Rocket Lab's The fourteenth mission, "I can't believe it's not optical," had a stowaway aboard. The New Zealand launch company quietly included its first fully functional satellite alongside its paying customer's payload. First Light, as it is called, is a kind of tech demo meant to show how access to orbit doesn't have to be, as CEO and founder Peter Beck put it, "some kind of pain in the ass".
Rocket Lab has been telegraphing this move for some time; the Photon satellite platform was announced early last year and acquired spacecraft manufacturer Sinclair Interplanetary in March. It was just a matter of when the company would choose to push the button, and now it has.
As Beck explained in a live broadcast today (now that First Light has been successfully deployed in orbit), the company felt that "access to space" is, in many ways and despite the inherent risks, a problem solved. . The next biggest pain point, he said, is that "it's really painful to go from an idea to getting something into orbit."
It's a cause for celebration, he said, when a project can go from idea to orbit in 18 months. It's too slow to keep up with innovation on the ground, especially for startups, who may not have 18 months on track. "We have to solve this problem," Beck said.
Photon and First Light represent Rocket Lab's new business proposition to provide a flexible platform for a modern satellite and one that fits hand-in-hand with its Electron launch vehicle and other services. Acting as a partner throughout the process rather than just a launch provider is obviously more work and money for Rocket Lab, and if things go well it could be much faster and cheaper for the customer as well.
There will be other new versions of Photon as well as cislunar and interplanetary space that will become targets for Electron launches. Rocket Lab has already signed up for a lunar mission, NASA's experimental CAPSTONE aircraft, which will be based on Photon and will help pave the way for subsequent Artemis missions.
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