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Rocket Lab to launch three times in one month, beginning in late August

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab yesterday announced that it is aiming to complete three launches of its Electron rocket in less than a month, with the first scheduled for late August.

Scheduled to lift-off from Launch Complex 1 on New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula in late August, the ‘Love At First Insight’ mission will be Rocket Lab’s 22nd Electron launch overall and fifth mission of 2021. ‘Love At First Insight’ is the first in a rapid succession of scheduled Electron launches between late August through September that represent the company’s fastest launch turnarounds to date.

All three launches are for the company BlackSky, which is putting into orbit a constellation of Earth-imaging small satellites.

Since 2018 Rocket Lab has repeatedly promised that it will soon ramp up its launch rate to monthly, and then weekly. For a variety of reasons, mostly relating to two launch failures in the past year, that promise has not been kept. If the company succeeds in putting these six Black Sky satellites into orbit on three quick launches, it will finally come close to demonstrating that pace.

Rocket Lab will reinforce that promise if it also completes its manifest of 2021 launches, which calls for three more launches for a total of nine launches in ’21, six of which will have occurred in the year’s last four months.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

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