Hungry Hippo is ready to fly

Rocket Lab announced Monday that the Neutron rocket’s innovative “Hungry Hippo” captive fairing has successfully completed qualification testing and is en route to Virginia's Wallops Island Flight Facility launch complex LC-3 in preparation for Neutron’s first launch. Neutron is Rocket Lab's entry into the Falcon 9 class of rockets and will be reusable. 

Neutron, though, operates rather differently from the Falcon 9. As you know, Falcon 9 drops its fairings, and after some time trying to catch the fairings with huge nets on offshore fishing-style boats, settled on dropping them into the ocean near a recovery vessel that then goes and pulls them out of the water. 

Neutron's first stage, by contrast, will open its top like a giant mouth to spit out the vehicle's entire second stage and payload, and will then close the two halves back together before descending back through Earth's atmosphere to land and fly again.

Video here, but it's tests of the opening and closing of the fairing, not an animation of a mission. 

Before departing Rocket Lab's California-based test facility, the fairing was exposed to 275,000 pounds of external force to simulate dynamic pressures during launch, rapid cycling of the open and close mechanisms to ensure faster-than-necessary operations, software integration and load forces exceeding 125% design requirements.

Once the fairing is incorporated with Neutron's first stage, Rocket Lab will perform a series of prelaunch tests, including a static hotfire of the nine Archimedes engines that power the reusable booster. Neutron will stand 141 feet (43 meters) tall with a 23-foot (7 m) diameter, and is expected to deliver up to 28,700 pounds (13,000 kilograms) of payload to low Earth orbit.

It has been a few years since Rocket Lab first started talking about developing Neutron. While Rocket Lab's main income source is the Electron, they seem to be a "Space 2.0" company. They have flown some reused boosters and engines, but don't seem to have made all the effort on reuse SpaceX has, which makes me assume it's probably less of an economic incentive for them. The Electron is a small satellite launch vehicle, just under 60 feet tall and putting a payload of 660 pounds to LEO. Neutron will be a big step up for them. Like Electron, Neutron has a graphite body. 

Rocket Lab has had 18 Electron launches in 2025 with 100% mission success. NextSpaceflight.com shows more launches: Saturday and next Thursday followed by a much larger bunch (seven) labelled No Earlier Than 2025. That puts them in a niche that features far more launches than United Launch Alliance, an even larger multiple of Blue Origin's launches than ULA's, but still a tiny fraction of SpaceX's. 

Illustration of Rocket Lab's Neutron with the "Hungry Hungry Hippo" system delivering an upper stage with payload. Image credit: Rocket Lab