The Electron The booster lifted off from Rocket Lab’s New Zealand site on the North Island’s Mahia Peninsula on Thursday at 4:38 p.m. EDT (2038 GMT or 8:38 a.m. local time on Friday, September 16). Synspective’s live launch of the Strix-1 satellite showed the rocket flying into the blue sky, with no technical problems reported during the launch or during the countdown. As the launch window was instantaneous, everything had to go right to allow the mission to proceed.
Close-up of Rocket Lab’s 30th Electron rocket as it carries a Synspective radar satellite – the 150th spacecraft carried by a Rocket Lab mission – into orbit on September 15, 2022. (Image credit: Rocket Lab) Thursday’s mission is called “The Owl Spreads Its Wings,” a nod to the Strix-1 payload. (Strix is a diverse and widespread genus of owls.) “Strix-1 is Synspective’s first commercial satellite for the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite constellation that provides imagery that can detect millimeter-level changes in the Earth’s surface from space, regardless of Earth weather conditions and any time of day or night,” Rocket Lab officials wrote in the mission description (opens in new tab). Rocket Lab also successfully launched Strix satellites for Synspective in December 2020 and February 2022. These missions were also owl-themed. Rocket Lab officials called this launch a milestone mission: Thursday’s mission was Rocket Lab’s 30th Electron launch, carrying the 150th satellite into space and firing the 300th Rutherford engine. The flight also follows the successful Rocket Lab launch of NASA’s CAPSTONE probe to the moon. In addition, the company aims to send one or more life hunting missions to Venus in the following years. Rocket Lab plans to make Electron’s first stage fully reusable and has successfully powered a recovered (and accidentally submerged in the ocean) booster by helicopter on May 2during a mission called “There and Back Again”. However, the company did not attempt a recovery at Thursday’s launch and the Electron’s first stage naturally fell into the booze after the engine stopped. Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in a new tab) or Facebook (opens in a new tab).
