Rocket Laboratory gives strange names to most of its missions. It was called “There and Back Again”, an endorsement of Booster’s restoration and the subtitle of J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel “The Hobbit”. The Hobbit trilogy, directed by Peter Jackson, was filmed in New Zealand.
The Rocket Lab Booster C is the latest development in an industry where rockets were once disposable and expensive. Reusing all or part of it can reduce the cost of transporting payloads into space and speed up launch by reducing the number of missiles to be produced.
“Eighty percent of the price of a full first-stage rocket, whether in materials or labor,” said Peter Beck, chief executive of the Rocket Lab, in an interview Friday.
SpaceX pioneered a new era of reusable rockets, and now the Falcon 9 continues to land and fly the first stages of rockets over and over again. The Falcon 9 secondary rocket (as well as the Rocket Laboratory’s electronic rocket) is still neglected, and usually burns up when it re-enters Earth’s atmosphere. SpaceX is designing its next-generation super rocket, the Starship, to be completely reusable. Competitors and companies in China, such as Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance, are developing rockets that are at least partially reusable.
NASA’s spacecraft were somewhat reusable, but they required extensive and expensive work after each flight, and did not deliver on the promise of aircraft-like operations.
For the Falcon 9, the booster is fired several times after separating from the secondary, and slows down a slow-setting trajectory to the ocean floor or land. The electron is a very small rocket, which makes reusing it very difficult.