Month Top:

A super-telephoto view of the base of Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket with nine engines alight. (four of the nine, and one center visible here)

The Rutherford engine Electron and Rocket Lab use for this rocket is unique, because it uses electric turbopumps to drive the fuels in high-quantity into the combustion chamber. Usually, these are accomplished in the GG (gas generator) or tapoff cycles with burning small amounts of fuels or oxidizers and then dumping those products overboard. Electron retains the efficiency and uses batteries / electric motors for infinite control over these pumps.

Peter Beck, CEO of Rocket Lab, has noted that this lets Electron run until it has “sipped the tank nearly empty” whereas other providers don’t have that luxury because if you run a turbo pump dry, it would rapidly and unscheduled-ly disassemble (RUD) itself.

Month bottom:

Each time to-date a NASA Crew returns from space on the Crew Dragon, they usually fly over some portion of land on their way home. In this instance on Crew 6 in Sept 2023, they returned on a northeasterly heading (ascending node) trajectory, with a splashdown off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida.

Positioning myself in the farm fields west of St. Augustine, Florida, I captured this view of the Dragon with its tail on fire.

At its peak, this trail of fire can be more than 30 miles in length. So, if you’ve ever visited the Kennedy Space Center and driven between Orlando Int’l Airport (MCO) and the space coast, imagine that distance between when you get on the highway and when you hit the first river causeway being a solid tube of red-hot, several thousand degree plasma about 8-10ft in diameter. Nuts!

Shown in a single, long-exposure photograph looking southwest, the Crew went from visible on the horizon to straight overhead in about a minute. Unbelievable!

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