Rocket Lab USA, Inc. (Nasdaq: RKLB) successfully launched their rideshare Electron mission that carried seven smallsats to LEO.
Named the “Baby Come Back” mission, Electron lifted the smallsats from Pad A at Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 in Mahia, New Zealand (photo below), to their assigned orbits.
Rocket Lab is also planning to conduct a marine recovery of Electron’s first stage as part of this mission, with the recovery team aboard the vessel Seaworker.
Payloads aboard the ‘Baby Come Back’ mission include…
- NASA
NASA’s Starling mission is a four CubeSat mission (built by Blue Canyon Technologies) and are designed to test technologies to enable future “swarm” missions. Spacecraft swarms refer to multiple spacecraft autonomously coordinating their activities to achieve certain goals. Starling will demonstrate technologies for in-space network communications, onboard relative navigation between spacecraft, autonomous maneuver planning and execution, and distributed spacecraft autonomy — an experiment for small spacecraft to autonomously react to observations, paving the way for future science missions.
- Space Flight Laboratory (SFL)
Space Flight Laboratory (SFL) selected Rocket Lab to launch Telesat’s LEO 3 demonstration satellite that will provide continuity for customer and ecosystem vendor testing campaigns following the decommissioning of Telesat’s Phase 1 LEO satellite.
- Spire Global
Spire will launch two LEMUR (Low Earth Multi-Use Receiver) 3U satellites carrying Global Navigation Satellite System Radio Occultation (GNSS-RO) payloads to replenish its fully deployed constellation of more than 100 multipurpose satellites. Spire’s satellites observe the Earth in real time using radio frequency technology. The data acquired by Spire’s GNSS-RO payloads provide global weather intelligence that can be assimilated into weather models to improve the accuracy of forecasts. Spire is the largest producer of GNSS-RO weather data, collecting over 20,000 RO profiles a day.
