As SpaceX teaches, the recovery of rockets and their subsequent reuse determine a great economic advantage for the company that produces them. But the SpaceX rockets, in fact, land vertically on platforms that navigate at sea. In this case, Rocket Lab tried to do something completely new: hook the first stage of Electron with a cable hanging from a helicopter, a Sikorsky S-92, when the rocket makes its slow descent from a parachute.
The operation is equally difficult, because it takes place at a height of about two thousand meters and the object to be intercepted is falling at a speed of 10 meters per second. During the live launch, the engineers cheered twice: the first, when the parachute was opened correctly; the second, when the carabiner of the cable dropped from the helicopter hooked the first stage of Electron.
It seemed done, but then there was a small roar of disapproval. The helicopter pilots ditched the rocket because they saw a problem in the way it was circling in the air. However, the rocket fell into the sea and was later recovered by a boat involved in the operation.Now Rocket lab will have a lot of data available to understand how to improve, in the future, a recovery that seemed possible only in a Hollywood film.
by Pier Luigi Pisa