The Terran 1 rocket stands awaiting its debut launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
John Kraus / Relativity Space
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It hasn’t mattered who you are, or how much time you’ve spent developing your rocket: The track record for debut launches is ruthless.
Earlier this week, Japan’s new H3 rocket failed on its first flight. Earlier this year, ABL’s RS1 rocket shut down a few seconds after liftoff. Other newcomers – Virgin Orbit, Astra, Firefly Aerospace – similarly fell short in first tries. Even today’s private U.S. launch leaders, SpaceX and Rocket Lab, had their share of failures when first gunning for orbit.
So why are first launches so unforgiving? With Relativity Space on the brink of its first attempt, and ULA aiming for its Vulcan rocket’s debut in the coming months, I caught up with George Nield, who understands the risk side of this business as well as anyone. Nield is currently part of NASA’s safety advisory group, and has more than three decades of experience in the space industry, including leading the FAA’s commercial space office.
“In a launch vehicle, you have lots of different complex systems … and traditionally, we’ve been talking about expendable launch vehicles. So you’ve got one try with this hardware to make it work,” Nield said. “You’re starting off at ground level – a standing start – and you’re hoping to go all the way to Mach 25.”
“That’s a pretty challenging thing to do the first time out, when you don’t necessarily understand everything you’d like to know about your system and how it performs, where the margins are, and what all of the factors are that are going to influence the performance,” Nield added.
Nield analogized developing a rocket to flying an aircraft for the first time. The latter “can crawl walk run” with taxi tests and short flights, and steadily “expand the envelope” to greater speeds and higher altitudes before ever putting passengers onboard or entering commercial service.
“There’s very little of that you can do once you leave the launchpad,” Nield said.
While most of the rockets we’re talking about here are expendable, Nield noted SpaceX’s Grasshopper tests as showing how rockets can adapt to a more aviation-like, step-by-step approach of increasingly ambitious flights.
“We’re finally transitioning to a reusable launch vehicle mentality, and I think you’re going to see more and more of that kind of testing,” Nield said.
But even with one-off rockets, Nield remains “very bullish” on the launch market.
“It’s easy for people to quote those examples … and maybe think, ‘Oh, well, we shouldn’t have this many companies trying to build rockets,” Nield said. “It may never be the kind of industry that an investor is going to have a sure-thing pay back, so buyer beware in terms of what you’re putting your money into.”
