99 not out: Rocket Lab's Electron lifts a Japanese eye-in-the-sky from New Zealand

From a cliff-top launch pad in Mahia, New Zealand, Rocket Lab's Electron rocket has flown for the 99th time — carrying the WADATSUMI-II satellite into a 575-kilometre orbit for Japanese Earth-observation company iQPS. The satellite's radar can image the ground day or night, through cloud, and the flight was Rocket Lab's tenth dedicated mission building out iQPS's constellation, which aims to revisit spots across the Asia-Pacific quickly enough to watch floods, landslides and shipping in near-real time. The company's 100th Electron launch is already scheduled for later this month — a century of flights for a rocket that began as a startup's sketch.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: infrastructure build