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Old 12-02-2018, 07:18 AM
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ZeroID (Brent)
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Good article on Peter Becks and Rocketlab's space aspirations and creed.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/...-humanity-star

For those of you who were concerned about space junk etc here is his take on de-orbiting the launch stage and the second stage kicker so no rocket hardware is left up there

'Our craft go into a transfer orbit, which is highly elliptical. Then we split off the kick-stage, which is a tiny spacecraft of its own, then circularise the orbit. Traditionally, you would end up with a giant second stage in orbit and that doesn’t make environmental sense. So by going into the elliptical orbit it means that the second stage is dipping into the Earth’s atmosphere and it only stays up there for a very short period of time before it burns up. We only leave a small kick-stage up there, but that has its own propulsion system, so once we deploy the satellite we spin that kick-stage around and do a de-orbit burn. So we are very conscious of not leaving anything behind except the spacecraft. Historically, that’s not been done.'

The article covers a lot more of how their systems differ.
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Old 12-02-2018, 07:53 AM
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The launch of the SpaceX with the red Tesla last week also did not leave any space debris behind. It jettisoned the booster back to Earth and the spacecraft if gone out of orbit between Mars and the asteroid belt.
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