium polymer batteries cannot match the energy density of conventional chemical propellants so it needs about 200 kilograms of batteries and those 200 kilograms mean that the thrust-to-weight ratio of the vehicle is a lot worse than equivalence.

In fact the second stage is explicitly designed to drop used up battery packs partway through the orbit insertion burn this hot swap process switches a power draw over from the depleted battery pack to the fresh battery pack and then drops a depleted battery pack or it will fall through the atmosphere and no doubt burn up after all lithium polymer batteries are well known for their potentiality for combustion the electron is also one of the first Rockets to successfully fly with composite fuel tanks it's taken some time but finally composit fuel tanks are catching on as primary containers the natural all-black exterior also seems highly appropriate when you consider that they are launching out of New Zealand rocket labs actually built their own Space Launch Center in the North Island of New Zealand it's as capable of launching with all required launch azimuth 

so they can go directly ether easter directly south and not worry about dropping hardware on anyone having said that they do seem to be having quite a lot of problems with the weather although it might be that they're just being extremely cautious in these early launches in May of 2017 they conducted their first launch campaign using a rocket appropriately named it's a test after several delays it did launch and it made it all the way to space but it didn't make it into orbit there was a problem with ake piece of communications hardware that was being run by a third party it wasn't configured correctly and telemetry data was lost resulting in them terminating the flight but hey at least they got to test the flight termination system the second test vehicle was called still testing and it was originally set up for a launch window back in December and again they had several delays partly due to technology sometimes due to traffic and frequently due to weather in fact one of the launches was cancelled because the rocket got too hot yes they had to cancel a launch because the weather was too good but a few days ago the launch window reopened and after a few delays again due to weather and wayward boats they launched and everything went to plan they were in fact carrying a live payload of three cube sets there was a one dove called the Dove pioneer and a pair of lemur two cube sets as well both of these companies by the way are based in San Fransisco spire global that makes lemur is interesting because their first launch was AR deuce at it was a Kickstarter that launched this company but now rocket labs have proven that their launch vehicle works they are looking to the future and to commercial customers NASA has apparently already bought a launch to put 18 cube SATs into low-earth orbit and of course moon express think that they can put a lunar lander a capable spacecraft on the top of this tiny little rocket which would be pretty special because although electron can't claim to be the smallest rocket that law has launched stuff into space if it could launch something that landed on the moon that would be a bonafide a record so congratulations to rocket labs we're looking forward to more launches.

 I am bruno and i'm waiting for next launch. bye!