On June 22, Rocket Lab started the countdown for its first real launch, in operational and not experimental mode, called “It’s Business Time.” The Electron, looking like the little pencil that could, stood on a launchpad on the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand, clouds of vapor billowing toward the cold sky. But they were the only things that would go up that day: The launch was called off at T-minus-23-minutes when a tracking dish, an antenna that communicates with and pinpoints the rocket, acted up.
On June 26, the Electron stood up to try again. But minutes after the launch window opened, the company said there was “an issue” with the motor controller, which manages commands sent to and from hardware and software on the rocket.
Rocket Lab had already delayed this inaugural commercial launch by two months, for a similar motor-controller problem. “It’s kind of like a hazard light flicking on in the dash of your car,” says Beck. “You would never go on a big trip.” Beck believed the company’s engineers had resolved the issue, but when that same metaphorical hazard light lit up again, the company called off the countdown and shut the launch window. “We’re not in the business of taking risk,” says Beck.
But no one in the launch business can be 100 percent successful, 100 percent of the time. Even much-vaunted aerospace vehicles, like the Falcon 9, explode. Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo crashed. The Russian Proton hasn’t always been a roaring success either. They’re rockets, man: They don’t work sometimes. “You can never have all the risk figured out,” says Caleb Williams, a space systems analyst at engineering and consulting firm SpaceWorks. “So there’s always going to be some leap of faith at some point.”
But it makes sense for the company to skew conservative during the Electron’s infancy. It’s kind of like if you want to make a good first impression at a party, and your options are (A) blowing up the house, (B) throwing the hosts’ valuables where they don’t belong, or (C) being late—and making everyone watch a livestream of the door till you arrive.
You’d probably pick Option C.