Rocket Lab's string of 20 consecutive successful launches ended Tuesday when the company's Electron rocket failed to deliver a small commercial radar imaging satellite into orbit.
The problem occurred on the upper stage of the Electron rocket about two and a half minutes after liftoff from Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand. This was the fourth time a Rocket Lab mission has failed in 41 flights.
In a statement, Rocket Lab said it is "working closely" with the Federal Aviation Administration and supporting agencies as the company begins an investigation into the cause of the failure. While Rocket Lab launches most of its missions from New Zealand, the company is headquartered in the United States, giving the FAA regulatory oversight authority over failure investigations.
"We will identify the issue swiftly and implement corrective actions and return to the pad shortly," Rocket Lab said. The company's stock price was down about 8 percent in early trading Tuesday.
The mission began with liftoff of the 59-foot-tall (18-meter) Electron rocket from New Zealand at 2:55 am EDT (06:55 UTC). The launch was delayed nearly 30 minutes due to elevated levels of solar activity.
The Electron rocket's nine kerosene-fueled engines burned for more than two minutes, sending the launch vehicle on a trajectory toward the southeast from Rocket Lab's privately owned spaceport. Everything went well with the first stage burn and stage separation, according to Rocket Lab, until the second stage was expected to light its single engine to continue accelerating to orbital velocity.
An onboard camera showed sparks around the upper stage engine as it was supposed to ignite. A display on Rocket Lab's live launch webcast showed the rocket's velocity decreasing, which suggested the vehicle's upper stage was not generating any significant thrust.
A few moments later, a mission director in Rocket Lab's launch control room declared an "anomaly," and the company's webcast ended. Without enough speed to reach orbit, the upper stage and its payload—a radar remote sensing satellite for Capella Space—fell into the Pacific Ocean downrange Rocket Lab's launch site, likely near the impact point of the rocket's jettisoned first stage booster (Rocket Lab did not attempt to recover the first stage on this mission).
Rocket Lab said in a statement that its next mission, which was expected to launch before the end of this month, will be postponed while the company investigates Tuesday's failure.
Not great, not terrible
The Electron rocket now has a 90 percent success rate over its 41 missions to date, which is still better than Rocket Lab's competitors in the market for dedicated launches of small satellites. Aside from Rocket Lab, Astra and Firefly Aerospace are the only other active companies in the new wave of commercial small satellite launch startups that have achieved orbit. Virgin Orbit launched a handful of successful missions, but that company went out of business earlier this year.
However, a 90 percent success rate pales compared to SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, which has now amassed more than 230 straight successful launches. SpaceX's Falcon 9 is much larger than Rocket Lab's Electron and isn't suited for dedicated launches of small satellites. But SpaceX has lured many small satellite operators with low prices on its Transporter rideshare missions, giving dozens of modest-size payloads rides into orbit on a single rocket at a fraction of the cost of a standalone mission on a smaller launcher.
Rocket Lab's demonstrated reliability also falls short of India's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, another larger rocket that is active in the commercial rideshare launch market.
Rockets like the Electron can place a single payload, such as Capella's radar satellite lost Tuesday, directly into a customer's preferred orbit. A satellite launched on a SpaceX rideshare mission might need to use up its own precious fuel to maneuver from where it was dropped off into its optimum operating orbit.
But there's a significant difference in launch prices. A dedicated commercial launch on Rocket Lab's Electron runs about $7.5 million. According to SpaceX's website, it would charge less than $1 million to launch a 363-pound (165-kilogram) satellite comparable in mass to one of Capella's radar spacecraft. A customer deciding between a SpaceX and a Rocket Lab launch would need to weigh these financial, reliability, and technical considerations.
Rocket Lab aimed to launch as many as 15 missions this year, a goal that is likely in jeopardy after Tuesday's launch failure. This was the ninth Rocket Lab launch so far in 2023. The company resumed flights within approximately two months after its last two launch failures.
The Electron rocket debuted on a test flight in May 2017, but a telemetry error caused a range safety officer to send a destruct command to the rocket a few minutes into the flight. Investigators determined the problem originated in a piece of ground equipment from a contractor, and there was nothing wrong with the rocket itself.
The company's second failure occurred in July 2020, when the electric turbopumps on the Electron's upper-stage engine shut off due to a faulty electrical connector. Rocket Lab returned to flight in less than two months, then racked up six successful launches in a row before another failure in May 2021. Engineers also traced the cause of that failure to the Electron's upper stage, which spun out of control shortly after stage separation and engine ignition.
At the end of June, Rocket Lab reported a contract backlog of $534 million, including many launch agreements for commercial satellite operators and the US government, plus deals to supply satellite components to a broad range of customers. Since the start of the year, Rocket Lab has signed contracts for at least 17 new launches.
While its Electron small satellite launcher has been flying for customers, Rocket Lab is deep into developing the new medium-lift Neutron rocket. The spending on Neutron was a large part of why Rocket Lab reported a net loss of nearly $46 million in the second quarter of 2023. In the same quarter, Rocket Lab reported more revenues from spacecraft systems sales than from launch services.
The launch failure Tuesday blemishes what had been a strong couple of years of technical accomplishment for Rocket Lab's launch business. Since its last failure in 2021, the company has succeeded in recovering Electron boosters from the sea. Last month, Rocket Lab flew a reused Rutherford engine on an Electron rocket's first stage and announced plans to fly a mission later this year with a full set of nine reused booster engines.
Rocket Lab also launched the CAPSTONE mission to the Moon for NASA last year. The company then successfully deployed four NASA hurricane research satellites in May after Astra failed to fulfill its launch contract for those missions.
