Space News by Jeff Foust — August 7, 2017
Rocket Lab blamed the failure of its first Electron rocket to reach orbit on a telemetry glitch in ground equipment that can be easily corrected, keeping the company on track to begin commercial launches by the end of this year.
In a statement released late Aug. 6, the U.S.-New Zealand company said its Electron rocket was flying as planned on its May 25 inaugural launch when a dropout of telemetry from the vehicle required range safety officials to terminate the flight four minutes after liftoff, at an altitude of 224 kilometers.
The company said that a third-party contractor supporting the launch misconfigured ground equipment that translated radio signals from the rocket into data used by range safety officials. That caused “extensive corruption of received position data,” resulting in the data loss that led safety officials to trigger the rocket’s flight termination system.
“It’s a very, very easy thing to fix. You literally tick a box in some software,” said Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, in an Aug. 6 interview during the 31st Annual Conference on Small Satellites here. “It’s more about working with our contractors to ensure that we have better oversight of their services.”
The company did not disclose the name of the contractor who made the software configuration error. Beck did say that Rocket Lab would continue to use that company on its future launches.
Rocket Lab’s separate telemetry stream, unaffected by the software glitch, showed that the rocket was performing as planned up until the flight was terminated. “We have demonstrated Electron was following its nominal trajectory and was on course to reach orbit,” Beck said in the company’s statement.
More:
http://spacenews.com/telemetry-glitch-kept-first-electron-rocket-from-reaching-orbit/
