Today’s mission will take us a step closer to reusable Electron rockets. We’re not recovering Electron from this mission, but the 1st stage has new guidance and navigation hardware, plus a reaction control system to orient the stage during re-entry. 
Today the focus is on monitoring the stage as it comes back to Earth so we can better understand the reentry environments it needs to survive. The data from today will help to inform our first efforts to recover a stage next year.
So why is it so hard to recover stages? Electron’s 1st stage plummets back to Earth at approx. mach 8.5. That’s more than 2.3 km meters per second!
Electron experiences temperatures of up to 2,900 kelvin on the way back to Earth. Between the speed and heat, that’s a lot of energy to dissipate in order to gently catch the rocket and bring it home for refurb/relaunch.
We’ve put cameras on stage 1, so today’s webcast *might* have video footage of the stage’s re-entry, though we are expecting telemetry drop-outs. Since we're running out of fingers, we have our toes crossed for some footage of reentry.
