Small rocket builder Rocket Lab USA Inc is gearing up for a mission that seems more appropriate for a big-budget action movie: catching a falling four-story-tall rocket booster with a helicopter.
A helicopter latches onto a dummy rocket stage standing in for Rocket Lab's Electron rocket booster during a recovery test over the South Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mahia, New Zealand, in this undated handout photo. Rocket Lab/Handout via REUTERS.is gearing up for a mission that seems more appropriate for a big-budget action movie: catching a falling four-story-tall rocket booster with a helicopter.
But unlike SpaceX's reusable, two-stage rocket Falcon 9, which reignites its engines to return to Earth, Rocket Lab aims for a helicopter with two pilots to pluck a 39-foot-tall booster stage from mid-air using a combination of ropes, parachutes and a heatshield."I'm pretty confident that if the helicopter pilots can see it, they'll catch it," Rocket Lab Chief Executive Peter Beck told Reuters.
Rocket Lab, which went public in 2021 through a blank-check merger led by Vector Capital that valued it at $4.1 billion, has launched roughly two dozen missions to orbit for a mix of government and commercial customers, three of which ended in mission failures. The growing field of small rocket companies also includes Astra Space and Richard Branson's Virgin Orbit.
After the first stage booster launches to space and releases its satellite-topped second stage toward orbit, it is designed to fall back to Earth at eight times the speed of sound, re-entering the atmosphere along a narrow path to rendezvous with the helicopter, which is equipped with tracking computers.
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