Rocket Lab’s new Neutron rocket faces red tape delays at Wallops
Proposed dredged channel. Click for original.
We’re here to help you! Rocket Lab appears to be having regulatory problems getting approvals to transport hardware for its new Neutron rocket to its new launchpad at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) on Wallops Island in Virginia, delays that might prevent it from launching as planned later this year.
It appears the company needs to dredge a deeper channel to ship the heavier Neutron hardware into Wallops, but it has not been able to begin work because of approval delays by the federal government.
The dredging project was approved by VMRC [Virginia Marine Resources Commission] in May, but the company has yet to start digging because it’s still awaiting federal sign-off from the Army Corps of Engineers.
Lacking this approval and unable to get the channel ready for this year’s launch, the company is seeking permission to use a stop-gap different approach to transport the hardware through these shallow waters.
Kedging, a little-known nautical method, is used to ensure the barges can safely navigate the existing shallow channel. Workers would use a series of anchors and lines to steer the barge through the shallow waters. The company is seeking permission to use this method through the end of June 2026 or until the dredging work is complete, whichever comes first.
Lacking an okay to do even this alternative approach, Rocket Lab will be forced to transport the hardware using “ramps and cranes,” an approach that is impractical in the long run for achieving a profitable launch pace. It also would likely result in not meeting its targeted launch date before the end of 2025 for the first Neutron launch.
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 print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.
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
Proposed dredged channel. Click for original.
We’re here to help you! Rocket Lab appears to be having regulatory problems getting approvals to transport hardware for its new Neutron rocket to its new launchpad at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) on Wallops Island in Virginia, delays that might prevent it from launching as planned later this year.
It appears the company needs to dredge a deeper channel to ship the heavier Neutron hardware into Wallops, but it has not been able to begin work because of approval delays by the federal government.
The dredging project was approved by VMRC [Virginia Marine Resources Commission] in May, but the company has yet to start digging because it’s still awaiting federal sign-off from the Army Corps of Engineers.
Lacking this approval and unable to get the channel ready for this year’s launch, the company is seeking permission to use a stop-gap different approach to transport the hardware through these shallow waters.
Kedging, a little-known nautical method, is used to ensure the barges can safely navigate the existing shallow channel. Workers would use a series of anchors and lines to steer the barge through the shallow waters. The company is seeking permission to use this method through the end of June 2026 or until the dredging work is complete, whichever comes first.
Lacking an okay to do even this alternative approach, Rocket Lab will be forced to transport the hardware using “ramps and cranes,” an approach that is impractical in the long run for achieving a profitable launch pace. It also would likely result in not meeting its targeted launch date before the end of 2025 for the first Neutron launch.
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 print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. 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
More nonsense from Greens.
Jeff Wright,
Pretty much. Dredging an extant channel a bit deeper should be a no-brainer in any rational universe but that is not, sadly, the one in which we live.
In pre-EPA times, my hometown put a dredge at the then-lakeshore to work for about a year to create about a square mile of new land for a municipal park and a bathing beach. The new land was at a lower elevation than the natural land so there was a 50% grade connecting them that turned out to be ideal for sledding and tobogganing during snow season. We child daredevils would ride our bikes down the slope the rest of the year. There were some long angled sidewalks connecting the higher and lower ground that made excellent high-speed skateboard runs.
Had the EPA existed back then, I have no doubt my hometown city government would not even have been able to afford to do the paperwork associated with such a project, nor fend off the inevitable nuisance lawsuits, never mind actually carrying it out. My childhood would have been appreciably less enjoyable.
I wonder, sometimes, just how many comparable projects have been stillborn over the last half-century-plus of federal Karen-ism writ large. I also wonder whether or not this may have something to do with what strikes me as the generally greater crankiness of youngsters these days compared to the norms of my long-fled youth.
I am familiar with these waters and likewise familiar professionally in the past working with the Corps, e.g. dredging and the Clean Water Act in the midAtlantic. I am a little surprised RocketLab had not worked this earlier from the start, given the Corps.’ CWA. authoritarianism. Dredging that channel will/ would be a highly scrutinized project. Recently just a few miles up Chincoteague Bay a contractor “kedged” his equipment into a sedimented marina, with laborious success. But that does offset (legally and environmentally) any contrary bureaucratic opposition.
I do wonder how large the rocket’s components. RocketLab owns the huge MartinMarietta Plant 2 in Baltimore, I assume for some assembly. It is adjacent to the Glenn L Martin airfield with mucho runway. Likewise Wallops airfield is closebyo the launch island. An AF decommisioned C5? or Anatov 122??
Gotta go right now, but please pursue.
As a practical matter, can Governor Youngkin ask the Trump Administration for some help with this? John S. does have a point, though.
This snag was entirely foreseeable on Rocket Lab’s part. Someone wasn’t doing their due diligence.
To Mr. Eagleson,
Progressivism doesn’t mean what it used to.
In FDR’s era–progressivism was “chop this down, dig that up–dredge this river–drain that swamp.”
The worst you could say about FDR men is that they wanted the poor in the Third World to live as we did.
Greens, on the other hand–wanted is to live like the Third World.
The environmental movement has always been anti-human.
Ironically, it was railroad barons who bought so much of the West who converted land to federal holdings. They helped keep America resource poor.
I guarantee you China will never be as dumb.
I consider myself a Neo-Victorian. A place for everything—and everything in its place. The whole public/private thing bores me.
What I care about is what is good for America at large–not ideological purists.
They bore me.
I think the environmental movement is a potential evil worse than Nazism and Communism combined.
Maybe someone cough John S cough can explain how dredging makes the water dirty under the clean water act? There has to be a reason why it would be so closely scrutinized. Seems like there would be some sediment that sediments somewhere other than the channel, no big deal.
Jeff Wright,
Progressivism, indeed, does not mean what it used to. FDR’s programs were aimed at employing the able-bodied – mostly men – and putting them to work building public infrastructure. My own unfortunate state of long-time residence, California, is still living off the legacy infrastructure built by FDR in the 1930s and Gov. Pat Brown in the 1950s. The CA population having more than doubled since those times, of course, the strain on that legacy infrastructure is everywhere apparent. And, rather than build useful new infrastructure, the one-party CA state gov’t. has been trying – and conspicuously failing – to build useless new infrastructure in the form of a “high-speed rail” line from L.A. to S.F.
Today’s progressives, of course, don’t really want to build new infrastructure or even maintain what was formerly built. All they want to do is employ ever more office-dwelling bureaucrats whose jobs are to keep anyone else from building anything.
All US Western land was government-owned by default as what are now states started out as federal territories. The rail barons didn’t buy land, it was given to them – on each side of rail rights of way – in exchange for the construction of said railroads. That contributed, marginally, to privatizing some formerly government land in the West, but there were never enough rail lines built to make much of a dent in the overwhelming government ownership. The land grants were structured such that the granted land would return to government control if the railroad rights of way ceased being used. So much of the early railroad land grants – particularly for mining-related narrow-gauge lines – has long since reverted to government control as mines played out and erstwhile boom towns became ghost towns.
The Chinese – specifically, the PRC – have been all sorts of stupid in ways different than anything done in the US. The PRC, for example, gave local governments almost no way to raise revenue except by selling land to housing developers. This worked for awhile, but the PRC housing market is now hugely overbuilt, especially as the population is aging and shrinking. The housing constructors are all going broke and empty units that are unsold and unoccupied generate no revenue that localities could tax even were they allowed to by Beijing – which they are not. The PRC is an enormous mess in almost every way, but especially demographically and financially. As a geopolitical going concern, its days are decidedly numbered. So are those of the entire Han ethnicity for that matter. The PRC will fall to pieces well before its notional centennial in 2049. The Han, as a consequential part of the world’s population, will have all but disappeared by the end of the current century.
The problem with a philosophy of “a place for everything and everything in its place” is the assumption that there is any obvious and broad-scale agreement about just where the “places” for “everything” should be. There isn’t.
Dick Eagleson wrote: “Today’s progressives, of course, don’t really want to build new infrastructure or even maintain what was formerly built. All they want to do is employ ever more office-dwelling bureaucrats whose jobs are to keep anyone else from building anything.”
Oh, how true. This is one of the many reasons that Californians and their businesses are fleeing the state in droves and U-Hauls.*
“As a geopolitical going concern, its days are decidedly numbered. So are those of the entire Han ethnicity for that matter. The PRC will fall to pieces well before its notional centennial in 2049. The Han, as a consequential part of the world’s population, will have all but disappeared by the end of the current century.”
the PRC decided to slow its population explosion (population bomb, a la Paul Ehrlich) by restricting families to one child. Since a son is the desired child in China, the result is that two generations (1979 to 2015) are heavy with men and boys. They are growing up to find that there are not enough women to marry. Rather than create a population of half that in 1980, they realized that the birthrate decreased too much with too few women. The birthrate has now fallen to that of the death rate, which may be what they wanted, but as the monosex generations reach reproductive age, now the birthrate is decreasing precipitously.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Birth_rate_in_China.svg
Population replacement rates can be measured by births per woman, but this does not work so well in China, as the number of women is decreasing rapidly. How China will recover from this is a mystery, but it is likely to have a significantly lower population two generations from now.
Huh. California is losing its population from piss-poor governance, and China is losing its population from piss-poor governance. The main similarity seems to be top-down centralized-control marxism.
So, what does this have to do with the price of rice in China? I mean, what does this have to do with the navigation of a Neutron to Wallops?
Oh, right. Top-down centralized-control marxism. It seems to be spreading throughout the U.S., too.
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* Anyone who wants to move into California might be able to get paid to haul a U-Haul into CA. I’m kind of kidding, but it is much more expensive to rent one out and much cheaper to rent one into CA. U-Hauls must be being brought back to California by the trainload.