Rockets and helicopters: What’s the catch?

After the countdown, the ten-meter rocket blasted off from the launch pad to carry satellites into space, but as the booster separated from its body, ripping back through the atmosphere, instead of crashing into the sea to never be seen again, a helicopter loomed in the air waiting to catch it. This is not science fiction, but the real story of a company that recovered the first stage of a rocket with a parachute and a helicopter. In May, California-based Rocket Lab made its first attempt of the pioneering mission in New Zealand, and it was a complete victory. The task was to find a new way of reusing the expensive part of a rocket, alternative to the well-known SpaceX Falcon 9 that can complete a controlled return to the launch pad after blasting into space.

Catching a rocket stage with a helicopter is unheard of in the industry, but with Rocket Lab’s ‘try and fail’ approach, the company has already inspired others to do the same, and it just might change the face of reusability in space.

Now these are views we could get used to. #ThereAndBackAgain pic.twitter.com/yYUtegy52v

— Rocket Lab (@RocketLab) May 11, 2022

A walkthrough of the great catch

Rocket Lab was founded in 2006, and provides end-to-end space capabilities, such as launching, satellite manufacturing, spacecraft components and in-orbit management solutions. The helicopter catch increased the company’s launches of satellites into space up to 146.

It was 3 May 2022, and Rocket Lab was poised to complete the “There and Back Again” mission, to catch the first stage of a rocket with a Sikorsky S-92 helicopter for the first time in history. At 10:49am NZST from, the company’s 18-meter-high Electron rocket blasted off from Pad A at Launch Complex 1 on New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula into space. The Sikorsky S-92 helicopter was already hovering the ocean an hour before launch, waiting to catch the rocket. After initial launch, Electron’s first and second stages completed a standard separation, but as the second stage continued on to orbit to deploy the satellites into space, the first made its way back to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere, gliding through at around 8,300 kilometers per hour.

This is what it looked like from the front seats. pic.twitter.com/AwZfuWjwQD

— Peter Beck (@Peter_J_Beck) May 3, 2022

During its descent, Electron reached temperatures of around 2,400 degrees Celsius, which Rocket Lab’s CEO Peter Beck described as “one of the most difficult parts of this entire process.” According to Shane Glynn, Rocket Lab’s senior recovery systems engineer, as the rocket made its way back to Earth, ground teams reoriented the vehicle so its engines would be able to make a more stable entry. After hitting low supersonic speeds, a number of small parachutes stabilized Electron, and then the main parachute was deployed at around six kilometers altitude to slow the stage to ten meters per second. Then, as it entered the capture zone, the Sikorsky met with the returning stage and snagged the main parachute line via a hook.

“That big parachute opens much higher than the helicopter so that gives time for the helicopter to come in when safe to do so, to then approach the parachute,” Glynn told Australian Aviation. After the S-92 triumphantly made the catch, it offloaded the rocket for a splashdown. “There’s thousands and thousands of things that have got to go right for this to happen,” Glynn added. “It’s a very, very complex – organizationally as well as technically – problem, even with logistics it is quite a major operation. There’s a huge number of cogs making this work, and we did it exceedingly well.”

While we await ideal weather conditions for #ThereAndBackAgain, the recovery team has been conducting capture tests using a stage 1 mass simulator. Our pilots make this look easy! 🚀🪂🚁 pic.twitter.com/1r6PZvzBni

— Rocket Lab (@RocketLab) April 26, 2022

The Electron rocket

Electron is Rocket Lab’s workhorse rocket. It has completed 26 launches to date, can fly up to space from three launch pads and is built with carbon composites. The rocket is developed with two stages, plus a ‘kick stage’ that is used to taxi small satellites into their unique orbits. The rocket was made to eventually be reusable, and Beck told reporters in May that in the future, half of the company’s missions are slated to use reusable rockets. Its booster makes up between 70 to 80 per cent of the total costs of the vehicle, meaning reusing it would save a lot of money.

“Reusability is an iterative process. As we’ve seen with SpaceX – for the first one, the turnaround time was six months or more, and then look to where they are now: taking weeks for turnaround,” Beck said.

Why the Sikorsky S-92?

It wasn’t just coincidence the Sikorsky S-92 was handpicked for this groundbreaking mission. Rocket Lab went through a lengthy process of choosing the right aircraft, but it ultimately came down to the S-92’s reliable capabilities, according to Shane Glynn. The Sikorsky helicopter is a US-made twin-engine aircraft, mostly used for civil and military operations. “The main reason why we went for the Sikorsky was because its capability. It has extended fuel tanks that were able to do the distances and more importantly, the time that we needed to be loitering, waiting for lunch to happen,” Glynn said.

“It could lift large masses; a lot more than we actually needed. So, it gives us a lot of confidence in reserve for doing these sorts of operations. Also, it’s one of those helicopters that’s designed for long duration flights over sea, so it gives us pilots the confidence that we’ve got the right machine for the right job,” Glynn added.

The company considered using other versions of the helicopter that were smaller, but the S-92 had the best range for the mission, which for the most part is a lot of waiting around for the rocket stage to fly through the atmosphere. Beck told reporters that the particular aircraft is capable of lifting 5,000 kilograms, and Electron weighs a fraction of that.

“There was a couple of other Sikorsky’s with similar sort of size of that capability, but not necessarily having the rest of the capabilities such as the fuel range or the token loads and also the sea operation experience without having to do significant development of a helicopter,” Glynn said. “The fact that the Sikorsky that we have is already pre fitted with all the equipment that we need, greatly increased the time that we had prior to this launch to be able to practice, otherwise, there’ll be a lot of downtime waiting for modifications to be done.”

Rocket Lab owns and operates two Sikorsky helicopters, but one is mostly used for transport to increase time efficiency.

A new approach to rocket reusability

Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket, the Falcon 9, became the first ever vehicle to be partly reusable. After the concept was announced in 2011, in December, 2015 the first successful landing and recovery of the first stage of a Falcon 9 was completed, marking a new era of space launch. The entire reason for reusing rocket stages is simple: to reduce overall launch costs. Most companies, and even SpaceX before this innovation, spend months and months building a complex rocket, only to be thrown into sea after one use. This has not only been criticized as detrimental for the environment, but has been a big reason space launch has always been extremely expensive, therefore far less accessible. But now, reusability has allowed many more customers to access orbit for their own payloads.

However, Rocket Lab attempted an entirely different approach to the standard Falcon 9 recovery; but why? Shane Glynn says it’s because the Falcon 9 is much larger – measuring at about 70 meters tall – and has plenty of residual fuel leftover to complete a controlled landing. But the Electron, which is vastly smaller and used for CubeSat launches over deep space exploration technology, has less fuel to carry it through to a landing back on Earth.

“That’s where we’ve got the advantage over them, in that we’ve got a much lighter vehicle (our carbon fiber construction), which makes it incredibly light and therefore possible to do a parachute descent and then an aerial capture,” Glynn said.

Why was the first try such a success?

CEO Peter Beck described the mission as “something of a supersonic ballet”, after all moving pieces swiftly worked together at extremely fast speeds. The company announced its initial plans for the mission in August 2019, during the Small Satellite Conference in Utah. The main point was to be able to make Electron almost immediately available to fly back into space just after being used. Morgan Bailey, Rocket Lab’s senior communications director said “to go from initial concept to successful capture in three years was pretty phenomenal for industry pace.” But its easier said than done, so how did they do it? Bailey said it was because the company wasn’t afraid to try, and fail.

“Development timelines have been two and a half years, and that’s not possible if you do everything based on theory. [But] it’s only because we’ve gone out into the field and tested it, that we’re able to learn so quickly and then get to a successful point faster than others perhaps would,” Bailey said.

According to Shane Glynn, the team behind the mission was also a core reason it worked out near-perfectly. “We have an exceptionally talented team with a massive array of different skills from different industries that were brought together,” he said. “So, it means that we’ve got quite a massive bandwidth to call on and get people’s views on things as we develop it. We do spend a lot of time making sure that we’ve checked every different parameter, every variable that could possibly cause any challenges and we explore what we need to do about it, [and] see how viable it is.”

Paving the way for the future

It is no secret that reusability is the future of space launch, following the worldwide movement towards sustainability, which is now evidently relevant for space too. Glynn said that with the success of the helicopter rocket catch, other companies are also preparing to adopt this approach too. “So clearly, we are setting a trend,” he said. “I think probably more than anything, it is showing people what’s possible, that people thought was not possible at all.”