Rocket Lab gives most of its tasks eccentric names. This was called “There and Back Again”, a nod to the restoration of the augmenter as well as the subtitle of J. R. R. Tolkien’s novel “The Hobbit”. The Hobbit trilogy, directed by Peter Jackson, was filmed in New Zealand.
Rocket Lab’s Enhanced Hunting is the latest advance in an industry where rockets have been too expensive for single use. Reusing all or part of one lowers the cost of transporting payloads into space and can speed up the launch pace by reducing the number of rockets that need to be built.
“Eighty percent of the cost of the entire rocket in that first stage, in terms of materials and labor,” said Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, in an interview Friday.
SpaceX pioneered a new era of reusable rockets, and now it regularly lands and flies the first stages of its Falcon 9 rockets again and again. Falcon 9’s second stages (as well as Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket) are still neglected, and usually burn up while re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. SpaceX is designing its next-generation super rocket, the Starship, to be completely reusable. Competitors such as Blue Origin, United Launch Alliance, and companies in China are developing missiles that can be at least partially reused.
NASA’s space shuttles were partially reusable, but required labor-intensive and expensive work after each flight, and did not deliver on their promises of aircraft-like operations.
For the Falcon 9, the booster rocket is fired several times after it separates from the second stages, slowing it down on its way to a quiet location either on a floating platform in the ocean or a location on land. The electron is a much smaller rocket, which makes it more difficult to reuse.