Watch Rocket Lab launch a private Japanese Earth-observing satellite to orbit today
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Rocket Lab will launch a private Japanese Earth-observing satellite to orbit this morning (Aug. 20), and you can watch the action live.
An Electron vehicle is scheduled to lift off from Rocket Lab’s New Zealand site today, during a window that opens at 9 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT; 1 a.m. on Aug. 21 local New Zealand time), carrying aloft a radar satellite for the Tokyo-based company iQPS.
Rocket Lab will stream the proceedings live, starting at about 30 minutes before liftoff. You can watch via the company, and Space.com will carry the feed as well if it’s made available.
This will be Rocket Lab’s ninth launch for iQPS, which is building a constellation of 36 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO). Such spacecraft can study Earth day or night, and they can peer through cloud cover as well.
The iQPS network “is being developed and deployed at a rapid pace to provide high resolution and near-real time SAR imagery to its global users,” Rocket Lab wrote in a description of today’s mission, which it calls “The Lightning God Defends.”
That name is a reference to the satellite going up today: It’s nicknamed SUSANOO-II, after a Japanese lightning god.
If all goes according to plan, the Electron’s upper “kick stage” will deploy SUSANOO-II about 50 minutes after launch, at an altitude of 357 miles (575 kilometers).
Today’s flight will be Rocket Lab’s 14th of 2026 and 93rd overall. The company’s most recent launch, on Aug. 6, also lofted an iQPS satellite to LEO.
The vast majority of the company’s flights have been performed by Electron, a 59-foot-tall (18 meters) rocket that gives small satellites dedicated rides to Earth orbit and beyond. Rocket Lab also operates a suborbital variant of Electron called HASTE, which allows customers to test sensors and other tech in the hypersonic flight environment.
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