Watch: Rocket Lab spacecraft heads to the Moon after successful lift-off

Tuesday, 28 June 2022

Rocket Lab launched a rocket to the Moon on Tuesday, after a series of minor delays.

The Electron rocket lifted off from the base on the Māhia Peninsular near Gisborne as scheduled on 9.55pm.

It is one of the smallest orbital rockets to attempt to launch a spacecraft to lunar orbit, Rocket Lab said before the lift-off.

“Perfect Electron launch!” Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck tweeted on Tuesday. “Lunar photon is in Low Earth Orbit.”

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The Capstone mission will see the rocket placing a small satellite into orbit around the Moon for Nasa in what the US space agency hopes will be a step towards its later launch of a crewed lunar space station and further missions to the Moon’s surface, and potentially Mars.

The launch of the Electron rocket and Photon spacecraft that will carry the Capstone satellite on its 3½ month journey to the Moon had been delayed several times from May 31, including for a software update.

The company had said the last delay, from Monday evening, was to allow for “final systems checks”.

Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck said earlier this month that “launching from Māhia” to the Moon would be a historic moment.

“This is a mission all New Zealanders can and should be proud of. We're going to the Moon and so few countries can say that.”

If the rest of the mission is successful, the Capstone CubeSat satellite – only about the size of a microwave oven – will be the first to take the new path around the Moon and will send back vital information for at least six months.

“It will have equilibrium. Poise. Balance,” Nasa wrote on its website. “This pathfinding CubeSat will practically be able to kick back and rest in a gravitational sweet spot in space – where the pull of gravity from Earth and the Moon interact to allow for a nearly-stable orbit.”

Eventually, Nasa plans to put a space station called Gateway into the orbital path, from which astronauts can descend to the moon’s surface as part of its Artemis programme.

For the satellite mission, Nasa teamed up with Rocket Lab, which launched the rocket carrying the satellite. The satellite is owned and operated by Colorado-based Advanced Space.

The total cost of the mission was put at US$32.7 million.

Getting the 25kg satellite into orbit will take more than four months and be done in three stages.

First, Rocket Lab’s small Electron rocket launched from New Zealand. Just nine minutes later, the second stage called Photon separated and went into orbit around Earth. Over the next five days, Photon's engines are scheduled to fire periodically to raise its orbit further and further from Earth.

Six days after the launch, Photon's engines will fire a final time, allowing it to escape Earth's orbit and head for the moon.

Photon will then release the satellite, which has its own small propulsion system but which won't use much energy as it cruises towards the moon over four months, with a few planned trajectory course corrections along the way.

The Ministry of Business, Science, Innovation (MBIE) said on Monday that it had helped facilitate a separate research agreement between Nasa and academics at the universities of Canterbury, Auckland and New South Wales.

A team led by Canterbury University associate professor Stephen Weddell will attempt to track Capstone and predict the path of its orbit from observatories in Tekapo and Canberra.

MBIE was involved because Nasa wanted there to be a government relationship in its research agreements, but it wasn’t involved in funding arrangements, Johnson said.

He noted Nasa had a budget of about US$30 billion (NZ$47b) for its Artemis Moon programme.

“Hopefully this is the start of what could be greater collaboration”.

- With Associated Press

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated Rocket Lab is owned by Advanced Space. Advanced Space owns and operates the Capstone satellite that was launched by Rocket Lab. (Amended at 11.27am, June 20, 2022)