Image copyright Reuters Image caption The two-stage rocket did not quite make it to orbit, but the team was very happy with the test flight

An American company has launched a rocket into space from New Zealand, the first from a private launch facility.

Rocket Lab's 17m-long (56ft) Electron lifted off from the Mahia Peninsula, in the North Island, the firm said.

The test flight was the first launch from New Zealand and is a major first step in an emerging market: launching cheap disposable rockets to carry small satellites and other payloads.

The company plans to start frequent commercial launches later this year.

Poor weather conditions had pushed the launch into the fourth day of a 10-day window and the Electron finally cleared its pad at 16:20 local time (04:20 GMT).

Image copyright Twitter/@RocketLabUSA

The launch was conducted with no media or spectators permitted, but the company released a video of the lift-off on its Twitter page.

"It was a great flight," chief executive Peter Beck said in a statement after the launch, adding though that the rocket did not quite reach orbit, the path on which its future cargo would embark on its revolution of the Earth.

"We'll be investigating why, however reaching space in our first test puts us in an incredibly strong position to accelerate the commercial phase of our programme, deliver our customers to orbit and make space open for business."

The test launch, one of three planned, did not carry a payload as such, although it was packed with sensor equipment to help engineers understand how the flight performed.

Eventually, Rocket Lab says it will be lofting payloads up to 150kg (331lbs) into a 500km-high orbits that go from pole to pole.

Image copyright AFP Image caption There was no public or media access to Mahia Peninsula to witness the launch

Analysis: Jonathan Amos, Science correspondent, BBC News

We're on the cusp of something quite exciting. Innovative companies are packaging really capable technologies into very small, low-cost satellites.

Their data will drive myriad new services - from helping city officials keep track of urban development to giving farmers information about the performance of their crops. But if this new wave is to succeed it needs cheaper access to space.

At the moment, the economics and flight schedules of these small satellites are still being defined by the availability and price of a ride on a big rocket.

Rocket Lab aims to change that. And there are others, such as Richard Branson's LauncherOne project. Rocket Lab's second vehicle is already built and set to fly in the next couple of months.

Keep an eye on the end of the year too because this US/NZ outfit even has a contract to send a small lander to the Moon.

Why New Zealand?

Rocket Lab's founder and chief executive Peter Beck is from New Zealand and the firm has a New Zealand subsidiary.

The country has less air traffic, compared to say the US, so there is less need for flights to be rerouted every time a rocket is sent to space.

Image copyright Digital Globe Image caption The launch site is located on North Island's Mahia peninsula

New Zealand is also positioned well to get satellites into a north-to-south orbit around Earth.

The trajectory takes the rocket out over open water, far from from people and property.

The country hopes these favourable factors will help it become a low-cost space hub.

Nice touch: The Electron has nine engines on its first stage and one engine on its second stage. They are called Rutherford engines - after the great New Zealand-born physicist Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937), who famously split the atom in 1917.

Why is the launch significant?

Private and commercial rocket launches are becoming more and more common - the most famous example being Elon Musk and his SpaceX Falcon rockets.

But the SpaceX vehicles are huge and are aimed at following in the footsteps of Nasa missions, delivering cargo to the international space station and eventually sending people to Mars.

Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The rockets SpaceX sends into orbit are a different league from the Electron

Rocket Lab's goal is to launch what, by comparison, is a tiny rocket for a fraction of the price, but with much more frequency.

The Electron is a mere 17m long and 1.2m in diameter. Each launch only costs about $5m. Rocket Lab wants to conduct 50 or more a year.

Just to put this all into perspective: SpaceX's current Falcon rocket is a towering 70m and can carry 22,800kg into low-Earth orbit for a standard price of $62m.

Rocket Lab's website already allows you to book a slot for your satellite. The cheapest deal is a small cubesat on a rideshare option - prices start at $77,000 (£59,280).</s>From household fixes to artificial organs, 3D printing is popping up everywhere. But the international startup Rocket Lab is thinking even bigger: rockets. Today, their 3D-printed rocket successfully made it to space.

As Reuters reports, the rocket—called the Electron—completed a successful test launch from the remote Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand. Clocking in at a wee 55 feet long, the battery-powered, low-cost rocket made it to space after multiple weather delays earlier this week.

In this case, “space” doesn’t mean orbit. “We didn’t quite reach orbit and we’ll be investigating why,” said Peter Beck, the company’s founder and CEO, in a press release. Nonetheless, the carbon-composite rocket, whose engine took a full 24 hours to print, made it up past Earth’s atmosphere with a cargo of sensors. Data will now be analyzed to figure out how to improve the rocket.

Its 3D-printed construction wasn’t the only new thing about the Electron. As the BBC notes, it was the first such launch from a private facility. The existence of petite, privately available spacecraft could create new opportunities to get satellites and other tech up into orbit for less money—and since New Zealand doesn’t have as much air traffic as the U.S., it could allow private industry to do so more often with less fuss.

The New Zealand Herald’s Grant Bradley reports that government officials and kiwis are excited about the potential of a space industry in their country. However, not everyone is thrilled about the launch. As Reuters notes, the people of Mahia, which is largely Maori, complained about their home being turned into a launch pad, especially in light of Rocket Lab’s plans to launch regularly in the future.

Someone else was doubtless watching as the rocket launched: NASA. In 2015, the agency awarded Rocket Lab a $6.9 million contract to figure out how to send tiny CubeSats—miniature satellites—to space without forcing the devices to hitch a ride on other rocket launches. Once that happens, it could make space research a lot less risky, yielding valuable new scientific information without a mammoth investment.

Are 3D-printed rockets truly the wave of the future? We won’t know until they’re in regular use—but the launch shows that the possibility is closer than ever.</s>Rocket Lab, a California-based spaceflight company with its roots in New Zealand, just launched its two-stage Electron rocket for the first time. The small launch vehicle successfully lifted off from Rocket Lab's Launch Complex 1 on the Mahia Peninsula of New Zealand at 12:20 a.m. ET on Thursday May 25—4:20 p.m. New Zealand time. The successful liftoff marks the first time an orbital-class rocket has been launched from a private launch facility.

"It has been an incredible day and I'm immensely proud of our talented team," said Peter Beck, CEO and founder of Rocket Lab, in a press release. "We're one of a few companies to ever develop a rocket from scratch and we did it in under four years. We've worked tirelessly to get to this point. We've developed everything in house, built the world's first private orbital launch range, and we've done it with a small team."

However, the test payload itself "didn't quite reach orbit." Rocket Lab is investigating the cause, and the company's engineers in Los Angeles and Auckland will be sifting through data from the launch in the coming weeks.

Rocket lab has two more test flights planned for the Electron this year. On the second launch, the company will focus on getting its payload to orbit as well as increasing the payload size. The company says it wants to launch about 50 rockets a year at full production, and it has already signed contracts with customers like NASA and Moon Express.

The Electron rocket stands about 56 feet tall and puts out around 36,000 lbs. of thrust from its nine oxygen-kerosene "Rutherford" engines. That makes the rocket significantly smaller than a SpaceX Falcon 9, which stands as tall as 260 feet and can put out as much as 1,710,000 lbs. of thrust. But the market for smaller satellites that only weigh a couple hundred kilograms and cubesats the size of shoeboxes is increasing steadily. Rocket Lab hopes to get its prices as low as $5 million per launch, providing an alternative to ride-sharing for hundreds of customers who want to launch smaller payloads.

The launch is a big step for Rocket Lab, which is the first company to build its own orbital-class rocket as well as its own launch facility. If the next two test launches go off without a hitch, we might see Rocket Lab fly their first Electron carrying a commercial payload before the year is out.</s>A supplied image of the launch and maiden flight of a battery-powered, 3-D printed rocket built by Rocket Lab, a Silicon Valley-funded space launch company, at New Zealand's remote Mahia Peninsula, May 25, 2017.

One of the world’s most promising new rocket companies successfully launched its first rocket to space from New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula on May 25.

Though the 17-meter-tall rocket and its test payload didn’t make it to orbit, its flight to space represents an important milestone.
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“We had a great first stage burn, stage separation, second stage ignition and fairing separation,” Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck said after the flight. “We didn’t quite reach orbit, and we’ll be investigating why. However, reaching space in our first test puts us in an incredibly strong position to accelerate the commercial phase of our program.”

Rocket Lab, a company recently valued at $1 billion by private investors, has been waiting since May 22 to test its first product, a rocket called Electron designed to launch small satellites into orbit. Its outer shell is made almost entirely of carbon fiber, and it boasts an electric turbopump and a 3-D printed engine. A successful launch will provide key data to refine the rocket’s construction, and validate the hopes of both the company’s backers and a slew of other small satellite firms desperate to see their own technology put into space.

A new generation of rocket companies, led by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, have made cheaper access to space a reality. In response, numerous companies have come up with new satellite business plans, creating a glut of demand for rocket launches. With SpaceX and its competitors largely focused on the lucrative business of launching large, expensive satellites, several companies are racing to bring smaller rockets, capable of being launched with little lead time, to service the lower end of the market.

Rocket Lab is among the leaders in this race, a binational firm with facilities in California and its launch center in New Zealand. The Electron is expected to cost $5 million and carry 225 kilograms of cargo into orbit. For comparison, a brand new SpaceX Falcon 9 lists at $60 million per launch and can carry some 22,800 kilograms into low-earth orbit. But Rocket Labs hopes to launch as many as 50 times a year, a major increase in cadence from the pace set by launch companies today.

The company’s first test rocket had been waiting patiently to fly for several days. Its obstacle was a common one in rocketry: clouds.

While rockets are capable of generating enormous amounts of force to heave their cargo out of gravity’s reach, the wrong atmosphere conditions stand in their way. This is not because clouds would deflect the rocket—at maximum output, it can generate 40,000 pounds of force—but that incredible speed through the atmosphere can result in something called “triboelectrification,” when friction builds up an electrical charge on the surface of the rocket, which could zap guidance computers or other electronics. Basically, it’s like the static electricity generated when you rub your socks on a carpet and then touch a door knob, but on a grand scale.

It’s a concern faced by rocketeers from Cape Canaveral in the US to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Having waited patiently for their opportunity, Rocket Lab’s engineers were able to make a successful flight.

Once Electron is fully qualified to take cargo into orbit, Rocket Lab already has customers lined up in NASA, the small satellite companies Planet and Spire, and even Moon Express, which hopes to launch a moon probe and win the Google Lunar XPrize on an Electron rocket. Rocket Lab has also just sold a launch to Spaceflight Industries, a company that acts as a broker for space access.

Rocket Lab is not the only small rocket company looking at this market. US-based Vector Space is also entering the test phase of its own effort to field a small satellite-hauling rocket, launching a reduced-size prototype with a full-size engine in the Mojave desert in early May. The company is planning a handful of suborbital tests this year to develop the vehicle before bringing it to full commercial use.

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• Amazon’s first bookstore in New York City sucks the joy out of buying books
• Coding is not “fun,” it’s technically and ethically complex</s>Electron lifted-off at 16:20 NZST from Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 on the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand. It was the first orbital-class rocket launched from a private launch site in the world.

"It has been an incredible day and I'm immensely proud of our talented team," said Peter Beck, CEO and founder of Rocket Lab. "We're one of a few companies to ever develop a rocket from scratch and we did it in under four years. We've worked tirelessly to get to this point. We've developed everything in house, built the world's first private orbital launch range, and we've done it with a small team.

"It was a great flight. We had a great first stage burn, stage separation, second stage ignition and fairing separation. We didn't quite reach orbit and we'll be investigating why, however reaching space in our first test puts us in an incredibly strong position to accelerate the commercial phase of our program, deliver our customers to orbit and make space open for business," says Beck.

Over the coming weeks, Rocket Lab's engineers in Los Angeles and Auckland, New Zealand will work through the 25,000 data channels that were collected during the test flight. The results will inform measures taken to optimize the vehicle.

"We have learnt so much through this test launch and will learn even more in the weeks to come. We're committed to making space accessible and this is a phenomenal milestone in that journey. The applications doing this will open up are endless. Known applications include improved weather reporting, Internet from space, natural disaster prediction, up-to-date maritime data as well as search and rescue services," says Beck.

Today's launch was the first of three test flights scheduled for this year. Rocket Lab will target getting to orbit on the second test and look to maximize the payload the rocket can carry.

Footage and imagery of the launch will be made available here:

https://www.rocketlabusa.com/latest/link-to-rocket-lab-imagery-and-video/

Media Contact:

Catherine Moreau Hammond | 027 538 9039 | c.moreauhammond@rocketlab.co.nz 

Chloe Tonkin | 020 414 30668 | chloet@porternovelli.kiwi 

Marcus Torrey | +1 (415) 891-4909 | marcus@methodcommunications.com

Rocket Lab's mission is to remove the barriers to commercial space by providing frequent launch opportunities to low Earth orbit. Since its creation in 2006 by Peter Beck, Rocket Lab has delivered a range of complete rocket systems and technologies for fast and affordable payload deployment.

In addition to New Zealand's first orbital launch site located on the MÄhia Peninsula, the company has operations in both Auckland and Los Angeles.

Electron is an entirely carbon-composite vehicle designed and manufactured in New Zealand that uses Rocket Lab's 3D-printed Rutherford engines for its main propulsion system. The Electron vehicle is designed to carry payloads, such as smaller satellites, to a low orbit. Owing to the modern design and construction of the Electron - rapid and scalable manufacture with high levels of automation is possible.

The Electron launch vehicle will allow constellations of small satellites to provide services like affordable internet from space and live-earth observation for activities such as environmental monitoring, natural disaster prediction, up-to-date maritime data and search and rescue services.

Electron is capable of delivering payloads of up to 150 kg to a 500 km sun-synchronous orbit - the target range for this high-growth constellation-satellite market. Electron is the most affordable small satellite launch vehicle. Customers signed to fly on Electron include NASA, Planet, Spire and Moon Express.

Rutherford is a state of the art oxygen and kerosene pump fed engine specifically designed from scratch in New Zealand for Electron, using an entirely new propulsion cycle. Its unique high-performance electric propellant pumps reduce mass and replace hardware with software.

Rutherford is the first engine of its kind to use 3D printing for all primary components. These features are world firsts for a high performance liquid rocket engine with propellants that are fed by electric turbopumps. The production-focused design allows Electron launch vehicles to be built and satellites launched at an unprecedented frequency.

Rocket Lab's Launch Complex 1 is located on the tip of the MÄhia Peninsula, between Napier and Gisborne on the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand. The complex is the first orbital launch site in New Zealand, and the first privately operated orbital launch site globally.

The remote location of Launch Complex 1, particularly its low volume of air and marine traffic, is a key factor in enabling unprecedented access to space. The geographic position of the site means it is possible to access a large range of orbital azimuths - satellites launched from MÄhia can be delivered to a wide range of inclinations to provide services across many areas around the world.</s>An American company has launched a rocket into space from New Zealand, the first from a private launch facility.

Rocket Lab's 17m (56ft) Electron rocket took off from the Mahia Peninsula, in North Island, the firm said on Twitter.

The test flight was the first launch ever from New Zealand and is a major first step in an emerging market; launching cheap disposable rockets to carry small satellites and other cargo.

The company plans to start frequent commercial launches later this year.

Poor weather conditions had pushed the launch into the fourth day of a 10-day window and the Electron finally took off at 16:20 local time (04:20 GMT).

The test launch, one of three planned, did not carry any actual cargo, but Rocket Lab says eventually the Electron rocket will carry 150kg (331lbs) into orbit.

Rocket Lab's founder and chief executive Peter Beck is from New Zealand.

Why is the launch significant?

Private and commercial rocket launches are becoming more and more common - the most famous example being Elon Musk's SpaceX.

But SpaceX builds huge rockets aimed at following in the footsteps of Nasa missions, delivering cargo to the international space station and eventually sending man to Mars.

Rocket Lab's Electron is entirely different. Its goal is to launch what, by comparison, is a tiny rocket for a fraction of the price.

That means that launches can be more frequent and a lot cheaper.

There is a growing market for small satellites and so-called cubesats - small rectangular boxes that may weigh only a few kilos which are used, for instance, to gather pictures of Earth and weather data.

Currently, the only way of getting these into orbit is by hitching a ride on a big rocket as a secondary payload.

What kind of a rocket is the Electron?

The Electron is 17m long and 1.2m in diameter.

While the maximum payload is 225kg, it is designed to carry only 150kg into low orbit - between 300km (186 miles) and 500km above earth.

Just to put this into perspective: SpaceX's current Falcon rocket is a towering 70m and can carry 22,800kg into low orbit.

According to Rocket Lab, each launch costs around $5m (£3.85m) and the rocket is made entirely of carbon-composite and can not be re-used.

The firm has developed its own partly 3-D printed engine for the project.</s>Small-satellite launch company Rocket Lab said its Electron rocket “made it to space” in its first test flight, as the Huntington Beach firm and other small-rocket start-ups begin to inch closer to commercial operations.

In a tweet Wednesday evening soon after the launch Rocket Lab said it was “delighted."

The Electron rocket, which did not have a satellite aboard during this test flight, was intended to reach an elliptical orbit, about 186 to 310 miles above Earth at an 83- degree inclination.

The company’s 10-day launch window opened Sunday afternoon at 2 p.m. Pacific time, but the launch was delayed by three days because of weather conditions at the company’s private launch complex on New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula.

Rocket Lab completed construction on the launch complex in September.

Company Chief Executive Peter Beck said in a statement last week that the “No. 1 priority” of this first test flight was to “gather enough data and experience to prepare for a commercial phase.”

“We are all incredibly excited to get to this point,” he said.

This was the first of three test launches before Rocket Lab starts launching customer payloads. The company has already secured contracts with customers such as NASA and Earth-imaging firm Planet.

The growing launch manifest puts pressure on Rocket Lab to test its rockets and move on to commercial service, said Bill Ostrove, aerospace and defense analyst at Forecast International.

Rocket Lab is building a business around the burgeoning small-satellite market.

Thanks to technological advancements that slashed satellite development and launch costs, a number of companies, including SpaceX, OneWeb and Boeing, have proposed so-called constellations of hundreds or even thousands of small satellites that would provide low-cost broadband Internet access.

To meet the expected demand for launches, companies such as Rocket Lab are tailoring their rockets to give these small satellites a dedicated ride to space.

The Electron is small — about 56 feet long, with a diameter of about 4 feet — and is intended to lift small satellites or other payloads weighing up to 330 pounds to a low orbit.

The rocket’s first stage is composed of nine Rutherford engines, which are powered by liquid oxygen and kerosene. The company said it used 3-D printing for all of the primary components of the Rutherford engine.

Recently, there has been a flurry of activity from small-satellite launch vehicle developers.

Tucson-based Vector Space Systems launched a test of its Vector-R rocket earlier this month in Mojave, Calif. Another industry player, Long Beach-based Virgin Orbit, is aiming to test LauncherOne — a satellite-launching rocket that will be dropped from beneath the wing of a Boeing 747 — for the first time by the end of the year.</s>On Thursday, shortly after midnight on the US East Coast, a New Zealand-based rocket company launched an orbital-class rocket from a private launch site for the first time. While relatively small, Rocket Lab's Electron launch vehicle stands at the vanguard of a new class of launchers designed to place increasingly tiny satellites into space. Facing competition from the likes of Virgin Orbit and Vector Space Systems, which are late in the development stage, Rocket Lab is the first small satellite launch company to put a full-size rocket into space.

“We’re one of a few companies to ever develop a rocket from scratch and we did it in under four years," said Peter Beck, chief executive and founder of Rocket Lab. "We’ve worked tirelessly to get to this point. We’ve developed everything in-house, built the world’s first private orbital launch range, and we’ve done it with a small team."

Although the Electron vehicle made it into space, it "didn't quite reach orbit," according to Beck. Rocket Lab did not release precise details of the launch from Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand but said the vehicle had a "great" first-stage burn, stage separation, second-stage ignition, and fairing separation. Over the coming weeks, Beck said, the company will investigate data from the launch, understand why the vehicle failed to reach orbit, and proceed to the second of three test launches before beginning commercial operations.

The Electron rocket is a relatively small vehicle, at 17 meters tall and with a diameter of 1.2 meters. Nine oxygen-kerosene "Rutherford" engines power the vehicle, each with 34,500 pounds of thrust at liftoff. (That is a little less than one-fifth the thrust of each of the nine Merlin 1-D engines that power SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket). When fully functional, the rocket will be able to send up to 150kg to a Sun-synchronous orbit 500km above the Earth.

This is far less than the capacity of orbital rockets operating today, including the Falcon 9, Atlas V, Soyuz, and other commercially available rockets. But in recent years there has been an explosion in demand for the delivery of small satellites weighing anywhere from a few hundred kilograms all the way down to cubesats and a desire to not have to ride-share with larger payloads. Rocket Lab hopes to meet this demand with services costing as little as $5 million per launch.

The new class of low-cost small satellite booster companies plans to launch rapidly, and often, to meet market demand. At full production, Rocket Lab says it will launch more than 50 times a year and is regulated to launch up to 120 times a year. A chief executive of a competitor, Jim Cantrell of Vector Space Systems, recently described the market for smaller launch vehicles as "shooting turkeys in a drum," saying there was incredible demand. In the race to reach the market first with a smaller orbital vehicle, then, Rocket Lab took a big step Thursday.</s>The debut launch of Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket from a privately-operated base in New Zealand made it to space Thursday, proving the performance of major parts of the booster before faltering short of the velocity it needed to enter orbit, the company said in a statement.

The U.S.-New Zealand company said data from the test flight will help refine the Electron launcher for future demonstrations before it enters commercial service hauling small satellites to orbit.

“It was a great flight,” said Peter Beck, Rocket Lab’s CEO. “We had a great first stage burn, stage separation, second stage ignition and fairing separation. We didn’t quite reach orbit,, and we’ll be investigating why, however, reaching space in our first test puts us in an incredibly strong position to accelerate the commercial phase of our program, deliver our customers to orbit and make space open for business.”

The 55-foot-tall (17-meter) Electron rocket, made of black carbon composite materials, fired its nine first stage Rutherford engines in the final seconds of Thursday’s countdown. After a quick health check, computers commanded hold-down restraints to release the booster at 0420 GMT (12:20 a.m. EDT) from Launch Complex 1, Rocket Lab’s operations base on Mahia Peninsula on the eastern coast of New Zealand’s North Island.

Liftoff occurred at 4:20 p.m. local time in New Zealand, and the Electron rocket quickly climbed into mostly cloudy skies, turning to the south over the Pacific Ocean.

Thursday’s launch, christened “It’s a Test,” came after bad weather halted flight preps on three consecutive days.

The nine Rutherford first stage engines, each burning a combination of kerosene and liquid oxygen, cumulatively produced around 34,500 pounds of thrust at liftoff and powered up to 41,500 pounds of thrust as the rocket soared into the stratosphere.

The first stage engines were scheduled to switch off at T+plus 2 minutes, 30 seconds, followed by first stage separation around four seconds later. A single modified Rutherford engine on the Electron’s second stage was programmed to ignite for nearly five minutes to drive the launcher into an orbit between 186 miles (300 kilometers) and 310 miles (500 kilometers) above Earth.

But something went awry with the rocket before passing the speed required to reach orbit.

Rocket Lab released no further details on the mission, which carried instrumentation collecting 25,000 channels of telemetry for engineers to evaluate the launcher’s performance. There were no commercial satellites aboard the rocket, only an inert payload, according to a launch license issued by the Federal Aviation Administration, the regulatory authority which oversees Rocket Lab operations because the company is based in the United States.

Nevertheless, Beck said in a statement the accomplishments in Thursday’s test flight will advance Rocket Lab’s mission to reduce the cost of space launches, particularly for lightweight payloads that have trouble booking rides on existing launchers.

“Rocket Lab will target getting to orbit on the second test and look to maximize the payload the rocket can carry,” the company said in a press release after Thursday’s flight.

“We have learned so much through this test launch and will learn even more in the weeks to come,” Beck said. “We’re committed to making space accessible and this is a phenomenal milestone in that journey.

“The applications doing this will open up are endless,” Beck said. “Known applications include improved weather reporting, Internet from space, natural disaster prediction, up-to-date maritime data as well as search and rescue services.”

NASA and several commercial companies have contracts for launches of CubeSats and other small spacecraft on Rocket Lab’s Electron booster, which is due to enter service following two more test flights later this year.

Rocket Lab is headquartered in Huntington Beach, California, with a design and engineering office in Auckland, New Zealand.

The company says it will charge $4.9 million per Electron flight, significantly less than any other launch provider flying today, and offer a dedicated ride for payloads that currently must ride piggyback with a larger payload.

With money from venture capital funds in Silicon Valley and New Zealand, along with a strategic investment from Lockheed Martin, Rocket Lab completed the design and qualification of the Electron rocket with less than $100 million since the company was established in 2006, according to Beck.

“We’ve done a lot in a short period of time with a little,” Beck said in a March interview with Spaceflight Now.

Rocket Lab’s progress was marked with test launches of more than 80 sounding rockets since the company’s formation.

The total money invested in Rocket Lab to date is $148 million, and the company was valued at more than $1 billion during a Series D financing round closed in March.

“It has been an incredible day and I’m immensely proud of our talented team,” Beck said in a statement Thursday. “We’re one of a few companies to ever develop a rocket from scratch, and we did it in under four years. We’ve worked tirelessly to get to this point. We’ve developed everything in-house, built the world’s first private orbital launch range, and we’ve done it with a small team.”

Rocket Lab did not provide a public live video webcast of Thursday’s launch, but a video feed of the liftoff was privately streamed to the company’s facilities elsewhere in New Zealand and the United States.

Future Electron missions could loft up to 330 pounds (150 kilograms) of payload to a circular sun-synchronous polar orbit 310 miles above Earth.

Each Rutherford engine on the 3.9-foot-diameter (1.2-meter-diameter) rocket generates around 4,600 pounds of thrust, using battery-powered pumps to cycle the engine’s liquid propellants, an innovation Rocket Lab describes as “entirely new” in rocket propulsion.

The Electron’s engine, named for the New Zealand-born nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford, is the first of its type to be primarily 3D-printed. Each Rutherford engine, including its engine chamber, injector, pumps and main propellant valves, can be printed in 24 hours.

Readying the commercial launch range in New Zealand proved to be just as much a challenge as the rocket itself, Beck said before the test flight.

“We are not just commissioning the launch vehicle, but we’re commissioning an entire launch range, including all the flight termination assets and all the telemetry assets,” Beck said in a March interview with Spaceflight Now. “We’ve got downrange tracking stations that we own on remote islands in the Pacific, so it’s not just a matter of rolling the vehicle out to an established pad.

“It’s the very first time that the FAA has provided a truly commercial launch license, so there’s a lot of work in that,” Beck said.

Personnel from the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Alaska relocated to New Zealand to set up and test tracking and range safety systems at the Mahia Peninsula launch site.

Beck said in March that the maiden launch would fly with manual and autonomous flight termination systems, and future Electron missions will likely carry just a self-destruct device, which simplifies the infrastructure required for a rocket mission.

“The range is a massive undertaking,” Beck said. “You don’t realize how good you’ve got it until you go and build your own range and realize what’s involved in that. Anybody who turns up at KSC (Kennedy Space Center) has it great, that’s for sure.”

A crew of around 45 engineers and managers stationed at Rocket Lab mission control in Auckland and at a range control center at Mahia were in charge of the countdown.

Rocket Lab says it could theoretically launch once every 72 hours from the Mahia Peninsula base once commercial operations commence, but Beck said the company also has agreements to launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and from the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Alaska.

Beck said launches going into orbits over Earth’s poles could take off from Alaska, while other missions could be based from Kennedy Space Center.

NASA is one of several customers who have signed up for a launch with Rocket Lab to place multiple small research satellites into orbit, committing to a nearly $7 million launch contract in October 2015.

The U.S. space agency also signed launch contracts with two other company’s working on micro-launchers in the same class as the Electron: Virgin Galactic and Firefly Space Systems.

The air-dropped LauncherOne rocket, now part of a Virgin division known as Virgin Orbit, could conduct its first test launch by the end of this year. Firefly ran into financial trouble last year and stopped development of its Alpha launch vehicle.

Rocket Lab also has a commercial launch deal with Moon Express, one of the competitors vying for the Google Lunar X Prize, for three missions to send micro-landers to the moon, the first of which must depart by the end of 2017 to win the prize.

Other Rocket Lab customers include Planet, a San Francisco company which builds and manages a fleet of CubeSats in orbit designed to take daily images of Earth’s surface. Planet’s launches to date have been on supply ships heading for the International Space Station, where the CubeSats are deployed, and as secondary payloads aboard Indian rockets.

Customers with satellites released from the space station or launched on the same booster with larger spacecraft often have little say about where or when their payloads go into space, a problem companies like Rocket Lab intend to solve.

Planet signed a launch agreement in 2016 with Rocket Lab for at least three dedicated Electron flights.

Spire Global also agreed to send its CubeSat-type satellites to orbit on up to 12 Electron rocket launches, expanding the San Francisco-based operator’s fleet of commercial weather forecasting and maritime tracking spacecraft.

Rocket Lab has also sold one Electron mission to Spaceflight, a Seattle company which aggregates small satellites from commercial, academic and government customers to share launches into orbit. Spaceflight and Rocket Lab did not announce a date for the rideshare flight in a press release last week disclosing the launch contract.

Rocket Lab’s latest infusion of $75 million from venture capital funds in March will help the company “scale up” its production to be ready for the anticipated launch rate, Beck said.

“The 3D-printed engine is a big part of that,” Beck said in a March interview. “Right now, with six printers, we can produce one engine every 24 hours, so if we need to produce more engines, we can just buy more printers. We put ourselves in a very scaleable situation, and now we just need to execute on that.”

At full production, Rocket Lab says it expects to launch more than 50 times per year.

The newest funding will also go toward outfitting a new rocket 150,000-square-foot rocket factory in Huntington Beach and upgrading Rocket Lab’s existing facilities in New Zealand.</s>Rocket Lab, an American-New Zealand aerospace company, made history yesterday when its Electron rocket reached space at 16:23 NZST.

Electron lifted-off at 16:20 NZST from Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 on the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand. It was the first orbital-class rocket launched from from a private launch site in the world.

“It has been an incredible day and I’m immensely proud of our talented team,” said Peter Beck, CEO and founder of Rocket Lab. “We’re one of a few companies to ever develop a rocket from scratch and we did it in under four years.

“It was a great flight. We had a great first stage burn, stage separation, second stage ignition and fairing separation. We didn’t quite reach orbit and we’ll be investigating why, however reaching space in our first test puts us in an incredibly strong position to accelerate the commercial phase of our programme, deliver our customers to orbit and make space open for business,” says Beck.

Minister for Economic Development Simon Bridges has congratulated the team at Rocket Lab on the successful launch of their first test rocket on the Mahia Peninsula.

“Today’s successful launch is a major milestone in the development of New Zealand’s space industry,” says Mr Bridges.

“It is the first visible sign of a space industry in New Zealand and is an achievement Rocket Lab, and all New Zealanders can be proud of.”

New Zealand is now one of 11 countries currently able to launch satellites into space from their own territory and the first to launch from a fully private orbital launch range.

“The potential benefits for our economy are very significant. These include opportunities to grow in areas related to the space industry such as research, materials development and testing, and to attract other space related companies to set up in New Zealand, and even space tourism,” Mr Bridges says.

Over the coming weeks, Rocket Lab’s engineers in Los Angeles and Auckland, New Zealand will work through the 25,000 data channels that were collected during. The results will inform measures taken to optimize the vehicle.

“We have learnt so much through this test launch and will learn even more in the weeks to come,” says Beck, “We’re committed to making space accessible and this is a phenomenal milestone in that journey.”

Today’s launch was the first of three test flights scheduled for this year. Rocket Lab will target getting to orbit on the second test and look to maximize the payload the rocket can carry.

Rocket Lab’s mission is to remove the barriers to commercial space by providing frequent launch opportunities to low Earth orbit. Since its creation in 2006 by Peter Beck, Rocket Lab has delivered a range of complete rocket systems and technologies for fast and affordable payload deployment.

In addition to New Zealand’s first orbital launch site located on the Māhia Peninsula, the company has operations in both Auckland and Los Angeles.

Rocket Lab is a private company, with major investors including Khosla Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Data Collective, Promus Ventures, Lockheed Martin and K1W1.

Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 1 is located on the tip of the Māhia Peninsula, between Napier and Gisborne on the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand. The complex is the first orbital launch site in New Zealand, and the first privately operated orbital launch site globally.

The remote location of Launch Complex 1, particularly its low volume of air and marine traffic, is a key factor in enabling unprecedented access to space. The geographic position of the site means it is possible to access a large range of orbital azimuths – satellites launched from Māhia can be delivered to a wide range of inclinations to provide services across many areas around the world.
Rocket Lab launches its 3D-printed Electron rocket on a test flight from Māhia Peninsula in New Zealand. This is the first launch from New Zealand and the first from a private facility. Electron is 17 meters high, is intended for frequent launches of small payloads, and costs $5 million per liftoff. SpaceX's Falcon 9 stands at 70 meters, carries up to 22,800 kilograms to the ISS, and costs $62 million per launch.