{"id":77480,"date":"2018-04-04T06:43:02","date_gmt":"2018-04-04T13:43:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/04\/rocket-lab-sets-date-for-first-commercial-launch-of-its-electron-rocket"},"modified":"2018-04-04T09:01:52","modified_gmt":"2018-04-04T16:01:52","slug":"rocket-lab-sets-date-for-first-commercial-launch-of-its-electron-rocket","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/04\/rocket-lab-sets-date-for-first-commercial-launch-of-its-electron-rocket","title":{"rendered":"Rocket Lab sets date for first commercial launch of its Electron rocket"},"content":{"rendered":"

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US spaceflight startup Rocket Lab is officially open for business and has scheduled its very first commercial launch for later this month<\/a>. The company will launch its small Electron rocket with payloads from two paying satellite operators on board \u2014 just three months after completing a second test flight of the vehicle. The upcoming mission will initiate the beginning of customer operations for Rocket Lab, which claims to have a busy manifest for this year and next.<\/p>\n

After four years of developing the Electron, Rocket Lab flew the vehicle for the first time in May 2017<\/a> out of the company\u2019s own private launch site in New Zealand. That test flight \u2014 appropriately dubbed \u201cIt\u2019s a Test\u201d \u2014 made it to space, though the rocket didn\u2019t achieve orbit, due to a glitch in communication equipment on the ground<\/a>. Rocket Lab was able to fix the problem, though, and performed a second test flight of the Electron in January in a mission called \u201cStill Testing.\u201d That time, the vehicle did<\/em> make it to orbit<\/a> and even deployed four satellites, including a secret disco ball probe<\/a> made by Rocket Lab\u2019s CEO Peter Beck.<\/p>\n

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US spaceflight startup Rocket Lab is officially open for business and has scheduled its very first commercial launch for later this month. The company will launch its small Electron rocket with payloads from two paying satellite operators on board \u2014 just three months after completing a second test flight of the vehicle. The upcoming mission [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2028],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-satellites"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77480"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77500,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77480\/revisions\/77500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}