![]() Expanding presence in North Americaīefore the Investor Day event even began, Rocket Lab kicked off Wednesday morning with news: It will test the Neutron rocket’s Archimedes engines at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. While the event livestream hit a technical snafu, Rocket Lab shared all the updates in a long tweet thread concurrent with the event ( read it here). The company shared the news with investors and the general public during Rocket Lab’s Investor Day. home to even a greater share of launches, testing and manufacturing. While the company has been public about its plans to expand to both hemispheres for a while, executives released a slew of updates on Wednesday detailing their goal to make the U.S. “Assuming that is done and blessed by the legislature, and we have no reason to believe it will not be, $15 million will go into construction for the facility, and the 30 million will be geared toward the construction of the new launch pad,” Mercer said, noting that the pad would be multi-purpose, not a Neutron exclusive.īeck added that “We’re hoping to break ground here extremely shortly,” as naturally the sooner they can build one, the sooner they can test it.Rocket Lab is a U.S.-based company, but until now the bulk of its activities have been conducted in New Zealand. The state has earmarked some $45 million in funds to expand and improve the Wallops NASA facility, though the money is still working its way through the capitol, said Ted Mercer, head of the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority (and USAF Major General, retired) on the call. It’s an all-in-one complex, including a launch and orbit ops center, that should offer hundreds of jobs for the area and further cement Wallops’s longstanding importance in the space industry. Rocket Lab reimagines rocket design with its Neutron launch vehicleĪs a launch vehicle designed from the ground up for reusability, Neutrons will also return to Wallops after delivering their payloads and be refurbished in the same facility where they were born. We didn’t want to define the diameter by the largest bridge between Wallops and California.”īeck spoke to the advantages of this large diameter back in December when the Neutron’s specs were first publicly revealed. “The stage diameter is really quite large - we made that decision really early. “The intent here is the entire launch vehicle will be manufactured in that facility,” said Rocket Lab CEO and founder Peter Beck on a media briefing call Monday. Rolls of the stuff will be available fresh from the composites equivalent of a warm oven, ready to wrap around Neutron’s 23-foot girth. Not only will the vehicle assembly take place there, but the specialized carbon composites that make it up will be manufactured on-site. It’s a lot of space, but of course rockets are big, and Rocket Lab plans to make quite a lot of them. The new Neutron Production Complex will be located right inside NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, on a 28-acre plot hosting approximately 250,000 square feet of interior space. will continue to field the company’s smaller Electron rockets, a fresh facility will be built in Virginia to house and eventually launch the much larger Neutron launch vehicle. While its existing pads in New Zealand and the U.S. Rocket Lab has announced the latest expansion of its growing empire of rocket building and launching facilities.
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