Rocket Lab Electron Launch from LC-1 | Owlright, Owlright, Owlright

Video from the channel The Launch Pad about Electron, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 42:23. Language: English. Video type: Livestream.

Rocket Lab's broadcast of Electron's 97th launch, mission "Owlright, Owlright, Owlright," from Pad B of Launch Complex 1 on the Mahia Peninsula (New Zealand). The payload was the thirteenth StriX satellite for Japanese company Synspective, which is deploying a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite constellation able to observe Earth day and night and in any cloud cover. Liftoff was scheduled for 12:39 local time, with a 40-minute window, and the mission came a week after another for the same customer from the same pad. The hosts recall that the first launch for Synspective was in 2020, on Electron's 17th flight ("The Owl's Night Begins"), carrying the StriX Alpha demonstrator, and that 14 more missions remained with this company through 2030.

The broadcast describes the rocket: two stages plus an optional kick stage, 18 m tall, 1.2 m in diameter, an almost entirely carbon-composite structure, and about 13 t at liftoff, burning liquid oxygen and kerosene. It carries ten 3D-printed Rutherford engines with pumps driven by battery-powered electric motors, nine on the first stage and one on the second; the kick stage uses the Curie engine, also 3D-printed and restartable. The broadcast also includes a look back at ten years of Launch Complex 1, described as the world's first private orbital launch site.

After the pre-launch verification checks, the onboard computer took control at T-2 minutes. After liftoff, Electron passed through maximum dynamic pressure and went through first-stage shutdown, stage separation, and second-stage ignition. The fairing separated around three and a half minutes into flight. Around T+6 min 37 s came the hot-swap of batteries, which discards the depleted pack so the second-stage engine can keep running, when the rocket was past 15,000 km/h and 193 km of altitude. Second-stage shutdown came shortly after T+9 minutes.

Mission control confirmed a nominal transfer orbit and separation of the kick stage with the satellite. This stage was expected to coast for about 40 minutes in an elliptical orbit before igniting the Curie engine to raise perigee to 549 km and deploy the satellite into its target orbit of about 559 km.