NZ's Own Rocket Lab News

[kiwithrottlejockey]

Mission Control has just announced that all boats are now out of the danger area and they are continuing the countdown towards an anticipated launch at 17:20hrs local time.

[kiwithrottlejockey]

In the end, the weather conditions deteriorated (presumably winds?), so the launch has been rescheduled for tomorrow afternoon.

I wonder if the idiots in the pleasure boat who caused the countdown to be stopped less than a minute from liftoff even care about what they have done?

They need to have the book thrown at them.

Fingers crossed for tomorrow.

[errolmartyn]

Jan 20, 2018 16:58:27 GMT 12 kiwithrottlejockey said:

. . . They need to have the book thrown at them.

Or perhaps a rocket up 'em!?

Errol

[isc]

I sat around most of the afternoon waiting, oh well we'll see tomorrow. I think the weather problem was high altitude winds. Fingers crossed. isc

[Bruce]

Vehicle is Orbital - payload deployed! Well Done Rocket lab and everyone else involved. The live stream was superb, beautiful images of our little country from space (and the Earth is round!)

[kiwithrottlejockey]

[Dave Homewood]

I have watched two of these launches now and both have been superb.

[kiwithrottlejockey]

[baz62]

Watched the replay of the launch and what an achievement! (I wondered in a Facebook post to Bruce Cooke whether we can now threaten North Korea with a giant jandal as payload?) The footage was very good, I had it fullscreen on my 26" monitor and it was amazingly clear. Dave would these guys be on your "to interview" list?

[kiwithrottlejockey]

For those of you who missed it, Rocket Lab has now uploaded 24 minutes and 39 seconds of footage of the final 14 minutes of coundown, the launch, successful orbit transition and insertion of the payload (three satellites) into orbit to their YouTube channel.

[isc]

A great day in NZ aviation(well things going up, maybe not down). isc

[ErrolC]

Jan 21, 2018 20:13:40 GMT 12 isc said:

A great day in NZ aviation(well things going up, maybe not down). isc

The vast majority of what went up is already down, as planned ;-)

[kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Washington Post....

Company shoots shiny orb into orbit and
angers astronomers over ‘space graffiti’.

Scientists on Twitter called the Humanity Star vandalism,
a disco ball and “space garbage”.

By BEN GUARINO | 2:11PM EST — Friday, January 26, 2018


Rocket Lab founder and chief executive Peter Beck stands with the Humanity Star in New Zealand in November.
— Photograph: Rocket Lab/Associated Press.

EARLIER THIS MONTH, the New Zealand-based private spaceflight company Rocket Lab successfully delivered its first orbital payload. Rocket Lab's Electron rocket released, along with three commercial satellites, an art installation-as-satellite called the Humanity Star.

The satellite, a highly reflective 65-faced ball crafted of carbon fiber, will orbit Earth for nine months. Around October, its orbit will decay, and the satellite will disintegrate as it descends in the atmosphere. Until its destruction, the Humanity Star will twinkle so brilliantly it can be witnessed by observers below. It will be most visible at dawn or dusk, creating an effect Rocket Lab likened on its website to a “bright flashing shooting star.”

Rocket Lab's goal is nothing less than a reflection on the cosmos. “Wait for when the Humanity Star is overhead and take your loved ones outside to look up and reflect. You may just feel a connection to the more than seven billion other people on this planet we share this ride with,” founder Peter Beck said in a statement on the company's website (which also hosts a location tracker for the orb).

But the giant Dungeons & Dragons die floating through space is not a critical hit. Not among professional stargazers. On Thursday, Mashable journalist Miriam Kramer collected criticisms from astronomers on Twitter. The scientists described the Humanity Star as vandalism, a disco ball, “space graffiti” and “space garbage”. Naked eyes can already see the International Space Station, astronomer Eric Mamajek tweeted, and sending reflective objects into orbit has not, in the past, prompted “awe and world peace”.

Columbia University astronomer Caleb A. Scharf, writing at Scientific American, said the idea “sounds like jolly nice fun” but also fills him “with a big dose of dread”. The satellite, in his perspective, is an unwanted intrusion into an environment increasingly crowded by satellites.

There are a few thousand satellites in Earth's orbit. And our ability to deploy a bunch of satellites at once is growing: In February, India deployed 104 small satellites from a single rocket, setting a world record. Decades before space powers had such capabilities, NASA astrophysicist Donald Kessler worried about space debris triggering a chain reaction of collisions among a sky thick with satellites, a scenario termed the “Kessler syndrome”.

This is not to suggest that the Humanity Star will be the spark that sets off a Kessler syndrome. “Kessler was describing an orbital Nagasaki, where everything was annihilated,” Federal Communications Commission economist Peter J. Alexander, who has written a paper on space trash, told The Washington Post in 2013. “But there are degrees in which the environment gets degraded even before that sort of collisional cascade,” he added.

“I don't want to be too negative about the Rocket Lab ball — I salute them for their success in putting it into orbit,” New York University astrophysicist Benjamin Pope told The Post. He also pointed to a tweet that suggested not everyone in the field was opposed, summing up the counternarrative: “It is probably short lived and kind of cool.”

That said, he disagreed with Rocket Lab's decision. “Privately sending bright toys up there can harm the international astronomical community's use of it,” he said.

Satellites do not need to be chronic pests or annihilators to cause headaches. A quick blaze through a telescope's field of view can disrupt research. “Astronomers are well used to finding their hard won images streaked with the destructive light trails of glinting objects as they pass overhead,” wrote Scharf, who also compared launching the Humanity Star to sticking a “big flashing strobe-light on a polar bear.”

“This Humanity Star could well be a minor annoyance,” Pope said, “in particular, as it zooms through the sky it will pass through the fields of view of ground based observatories and ruin patches of their data.” He could only find limited information about the object's orbit, but he was concerned it might travel above large observatories in Hawaii or Chile, which are particularly sensitive to bright objects.

Rocket Lab did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But when Pope tweeted, “Oh god why would you do this to us astronomers,” the company replied that the object's presence will be short-lived.

The company is also “considering future iterations of the Humanity Star” once this one is destroyed, according to its website.

__________________________________________________________________________

• Ben Guarino is a reporter for Speaking of Science at The Washington Post.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

• Thousands of tiny satellites are about to go into space and possibly ruin it forever

www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/01/26/company-shoots-shiny-orb-into-orbit-astronomers-irked-over-space-graffiti

[atea]

Saw Peter Beck mowing his lawn this morning down the road here in Beachlands.

Putting a rocket into orbit and keeping up with the household chores all in the same week. Legend!

Shows where a dream can get you if you truly believe in what you are doing.

[isc]

Humanity Star has set, it burned up last night. isc

[Dave Homewood]

Aww, I never even saw it.

[isc]

Nor I, I kept following it's track on the web site, but it was never in the right place grr. isc

Just had a look at the map and it is still shown orbiting, at the moment it is crossing China, heading for Mongolia. Perhaps they have forgotten to take it down.

[markrogers]

I think the Humanity Star is awesome. I read somewhere that there's hundreds of satellites, from past to present orbiting earth.

[isc]

Markrogers, your right there, and if you look up Google you'll find a number of satilites you can spot and follow, just don't get in the way of the Chinese space lab that is supposed to come down in the next week or so. isc

[kiwithrottlejockey]

from STUFF....

• Rocket Lab aiming for two space flights a month and a second launch pad









• More on Facebook