Rocket Laboratory has launched seven small satellites into Earth orbit, including one of its own spacecraft designed to orbit future missions to Venus and the moon.
A rocket lab Electron amplifier picked up EDT (2230 GMT, or 11:30 23 March local time) from the company’s Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand on Monday (March 22) at 18:30, on a mission called “They’re Going Up So Fast.”
“They’re going up really fast, with a beautiful lift of Electron out of the way at Launch Complex 1,” said Scott Mohler, manager of Rocket Lab’s propulsion engineering, during the launch of today’s webcast. (Begin Complex 2, which Rocket Lab recently completed in Virginia, is expected to host its first lift this year.)
In photos: Rocket Lab and its electron amplifier
“They Go Up So Fast” was the overall 19th Electron launch, and the seven payloads bring the total number of satellites raised by the 18-foot-high booster to 104, Rocket Lab representatives said.
The seven payloads that drove around the track on Monday are very diverse. There is an Earth observation microsatellite for the company BlackSky, for example, and two “Internet of Things“nanosatellites, one for Fleet Space and one for Myriota.
There were also three experimental satellites on board – one for the Canberra space of the University of New South Wales, a demonstration of weather satellite technology from Care Weather Technologies in Utah and a technological demo cube for the US Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command (SMDC)).
The SMDC cube set, called Gunsmoke-J, “will test technologies that support the development of new capabilities for the U.S. military,” Rocket Lab representatives wrote in the mission press kit, which you can find here.
The seventh payload was one of Rocket Lab’s own Photon satellites. The spacecraft, which the company calls “Pathstone”, is the second photon to orbit the “First Light” vehicle. launched in August 2020.
Like First Light, Pathstone will carry out a risk reduction mission in orbit around the Earth.
“Photon Pathstone will demonstrate power management, thermal control and posture control systems, as well as newly integrated technologies, including deep-space radio capability, an upgraded RCS (response control system) for precise directional indicators in space and solar sensors and stargazers,” Rocket Lab representatives written in a mission description.
Such work will help Rocket Lab prepare for Photon missions to distant destinations. NASA has already booked a trip to the moon via Electron and Photon for it KAPSTEEN (“Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment”) cubesat, a mission to be launched later this year.
And Rocket Lab plans to start self-funding Venus missions in the next few years using the Electron-Photon duo.
The company is also making the first phase of Electron reusable booster repair on a previous mission. But Rocket Lab did not recover the boost on “They Go Up So Fast” today.
This story was updated on March 22 at 20:00 EDT with details of the launch webcast.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.