📰 Rocket Lab Loses Seven Satellites After 'Something Went Wrong'

An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica: On Sunday morning, local time in New Zealand, Rocket Lab launched its 13th mission. The booster's first stage performed normally, but just as the second stage neared an altitude of 200km, something went wrong and the vehicle was lost... "We lost the flight late into the mission," said Peter Beck, the company's founder and chief executive, on Twitter. "I am incredibly sorry that we failed to deliver our customers satellites today. Rest assured we will find the issue, correct it and be back on the pad soon." The mission, dubbed "Pics Or It Didn't Happen," carried 5 SuperDove satellites for the imaging company Planet, as well as commercial payloads both for Canon Electronics and In-Space Missions. "The In-Space team is absolutely gutted by this news," the company said after the loss. Its Faraday-1 spacecraft hosted multiple experiments within a 6U CubeSat. "Two years of hard work from an incredibly committed group of brilliant engineers up in smoke. It really was a very cool little spacecraft." The article notes that since January of 2018, "the company had rattled off a string of 11 successful missions and emerged as a major player in the small satellite launch industry." In a video statement on Twitter, company founder Peter Beck said solemnly that "Today's issue is a reminder that space flight can be very unforgiving."

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