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Comment by toomanybeersies | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting seeing the difference between the publicity that SpaceX gets, and the publicity of other rocket companies like RocketLab get.

It shows how effective the PR machine for SpaceX is. RocketLabs launch is pretty significant, considering it's the first orbital launch of a rocket designed and built in a small nation.

This has barely hit the news. I guess part of the reason is that it's not in the USA, and that New Zealand isn't capable of putting nuclear warheads on top of one, unlike North Korea.

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Seems par for the course don't you think, SpaceX didn't receive much coverage for their grasshopper tests or Falcon 1 flights either? In fact, most of their coverage has just come in the last couple of years after working diligently for ~13 years prior to that.

Ironically I was led to watch RocketLabs launch by r/SpaceX.

With SpaceX, I find it hard to fault them for this.

Public interest in spacetech is inevitably tied to futurism, idealism, idealism, big ideas and such.

SpaceX is building the biggest ever rockets, declaring mars as a goal, landing rockets on rafts like a sci-fi flick... Build the future stuff. They also launch geostationary satelites and supply the ICC, in fact that's what they do as a business.

Whether you want to call this PR, vision, culture or whatever... SpaceX calls satelites and ICC transport "routine" work. It's how they do what they do, not what they do. What they do is the stuff that sounds like breakthroughs, breaking through the limitations keeping us stuck on earth.

It's hard to rate psace companies on a coolness scale. Any space company is already way up on the scale. SpaceX... is like the hollywood version.

In any case, huge congratulations toRocket Lab. A rocket company with weekly scheduled flights on a shoestring is a feat.

minor nitpick: I think you meant ISS [0] not ICC.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station

oops! Yep, ISS.

Even though... launching war criminals to an off-world prison would be a great addition to Musk's comic book character persona. ..c Can you imagine the prison break edition!

You don’t generally make the news for doing things others have done before you. Don’t get me wrong, this company is cool and their success is super exciting, but I see no reason for them to get any press coverage outside of specialty media.

SpaceX was pretty quiet too when they were first starting out, and when they’re all over the news now it’s generally because they’re doing something new.

I doubt nukes have anything to do with it. The Falcon 9 would be an atrociously bad ICBM.

RocketLab's doing incredibly innovative things. They're using an entirely new kind of rocket engine power cycle. This is the first new power cycle invented since the Full Flow Staged Combustion Cycle in the 1960s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_pump-fed_engine

They're using entirely 3d printed rocket engines and also full carbon composite rocket bodies - another first for a rocket of this scale.

Where it comes to "doing things others haven't done before you" they're doing an amazing job. SpaceX is doing great but nothing close to this.

don't know why this was down voted, it was informative. Thanks.

Agree with everything you said, except

>SpaceX is doing great but nothing close to this.

This isn't just false, it's unnecessary. It takes nothing away from RocketLab to acknowledge that SpaceX has also done "incredibly innovative things," such as propulsive first stage landings.

> This is the first new power cycle invented since the Full Flow Staged Combustion Cycle in the 1960s

Yes, battery pump engines aware new for this scale of a rocket. No, it’s not the first new cycle since the 1960s.

Ok, I'm curious. What rocket engine power cycle was invented between the Full Flow Staged Combustion Cycle (1962) and the Electric Pump-Fed Cycle (2010)?

A new combustion cycle and new construction techniques are really cool, but nothing I’d expect average people to care about, thus nothing I’d expect to be reported on outside of specialty media.

It's a new country launching a rocket though. That seems like reasonably big news to me.

Not front page, stop the press news, but still news.

Technically, New Zealand's a "country", but to call it a "new country" is pushing it. It's a cultural appendage to the U.K. and the U.S. West Coast, with a bit of Hong Kong thrown in. It's the unitary state that never joined Australia in 1901, being listed in the Australian Constitution as one of its 7 candidate states. It would have joined the Australian Federation if refrigerated shipping hadn't have been invented a year before, meaning they could ship their meat products to London instead of relying on a guaranteed open market at Sydney. Meat and other primary production is NZ's main industry, what with the banks and most other large corps being owned by their larger Australian counterparts. The only other industry in NZ of note is "Human Arrivals", which not only includes Tourism and International Education but also Immigration (despite being on the country's capital rather than current account). Of course, New Zealanders refer to Australia as "the 52nd state", so calling Australia a "new country" is also pushing it.

I'm pretty sure that toomanybeersies means new country as in, "a country from which an orbital rocket has never been launched before", rather than "a country which is new".

Edit: Also, as far as I can tell, agriculture including meats is only 8% of New Zealand's economy. Hardly the "main industry". Like most high-income industrialized economies, most of the economy is in services.

Whoops, I should've read that phrase "new country" in context.

As for your edit about NZ's economy being mainly "services", if you subtract industries owned/controlled by Australia/US/UK (e.g banks, TV content), re-apportion industries servicing the Ag/Meat/Milk/Wool/Forestry/Fisheries industry as being part of that industry, and do similar for industries servicing "Human Arrivals" (e.g. house construction being part of Immigration/International Ed), then you end up with the two big drivers of New Zealand's economy: Human Arrivals and Primary Production. They don't fit into the official categories in the govt's accounting system, but they're the real engines of NZ's economy. The rest are just hangers-on.

The fact that certain industries have a lot of foreign ownership doesn't mean that they're not part of the actual economy. They produce in NZ, they employ in NZ, they buy inputs in NZ - they're part of NZ's GDP economy.

And the rest of your statement makes no sense. Some tertiary industries service primary industries, but most don't. Some housebuilding and education services immigrants, but the vast majority isn't, and regardless of that fact, it still counts as part of the local GDP. Services are no less "real" than resource industries.

Beyond not having nuclear weapons to put on a rocket - we're quite disinterested in having anything to do with them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_nuclear-free_zone

Disinterested with a touch of virulent hatred for them.

There's an element in New Zealand that has a blindly hysterical anti-nuclear stance. Then there are others who understand that nuclear energy is one of the cleanest and safest forms of energy, and that refusing to admit American naval vessels into our waters is just a pointless diplomatic affront to our strongest ally.

There's an excellent reason to not have nuclear energy in New Zealand, which is that we don't need it. We already have 80% renewable electricity production, and we could realistically bridge that gap with cheaper methods than a nuclear power plant. However, just being "anti-nuclear" for the sake of being "anti-nuclear" isn't one of them.

New Zealand's anti-nuclear stance has nothing to do with nuclear power. The reason we don't allow American warships into our waters is because we disapprove of nuclear weapons, whether powered by or as a payload.

>New Zealand's anti-nuclear stance has nothing to do with nuclear power.

This is absolutely false.

https://nzhistory.govt.nz/politics/nuclear-free-new-zealand/...

>Labour campaigned against nuclear propulsion and weapons

>Labour announced its decision to ban ships that were either nuclear-powered or -armed.

>party activists were unwilling to draw distinctions between nuclear propulsion and nuclear weapons. The mood of the nation was also turning against such political manoeuvring.

>Following confidential discussions over the selection of an acceptable ship, in late 1984 the United States requested that the ageing guided-missile destroyer USS Buchanan visit New Zealand. The Americans hoped that a perception that it was not nuclear-armed would be enough for it to slip under the political radar, and believed they had Lange’s agreement. But on 4 February 1985 the government said no. ‘Near-uncertainty was not now enough for us,’ Lange later explained. ‘Whatever the truth of its armaments, its arrival in New Zealand would be seen as a surrender by the government.’ In response, Washington severed visible intelligence and military ties with New Zealand and downgraded political and diplomatic exchanges. George Shultz confirmed that the United States would no longer maintain its security guarantee to New Zealand, although the ANZUS treaty structure remained in place.

In any case, even if your claim was true (and it quite clearly isn't), rejecting the alliance with our strongest and one of one of our closest allies over the issue isn't a good move, no matter what way you look at it.

> In any case, even if your claim was true (and it quite clearly isn't), rejecting the alliance with our strongest and one of one of our closest allies over the issue isn't a good move, no matter what way you look at it.

This is a really interesting point. I'm no social scientist, but my naive viewpoint is that not being armed hopefully makes us a less interesting target. Whether or not that matters is hopefully something that would never be put into practice.

Lange’s Oxford Union speech defending NZs rejection of nuclear weapons is worth watching if you haven’t heard it before. The second link provides some background and the transcript.

https://nzhistory.govt.nz/media/sound/oxford-union-debate

https://publicaddress.net/great-new-zealand-argument/nuclear...

Ah, some are blindly hysterical, thankfully others understand. That's a remarkably question-begging and arrogant way of writing. Opinion masquerading very unsuccessfully as fact.

Nuclear power is currently extremely expensive, and only operates in countries that provide massive subsidies. Even excluding cleanup, waste storage, security, and insurance. The difficulty in terms of peaking power make it a poor fit for lower cost, but intermittent renewables.

In theory it could be fairly cheap, but no country has pulled it off. France for example provided over 2 billion euros / year in direct subsides along side many indirect subsidies.

> New Zealand isn't capable of putting nuclear warheads on top of one

I'm pretty sure we could if we actually wanted to. But we have a staunch anti-Nuclear policy :)

..and we also know that it's not how big your button is, but how you use it. We'd rather use ours to push human kind forward.

Isn't Rocket Lab a US start-up, funded almost entirely by US money, operated by US executives, with headquarters in Huntington Beach CA and a New Zealand subsidiary?

American money paying for New Zealand operations.

Source: Me; I was almost a customer.

It’s a little more complex than that. But that’s not a bad summary.

It was started in New Zealand, and got its initial investment from New Zealand, but the majority of funding now comes from America and the majority of ownership is American.

However, most of the R&D, operations, and manufacturing are done in New Zealand. I almost applied for a job there, but it would've required relocating to Auckland, which I wasn't willing to do.

Come on over - life is amazing here in Auckland.

Unless you'd like to buy a house there or drive anywhere ;)

I actually recently emigrated over the ditch to Melbourne from Wellington.

If I do go back to New Zealand, it would be to Christchurch, where I went to university. The lifestyle in Christchurch is a lot more laid back, more outdoor activities (great skiing and hunting), and rent is a lot cheaper.

Unfortunately the market for Ruby developers is practically non-existent in New Zealand, so I don't think it would be practical for me to move back to NZ for the next 5 years or so.

Interesting. I was a Ruby developer in Wellington from 2013 to 2016 and felt demand was huge compared to the size of the city.

I'm hoping to move to NZ with my girlfriend in 2019, to settle down. I finally got 3 years of work experience for a memory card manufacturing company in Taiwan, which means I should be eligible for the Skilled Migrant Category visa.

If you'd like to talk about making those plans a reality, please get in touch! I think that the SMC visa requires me to only work for certain companies that are allowed to sponsor immigrants, though, and that would prevent me from working for an exciting startup like Rocket Lab.

IIRC a big benefit of having the rockets and launch pad in New Zealand is that it's possible to scale up and launch nearly-continuously from eastern New Zealand (if necessary) due to the lack of air traffic, while finding launch pad space in the US requires scrounging around and waiting.

And the shipping cost of moving things to New Zealand by boat to put on a rocket is obviously a rounding error compared to that of moving those things to orbit.

I'm pretty sure they recently restructured by creating Rocket Lab US and making the existing Rocket Lab NZ a subsidiary to get more flexibility regarding some arms restrictions.

Yep, and our government passed laws around "What happens if a rocket crashes" (no-one can take photos) to fit in with US regulations.

I'm sure it will get plenty of coverage here tonight. I think the news channels are over the PM getting pregnant and there are no rugby matches on :-)

Careful where you go for that news as talkback radio will be (more) deadly for the next year or two. Overheard at a grey power cuppa yesterday, ‘She was pregnant when negotiating to be Prime Minister did you know? It’s unbelieveable’.

This is the go to conspiracy theory - and that the only reason Winston agreed to the coalition was so that he could be gasp acting Prime Minister when she went on maternity leave. For six whole weeks.

I'm not entirely sure what they expect Winnie to get up to in six weeks.

> New Zealand isn't capable of putting nuclear warheads on top of one, unlike North Korea.

North Korea couldn't put a warhead on top of this one either. The nominal payload of the Electron is 150kg. While there are nuclear warheads that small (the W80 is in that range), it's very unlikely North Korea has achieved anything close to that level of miniaturization.

This is this company's first launch and as such the company is not known for the general public. Moreover, no Elon Musk-like legend has showed up for RocketLab yet. Therefore, it is pretty comprehensible that this launch has received less coverage.

It was their second launch with the Electron. Wired (https://www.wired.com/story/rocket-lab-still-testing/), has an article about them.

If you're curious about the PR machine associated with SpaceX... see Tesla's stock price and news versus the very real and known issues with their debt/liabilities and production.

Do remember that there may be interested parties painting a bleaker "production issues"/ "liabilities" picture than the truth. See e.g. this review [1].

[1] http://www.thedrive.com/new-cars/17280/tesla-model-3-the-fir...

Im trying to imagine what would happen if nuclear capable launches were proposed in NZ. It wouldn’t be insurrection, but some something in that ballpark would happen.

Also this is a cryogenic rocket which has to be kept cold and launched soon after fueling. Not terribly good for nuclear launches.

yep, it's quite amazing how little reporting of this there has been from US sites. news sites from other countries had much more coverage.

reusability; spaceships landing upright like they were always supposed to; mars

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