“It is a significant reduction in range costs and range equipment,” Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said at the briefing. Rocket Lab has been using its own AFTS for more than 20 Electron launches from its original launch site, LC-1 in New Zealand. Eighteen companies have requested access to the software, Pierce said, but Rocket Lab will be the first to use it on the upcoming Electron launch. NAFTU will be available to other range users to reduce the number and cost of traditional range safety assets and support higher flight rates. “What we’ve been doing over the past couple weeks is following up with answers to questions to show how NASA Wallops validated the combined response to our flight safety plan to the FAA,” he said. He said there is some additional final paperwork to complete for the Electron launch, in the form of additional analyses by a joint NASA-Rocket Lab team. Pierce said NASA still needs to complete “cleaning up some of the paperwork” for full certification of NAFTU from the FAA, which he expects to be complete by the end of the month. Rocket Lab’s implementation of NAFTU, which the company calls Pegasus, has received approval from the FAA for the upcoming launch. “As soon as we completed that, we turned to supporting Peter and the fabulous Rocket Lab team” as the company modified NAFTU for use on Electron. The system completed an independent certification led by the chief engineer of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in October. “We knocked down each one of those challenges, one by one, and we completed independent testing in the summer of 2022.” “As part of that, as normally happens in I&T, you find errors or bugs that needed to be fixed, and that’s what we did,” he said. It took more than a year to develop the test procedures and scripts needed to ensure the software met range safety requirements.īy early 2022, NAFTU was ready for independent certification testing. Space Force and Federal Aviation Administration to fix the software and go through a certification process, he said. In the fall of 2020, NASA established a “cross-agency” team that included the U.S. During final checks of the software, engineers discovered numerous errors in the code. 14 online briefing, David Pierce, director of NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, said the final safety certification of what’s called the NASA Autonomous Flight Termination Unit (NAFTU) was originally scheduled in time to support a mid-2020 first launch from LC-2. However, delays in development by NASA of a new autonomous flight termination system (AFTS) required for Electron launches from Wallops delayed that first flight by more than two years.Īt a Dec. At that time, it expected to perform the first launch there in the second quarter of 2020 for the Defense Department’s Space Test Program. The scheduled launch comes three years after Rocket Lab declared Launch Complex 2 complete. HawkEye 360 signed a contract in April for three Electron launches, including the first Electron launch from Wallops. The mission will place into orbit three satellites for HawkEye 360, which operates a constellation of spacecraft that perform radio-frequency surveillance. There is an 85% chance of favorable weather for the launch that day as well as on a backup day Dec. The launch, called “Virginia is for Launch Lovers” by the company, is scheduled from the company’s Launch Complex (LC) 2 at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops during a two-hour window that opens at 6 p.m. WASHINGTON - After more than two years of delays, NASA and Rocket Lab are finally ready to conduct the first Electron launch from Wallops Island in Virginia on Dec.
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