This is CBS Islander World. I'm John Batcher. From the surface of the planet Earth, we're

staying very firmly on the surface of the planet Earth with Bob Zimmerman who keeps the

website behind the black because we're looking at commercial space. This is Rocket Lab.

And the East Coast of the United States, Wallops Island, and NASA approving a critical

step going forward with launches from Wallops Island. Bob, what is flight termination software?

Good evening, too. Good evening, John. Well, Rocket Lab, which launches out of New

Zealand, it's an American company. It's a small, fat rocket company. They launch small

CubeSats and so forth. And they've been operational now for about three years. Rocket Lab has

been trying to get approval to launch rockets. It's an electron rocket from Virginia at Wallops

Island, the Mid-Atlantic Space Point. And they were ready to do this a year and a half

ago. They were ready to launch. They wanted to launch. But they have not been able to get approval

of the flight termination software. Now, when they launch a rocket in the past, there is

a range of offices standing by with their finger on the button. And if that rocket starts

to go out of control, they can destroy it at any point. So it won't fly into populated

areas. Now, Rocket Lab has been using its own flight termination software down in New

Zealand for years and very successfully. It's actually terminated a few launches because

they had problems with the rocket. And SpaceX has introduced its own flight termination

software, which is different. It's not a human being sitting with their finger on the

button. It's actually software that tracks the path of the rocket. And if it deviates

from that path beyond certain margins, it will then automatically blow the rocket up.

The idea, of course, is to simplify things, reduce the protective area around rockets

on more rockets can launch more frequently. NASA has been trying to develop its own flight

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