These Small Rockets Are Designed To Launch Small Satellites

Rocket Lab's Electron rocket is smaller than most, built to carry tiny CubeSats. Rocket Lab

Wired: The Little Rocket That Could Sends Real Satellites to Space

The launch company Rocket Lab has amusing names for its missions. The first, in May, was called “It’s a Test” (it was). When the staff debated what to call the second launch of their diminutive Electron rocket, so sized (and priced) specifically to carry small satellites to space, they said, “Well, we’re still testing, aren’t we?”

They were. And so “Still Testing” became the name of Rocket Lab’s second launch, which took place on January 20, at around 8:45 pm Eastern Standard Time. In December, the company canceled multiple attempts before rescheduling the launch window for 2018. The livestreamed rocket lifted off from the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand, headed for someplace with an even better view.

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CSN Editor: They want the small payload-satellite niche. More signs on how the commercialization of space continues.

It's Not Easy To Lauch A Rocket

Why North Korea Sucks At Rocket Technology -- Danger Room

Rockets: They’ve been around for, oh, 70 years. But just because they’re senior citizens doesn’t mean they’re technologically decrepit. As North Korea’s latest failed rocket test shows, launching a rocket into space is still, well, rocket science.

To successfully launch a rocket into space — a necessary achievement for creating the intercontinental ballistic missiles that North Korea wants and breathless American politicians baselessly fear they’ll develop — you need expertise in lots of things. Lots of physics. Lots of safe handling of dangerous chemicals. And lots of experience.

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My Comment: During the heydays of the Soviet Union, my uncle worked in a division that was responsible for developing and assembling satellites, and then configuring them to be put on a rocket. Growing up I always pestered him about his job, and he mentioned to me more than once that assembling and successfully launching a rocket is an incredibly difficult engineering endeavor .... a fact that I am sure a few North Korean engineers are saying right now.

Armadillo Aerospace's Scorpius Craft Finally Bags $1 Million Lunar Lander Challenge

Scorpius Shoots for the Moon: Armadillo Aerospace's Scorpius vehicle completed a mock lunar landing on Earth -- next step, space Armadillo Aerospace

From Popular Science:

Armadillo Aerospace may claim a $1 million prize for completing a mock lunar landing, if no other competitors step up

A future trip to the moon could use a commercial vehicle, if Armadillo Aerospace has anything to say about it. The company's rocket-powered craft pulled off a mock lunar landing on Saturday to qualify for a $1 million purse from NASA's Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge.

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Behind the Scenes With the World's Most Ambitious Rocket Makers

SpaceX propulsion chief Tom Mueller examines a spacecraft control thruster.

From Popular Mechanics:

An improbable partnership between an Internet mogul and an engineer could revolutionize the way NASA conducts missions—and, if these iconoclasts are successful, send paying customers into space

In late 2001, Tom Mueller was sacrificing his nights and weekends to build a liquid-fuel rocket engine in his garage.

Mueller, a propulsion engineer at Redondo Beach, Calif.–based aerospace firm TRW, felt like an “unwanted necessity” at his day job. His prolific ideas about engine design were lost at such a large, diverse company. To satisfy his creative impulses, he built his own engines, attached them to airframes and launched them in the Mojave Desert with fellow enthusiasts in the Reaction Research Society, America’s oldest amateur rocketry club. RRS members, many of them employees at aerospace firms, meet regularly in the Los Angeles area to build and launch the biggest and highest flying rockets they can—just as the group has done since it was founded in the early 1940s.

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