Rocket Lab Sees Payoff From CAPSTONE Launch
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Rocket Lab sees payoff from CAPSTONE launch - SpaceNews:
The successful launch of a NASA lunar cubesat mission was the culmination of two and a half years of work at Rocket Lab that, the company's chief executive says, could enable "ridiculously low cost" planetary missions.
Rocket Lab's Electron launched NASA's Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) cubesat and the company's Lunar Photon kick stage June 28. The Photon will gradually raise its orbit over the next several days before a final burn that places CAPSTONE on a ballistic lunar trajectory.
The payload, with an overall mass of more than 300 kilograms, pushed the Electron to the limit. "Electron gave everything that it could give. We've never run the engines as hard as we ran them tonight," Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said in an interview a few hours after the launch, which took place in the evening in New Zealand. "We put the Lunar Photon exactly where it needed to be and we had some performance left over in the vehicle."
[...] The payoff, he said, is a system that can be used for other smallsat missions with high performance requirements. Rocket Lab is already planning to use the same kick stage for a privately funded mission to Venus, replacing the CAPSTONE cubesat with an atmospheric entry probe.
"We can go to Mars and to asteroids equally well," he said. "This really is an entirely new system for deep space exploration at just a ridiculously low cost."
Perhaps we're getting closer to the point where we can crowdsource a Soylent mission to Mars!
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.