Rocket Lab Electron rockets to have unusual recovery method

A lot of people dream of making space travel a more regular thing but, until recently, most have taken for granted how expensive those can be simply because every rocket is almost completely destroyed after use. Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin have helped ignite a new trend that focuses on reusable rockets and now almost every space company and space agency is eying reusable rockets. Young company Rocket Lab is no different but it is different in how it wants to recover rockets by catching them with helicopters.

That definitely defies what most will imagine about reusable rockets, especially after the likes of SpaceX and Blue Origin have filled our minds with vertically landing rockets. That is, indeed, the more "normal" way to make sure that a rocket's first stage, the part that first ignites the fuel and gets dropped back to earth, survives a landing. Rocket Lab's Electron, however, is not like SpaceX's Falcon 9 or Blue Origin's New Shepard.

Beside those hulking rockets, the Electron rocket might look like a dwarf. It is intended to offer an affordable alternative for companies to jettison smaller payloads into space, like small science equipment or satellites, and can, therefore, afford to be smaller. That, in turn, can make its recovery methods a bit more interesting.

Rocket Lab plans to implement its reusability program in two phases. The first involves trying to recover an Electron first stage from the ocean to be shipped back to the company for refurbishment. The second, more interesting phase involves catching the rocket mid-air using a helicopter. The rocket may be small enough for that to be possible but it still boggles the imagination how it will be accomplished.

Rocket Lab doesn't share more details about its plans other than it plans to start the process next year. That's pretty ambitious for a company who only completed its first successful commercial launch last year.