On late Wednesday night Relativity space attempted to launch their Terran 1 rocket for the first time. The original launch attempt was scheduled for 10:00pm EST however due to upper level winds as well as range violations the launch didn’t take place until 11:25 pm EST. At Liftoff everything (as far as we know) went flawlessly and they reached their main goal of passing through Maximum Aerodynamic Pressure, or Max-Q for short. In a tweet from Tim Ellis, Relativity’s CEO, he stated “the key inflection in my mind is surpassing Max-Q” as well as stating that they had tested everything on the ground and it had all checked out, they just needed to see how it would actually work out. In the end the vehicle did successfully surpass Max-Q and went on to a successful stage separation. Shortly after SES-1 the vehicle started to loose altitude indicating that the engine was under preforming which resulted in a loss of the mission. We don’t exactly know what the root cause of the failure was at this moment, however we do expect a statement from relativity once they figure out what went wrong.
Developing article: Stay tuned for more details.
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