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April 2, 2022 10:02 pm

Two More Successful Rocket Launches from Satellite Launch-Service Providers

SpaceNews reports:The launch was the latest in a series of Electron launches of BlackSky satellites arranged by Spaceflight. That deal included launches of pairs of BlackSky satellites in November and December 2021 as well as a failed Electron launch in May 2021.... Rocket Lab did not attempt to recover the first stage of the Electron after this launch. The company said in November that, after three launches where it recovered Electron boosters after splashing down in the ocean, it was ready to attempt a midair recovery of a booster by catching it with a helicopter, the final step before reusing those boosters. The company has not announced when that recovery will take place, but hinted it would take place soon.... Lars Hoffman, senior vice president of global launch services at Rocket Lab, during a panel session at the Satellite 2022 conference March 22...added that the company has a "full manifest" of Electron launches this year, including the first from Launch Complex 2 at Wallops Island, Virginia, with a goal of launching on average once per month. "We're keeping pace with the market. We're trying not to get too far ahead." Meanwhile, in mid-March Space.com reported that the launch-service provider Astra "bounced back from last month's launch failure with a groundbreaking success, deploying satellites in Earth orbit for the first time ever" with its low-cost two-stage launch vehicle, LV0009. (Watch video of the launch here.)It was a huge moment for Astra, which suffered a failure last month during its first-ever launch with operational payloads onboard.... Astra aims to break into the small-satellite launch market in a big way with its line of cost-effective, easily transported and ever-evolving rockets. The company had conducted five orbital flights before today, four of them test missions from Kodiak. Astra reached orbit successfully on the most recent of those four test flights, a November 2021 mission that carried a non-deployable dummy payload for the U.S. Department of Defense. But the company stumbled on its next mission, its first with operational payloads onboard... Astra investigators soon got to the bottom of both problems, tracing the fairing issue to an erroneous wiring diagram and the tumble to a software snafu. The company instituted fixes, clearing LV0009's path to the pad... LV0009 rose into the Alaska sky smoothly and ticked off its early milestones as planned. Stage separation and fairing deploy went well, and the rocket's second stage cruised to the desired orbit with no apparent issues. LV0009 deployed its payloads successfully about nine minutes after liftoff.... One of the known payloads is OreSat0, a tiny cubesat built by students at Portland State University in Oregon that is designed to serve as a testbed for future cubesats that will study Earth's climate and provide STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) outreach opportunities.

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