REPLAY LIVE 🔴 LANCEMENT ELECTRON DE ROCKET LAB : ANTIPODEAN ADVENTURE (NROL-199) (FR) !

Video from the channel Vulga-Space about Electron, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 30:43. Language: French. Video type: Livestream.

Rebroadcast of the French-language live stream from the Vulga-Space channel, hosted by Alex and Lauriane, following the official Rocket Lab feed of an Electron launch on the Antipodean Adventure mission. The payload is the classified satellite NROL-199, also called RASR-4, for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). Liftoff was scheduled for 7:00 Paris time from Pad LC-1B on the Māhia peninsula (New Zealand), with a two-hour window. An earlier attempt, on the Tuesday of that week, had been scrubbed due to upper-level wind shear.

Before liftoff, the hosts go over the launch vehicle: a lightweight rocket 18 m tall, 1.2 m in diameter and about 13 t. The first stage carries nine Rutherford engines fed by RP-1 kerosene and liquid oxygen, whose pumps are driven by electric motors powered by lithium batteries. The second stage uses a single vacuum-optimized Rutherford, and the Photon kick stage, with its Curie engine, circularizes the orbit before releasing the payload.

The launch goes off on time with no holds in the countdown. Onboard cameras show the pass through Max-Q, first-stage engine cutoff around T+2 min 35 s, stage separation and second-stage ignition, the fall of the two fairing halves and, later, the jettison of the second stage's two depleted battery packs to shed mass. The first stage is not recovered on this flight and falls into the sea. The second stage burns for just over six minutes until cutoff, with the Earth's curvature and a sunset in the background.

The Rocket Lab broadcast ends after second-stage cutoff: since this is a military mission, neither the payload nor the Photon stage separation nor the satellite deployment is shown, and none is confirmed by the close of the stream. The hosts announce coverage for that same day of an Atlas V carrying the SBIRS missile-warning satellite and a suborbital flight of Blue Origin's New Shepard.