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A conceptual rendering of the two ESCAPADE spacecraft orbiting Mars.
Rocket laboratory
Rocket Lab, which is nearing closing its SPAC deal to go public, announced Tuesday that it has won an advance contract that could send two of its Photon spacecraft on a mission to Mars in 2024.
NASA awarded Rocket Lab a design contract for the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers mission. The goal is to send a spacecraft into Martian orbit to study the composition of the planet’s magnetosphere, to better understand how the solar wind removes the atmosphere over time.
While the total cost of the mission has yet to be released, Rocket Lab’s oven-sized Photon spacecraft represents a low-cost method of conducting an interplanetary mission, often costing hundreds of millions of dollars or more. Photon is the hub of Rocket Lab’s space systems business, with the company expanding beyond rocket building to building versatile spacecraft last year.
“Traditionally as interplanetary missions would have been done, you are talking about large decade missions generally with a ‘B’ [for billions] in front of it, “Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck told CNBC.
“What we decided to do … was reevaluate and say, ‘well wait a minute, for about $ 10 million, why can’t you go with a smaller spacecraft to another planet and really do a real science. significant? ‘”Beck said.
Advances by private companies in rockets and spacecraft have reduced the cost of interplanetary missions, Beck said.
“Plus, it’s just great,” Beck said.
Rocket Lab has completed the preliminary design review on the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers mission, known as Escapade, for NASA. The contract will undergo further reviews, with the space agency expected to decide by the end of July whether the company will build the pair of spacecraft.
NASA did not disclose the cost of the mission as the next two phases, the construction process and the selection of a rocket for launch, have yet to be announced. But part of the overall goal is to keep costs down. In comparison, a pair of cubic communications relay satellites built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory performed a technology demonstration in 2018 with the arrival of the InSight lander mission for $ 18.5 million.
“The whole point of this is to try to do it as low cost as possible and get the greatest amount of scientific value for money. So I think you’ll look back on this mission in hindsight and think ‘man, it was incredibly good value. ‘”Beck said. “You talk to a planetary scientist and maybe they manage to do two missions in their entire professional career. And we’re like, ‘it’s just crap, we need to increase the iteration speed here.'”
The moon, Venus and then Mars
Escapde isn’t even the company’s first interplanetary mission on the bridge. Rocket Lab has already received another NASA mission for Photon called Capstone, which is expected to send a cube satellite into orbit around the moon this year. Beck said a launch date should be announced “soon enough”. Additionally, Rocket Lab is carrying out a private mission to Venus, also using a Photon spacecraft, for launch in 2023.
“The Capstone mission to the Moon is what really allowed a lot of this in the beginning … and it’s very similar to the Venus mission, and we leveraged that further with the Mars Escapade missions,” Beck said. “We are really trying to establish ourselves … if you have some smaller interplanetary missions with big science goals that you want to achieve, then we are your one stop shop.”
Rocket Lab’s “Photon” satellite platform, on the right, is shown in the company’s factory next to an upper stage of the Electron rocket.
Rocket laboratory
The Interplanetary Photon is not like the spacecraft that Rocket Lab launches into low Earth orbit, because it needs an enhanced propulsion system, the ability to survive extreme temperature changes, a more powerful radio and a strengthening against radiation. among other things.
“It’s just crazy, crazy shit you should never think about, but these are the things we’re really good at,” Beck said. “And just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it has to be a billion dollars, it just means it’s going to be a little smarter.”
NASA will later choose a rocket to launch Escapade, and Beck said Rocket Lab hopes to have its next Neutron rocket ready in time to compete for the contract “but we were happy to build spacecraft like this for other missions.” he added.
CEO Peter Beck sits at the base of the fairing, or nose cone, of the Neutron rocket the company is developing.
Rocket laboratory
When Rocket Lab earlier this year announced plans to go public by merging with special acquisition company Vector, it revealed it had $ 2 million in space systems revenue last year. Beck has “high” aspirations for building and selling spacecraft, but said he is already “surpassing those,” which is good, as Rocket Lab’s SPAC presentation predicts the unit will reach $ 656 million in revenue. by 2027, up from $ 2 million last year.
Working through Electron bankruptcy
The Electron rocket for the company’s twentieth launch and second landing recovery attempt.
Rocket laboratory
Rocket Lab’s most recent launch of the Electron rocket, its twentieth flight to date, failed to reach orbit after a failure following ignition of the vehicle’s second stage engine. Beck says the failure was caused by a “really complicated and unlikely layering of probabilities on top of each other.”
The company recreated the failure a week after launch by removing a rocket from its production line, cutting its tank in half and putting “the entire second stage in a vacuum chamber,” he said.
“We had to do some pretty bad things to be able to replicate the failure,” Beck said.
Although Rocket Lab has not yet completed its internal review, the company is almost done. The failure was Rocket Lab’s second in the past year, but Beck pointed out that the company’s problems are “not unheard of” in the launch industry, referencing past failures of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets and Vega’s Vega rockets. Arianespace.
“This industry is pretty cruel,” Beck said, adding that the situation “is the reality of carrying on a launch vehicle and also the reality of flying a lot. It’s very easy to have a 100% flight record if your rockets they are always on the ground. “
SPAC closure on the track
Rocket Lab announced in March its merger with SPAC and a document filed by Vector last month said the company is expected to close the deal in the third quarter, rather than the end of the second quarter as originally planned.
The SPAC agreement provides Rocket Lab with a $ 4.1 billion business valuation, with the company expecting to have approximately $ 750 million in cash upon completion of the merger.
“We’re looking in great shape,” Beck said.
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