Rocket Lab, the company founded by Beck, partially achieved the feat on Tuesday as it pushes to make its small Electron missiles reusable. However, after briefly catching the rocket used, a helicopter crew was quickly forced to let it go again for safety reasons and crashed into the Pacific Ocean where it was picked up by a waiting boat. The California-based company regularly launches 18-meter (59-foot) rockets from the remote Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand to deliver satellites into space. On Tuesday, the Electron rocket was launched in the morning and sent 34 satellites into orbit before the main amplifier began to fall to Earth. His descent was slowed to about 10 meters (33 feet) per second by a parachute. It was then that the helicopter crew jumped, hanging a long line with a hook under the helicopter to catch the amplifier’s parachute lines. The crew caught the rocket but the load of the helicopter exceeded the parameters from tests and simulations, so they launched it again. The train of emotions was recorded in a live stream of the event, with the people in control of the mission cheering and applauding as the rocket was fired, only to leave a collective vegetable and sigh about 20 seconds later. However, Beck hailed the mission as a success, saying that almost everything went according to plan and that the unexpected load problem was a tiny detail that would soon be fixed, a “nothing in the plan of things”. “They made a big arrest. “They just did not like the feeling of the cargo,” Beck said of the helicopter crew during a post-launch conference call. He said a detailed analysis should reveal the reasons for the deviation in load characteristics. He said he still hoped the company could save some or all of the used rocket booster, despite being submerged in salt water, which they hoped to avoid. Rocket Lab has named its latest mission “There And Back Again” – a reference to the New Zealand film trilogy “The Hobbit”. The company described the brief capture in the air at 1,980 meters (6,500 feet) from the Sikorsky S-92 helicopter as a landmark. He says reusing its missiles will allow the company to increase the number of launches it makes and reduce costs. Elon Musk’s SpaceX company designed the first reusable orbital rocket, the Falcon 9. Nick Perry, The Associated Press
