Rocket Lab had “Pics or It Didn’t Happen”, and it didn’t happen.

Well, ok, it kind of happened.

On July 4 at 9:19 pm UTC, an Electron rocket took off, but there was an anomaly before the payload made it to orbit.

The first four minutes of the launch were perfectly nominal, and everything looked like it was going smoothly. Until it wasn’t.

At about five and a half minutes in, the telemetry numbers started looking a little weird approaching hot-swap: the speed of the rocket seemed to be decreasing, but the height of the rocket seemed to be increasing.  At six minutes into the flight, the displayed video of the second stage’s speed and altitude appeared to freeze for about ten seconds. SAP Response Plan was called out at T+06:35. (No one seems to know what that callout meant other than it wasn’t nominal.) A few seconds later, it was announced that the video feed from the rocket was lost. The view then switched to a quiet control room. Both speed and altitude were still ticking – this time with the speed increasing but the altitude decreasing, which would be expected of an object falling back to Earth. Around T+7:45, the numbers were quietly removed from the live stream. Finally, a very long three minute shot of the control room, where quiet murmuring (T+8:22) gradually increased (T+10:30), before mics are seemingly cut (T+11:00). The webcast ended shortly afterward (T+11:22).

Rocket Lab hasn’t announced what went wrong other than an “issue occurred late in the flight during the 2nd stage burn.”

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