Rocket Lab Unveils Plans for New 8-Ton Class Reusable Rocket
rocketlabusa.com
rocketlabusa.com
Peter Beck, who once claimed he’d eat his hat if they made a reusable rocket, sure made a big 180 on the topic, and I couldn’t be happier! Speaking of, watch the announcement video: https://youtu.be/agqxJw5ISdk
I’m also GLAD they copied the Falcon 9 design (which is as old as scifi and was demonstrated by DC-X and Masten Space Systems and Armadillo Aerospace) for the first stage landing concept. Better to use what works instead of just making a novel approach just for the sake of novelty or Not Invented Here. Rockets ought to land on a pillar of flame like God and Heinlein (EDIT: and apparently the Soviet Cosmists) intended: https://youtu.be/TdSxDNnqRlo
Also, RocketLab has a TON of ex-SpaceXer employees... I’ve long said that the high churn (for aerospace, but not any higher than typical tech company) of SpaceX, while not necessarily really good for SpaceX, is really good for the industry as a whole.
http://nick-stevens.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/buck-roge...
Anyone motivated by money would have stopped working that hard many, many Billions ago.
I'm sure he's motivated by other stuff too but he's very clearly also motivated by wealth accumulation to some degree.
I would argue that many of the billionaire class (outside of wall street) are more interested in their projects and goals than strictly capital accumulation. Especially those who have signed off on donating a majority of their wealth after their death.
Only if the competition is mediocre. If the competition takes away money, attention and admiration from Elon, he will not be happy.
RocketLab has already been doing that, and he still has praised it.
Musk doesn’t have to be your villain to be an imperfect person.
Rocket Lab deserves the praise it receives. More so than Blue Origin, an older company whith grander ambitions but has been unable to execute on anything beyond a few small scale suborbital hops. Their methalox BE-4 engine is admittedly pretty cool though.
vs
2. Design for first-time-close enough, spend a lot of money on many relatively cheap-ish prototypes that get blown up but improve each time. While making money with a less (but still) ambitious design
"In 1979, Les Blank took a detour to film German filmmaker Werner Herzog honoring a vow he made to Errol Morris that he (Herzog) would eat his shoe if Morris ever actually made one of his films he was forever talking about. Stung to action, Morris directed Gates of Heaven and Herzog, true to his word, returned to Berkeley to consume one of his desert boots at the UC Theater. Blank's film documents Herzog's strongly expressed belief that people must have the gutts to attempt what they dream of."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGcWTIWYDMQ (just the lead-up..)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kii4jQ7XHuY (shoe-eating..)
> 12. (4/9/17) G.K Chesterton On AI Risk was an April Fools’ joke and not meant seriously. But it did criticize Maciej Ceglowski’s piece where he accused singularitarians of not caring enough about the poor. The fake Chesterton of the piece said that if Ceglowski himself gave to charity at the same level as the people he was criticizing, he would “eat his hat”. Ceglowski pointed out that he does indeed give a lot of money to charity, including a $15,000 donation last year. Under the circumstances, I felt honor-bound to eat my hat and post a video of it on Twitter.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/01/g-k-chesterton-on-ai-r... https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/848396684862275584
What does that even mean? Going threw the NASA certification? Why would NASA even do that?
There is capsule that could even launch on the rocket that currently exists.
We will see if it is a good market and if they will be able to execute.
https://nodis3.gsfc.nasa.gov/displayDir.cfm?t=NPR&c=8705&s=2...
But even if you design to those standards, doesn't mean you will actually get certified.
And as SpaceX learned, the interpretation of those specification are not easy.
So if you just build something without constantly working with NASA, and have their cooperation, you are unlikely to get certified.
The mega-constellation sweet spot argument is not really convincing, if you have a reusable mega rocket with a relightable second stage (like SpaceX plans), you can hit multiple planes in a single launch. The 8 ton class is probably just the largest they can afford to plan at this stage.
I think Starship is awesome, but even Falcon 9 is so big it leaves some room for something a bit smaller.
8 tons is in the Soyuz/R7 range, which is what the other megaconstellation is using. And it has had well over 1000 launches and still holds the record (in the 70s and 80s) of the most number of launches per year for a single rocket type, which makes it a good target class for size of a reusable rocket.
8 tons is about where Falcon 9 v1.0 started out, by the way. How many customers wish they had that built the smaller falcon 5.
Additionally, a smaller rocket is useful for some human spaceflight applications. If you only need to launch two astronauts in orbit to fix a satellite, it’d be nice to have a smaller rocket option. An 8 ton first stage reusable rocket is also big enough to eventually have a reusable upper stage and still carry a a couple astronauts, their space suits, a small (Gemini-sized) vehicle (possibly integrated with the reusable upper stage), and some tools and parts to repair the satellite. Launch costs could in principle be less than $1 million, which is about the propellant costs alone for Starship.
Starship is awesome. But we don’t have JUST 757s and 777s. We also have smaller utility aircraft. I’ve long thought that something just under 10 tons, partially or fully reusable, is a good market opportunity. Makes a lot more sense than tiny rockets for megaconstellations.
But maybe until Starship gets the launch rate to reach its potential, there's room for smaller rockets with disposable upper stages. SpaceX is banking on the space industry expanding well beyond megaconstellations, but that will take a few years. By the time we get there, maybe other companies will manage reusable upper stages too.
But if you throw away second stages, your rate of reuse goes waaay down.
I don't think an 8-ton lift vehicle is going to achieve second stage reuse.
This, and the rest of your comment, is quite reasonable.
What it mostly comes down to is $/kg -> orbit. I know Musk constantly over-promises, but there's at least a good chance that Starship/Superheavy will get their total per launch cost below a million dollars. Perhaps well below that. Gwynne Shotwell, someone known for being almost infinitely more realistic than Musk, has stated multiple times that she firmly believes Starship will become a viable on-Earth passenger/cargo carrier.
And that can only happen if a Starship/Superheavy total launch/mission cost is on the order of a long-haul aircraft. That is, well less than a million dollars.
It's also possible that the fundamental physics of Earth surface -> LEO in a fully re-usable way can only be done with large machines. As an analogy: I'm not aware of any 'not large' machines that can transport anything economically across Earth's oceans. The physics, as I understand it, just don't allow it.
Having said all that, I love the hell out of all of the innovation and potential competition coming around in this area. That's the best way to really test the assumptions (many of which I've just stated) that might be holding us back.
The rental price to charter an A380 to the other side of the world and back is about $1.3million not counting fuel or the time spent on the ground fueling and going to/from charter location.
So I’d say a couple million per Starship launch would be on the order of a long-haul aircraft price. Still has plenty of room for smaller and cheaper per-launch fully reusable rockets.
> Still has plenty of room for smaller and cheaper per-launch fully reusable rockets.
Upon further reflection, I'm getting more on board with this, with two big relevant factors: first, how quickly can these new companies work out the fully reusable mojo. SpaceX is clearly many years ahead, but having a predecessor company actually demonstrating a technology surely makes it somewhat easier to re-implement. Second: back to the physics. I don't have a good intuition for this, but I do hope that it's physically possible to efficiently do small scale orbital transport.
One way or another, I'm happy as can be that there are smart people (outside of SpaceX/Blue Origin) really pressing into this problem.
A major reason the StarShip is going to be more affordable per launch than a Falcon 9 is that the StarShip is (planned to be) 100% reusable. Falcon 9 (and Electron) always disposes of its 2nd stage.
Hopefully other launch companies can provide 100% reusable alternatives to StarShip just in the name of diversity and planetary capacity. Musk points out that larger ships have an advantage here due to volume vs surface area and the fixed weight cost of avionics.
The number of one-off, irreplaceable, you-have-to-fix-them-if-they-break satellites currently in orbit can be counted on one finger.
As launch costs go down, this is not going to change.
I know this was an accident but I'm stealing this.
Also, astronauts are MUCH faster at assembly than robots.
1. From the ground, you have no idea what is wrong with the satellite, whether or not the problem is fixable, and even if it is, what exact tooling/replacement parts need to be brought up.
2. Satellites are not designed to be easily taken apart.
3. Doing any kind of technical work in a spacesuit is incredibly difficult.
The extra cost of building your satellite with sufficient self-diagnostics, with a design that lets someone in a spacesuit take it apart and conduct meaningful repairs on it is going to be paid every single time you launch that satellite. This cost, in both design, and engineering is not trivial.
And the only time you'll ever get any value from it is if you go ahead and do another, even more expensive space launch - this time human-rated. This launch is likely to head on up, and discover that no, they don't have the right tools, replacement parts, or even ability to access the broken parts of the satellite.
The overwhelming cost of a satellite is the R&D that goes into designing it. If space launches are cheap, the correct economics to follow are "Just build two of them, and if the first one breaks, launch the second one."
That's a nice theory. But that requires an actual capsule that is capable of all of these things. If you want to repair a sat, you need a EVA suit and so on.
Its very unlikely to be cheaper to repair a sat with human, then to simply launch another one, or launch a human controlled robot.
Also, such a capsule does not exist, and if SpaceX is any indication, development of such a capsule would cost 1-2 billion at least, do do it according to NASA spec.
RocketLab does not have that kind of money and I don't see NASA or private financing come up with that.
> Starship is awesome. But we don’t have JUST 757s and 777s. We also have smaller utility aircraft.
While that is true, its not an analog. From Starship once you are in Orbit you can do all that stuff too.
There are already companies like Momentus and others who whole business is to make connecting flights.
RocketLab might be in a good position to be 'second best' and launch stuff that people don't want to put on SpaceX rockets. They will have to compete with New Glenn for that.
I wish them luck.
Where they will get an engine that capable, in that short a time is also really questionable to me. Maybe they are already deep in development, but it doesn't seem like it.
Mega-constellations are exactly the type of project that doesn't need multiple planes. They require multiple sat in each plane, meaning one rocket full of small sats can go to one plane and dump them all. I suspect something has been lost in translation. I think they mean to say that the relightable engines will allow access to different altitudes on a single launch, multiple orbits within a single plane.
Inclination changes are expensive, so if you want different inclinations, it almost always makes sense to use a separate launch vehicle for each inclination you want to target.
However, the longitude of the ascending node (Ω) is perturbed by the earth's oblateness, and the rate of Ω precession is a function of the semi-latus rectum (p) and the inclination (i). If you adjust the orbit altitude to tweak p, you can adjust the precession rate to swing the plane around to where you want it.
This takes a while (months), and you of course need some sort of propulsion on the spacecraft to return you to your target altitude after the maneuver, but if the launch vehicle can drop you into the higher/lower altitude above/below the target plane rather than doing that on-board the spacecraft, the delta-v cost is halved.
It would probably be less efficient to use lots of small engines, but perhaps the reduced cost of using an already existing engine that you can mass produce would make up for it.
A total of 135 engines for a rocket comparable to the original Falcon 9 which they are targeting.
Its not the number of engines that is the problem.
The problem is how efficient is your engine, how is the Trust-to-Weight ratio.
To do a reusable launcher you need to be really damn efficient on every part of the rocket. Elon explains this pretty well in the talks he gave around 2014.
With Earth's gravity is seems like we are just barely able to make a reusable launch system by pushing the physics of chemical propulsion to its limits. Better technology can only help so much. We are already close to the limits of physics for things like rocket efficiency, material masses, etc.
Make Earth even say 10% bigger than we'd never be able to build reusable chemical rockets. Make it even bigger still and disposable chemical rockets might be infeasible, making nuclear propulsion the only viable way to get out of your gravity well. A nuclear first stage launching from inside your biosphere is not a great idea, and making nuclear rockets reusable is harder than making chemical rockets reusable. Keep increasing gravity and it only gets exponentially harder still. At some point any kind of space flight become impractical even if you're willing to irradiate yourself.
But... make a planet smaller than Earth and pretty soon you start to have trouble holding onto an atmosphere! Look at what happened to Mars.
This could be yet another Fermi paradox answer. Earth may be right on a knife edge between too small to have a long term stable biosphere and too big to get off the thing!
Of course maybe an intelligence would eventually develop a propulsion system that could crawl out of a super-Earth gravity well using something like nuclear fusion or microwave beamed power, so who knows... it's just another possibility.
I disagree. There are nuclear rocket designs that don't have radioactive exhaust.
Sure, its a little bit of a problem if it explodes, but not to bad.
And actually if you do that, then you are much better set up for deep space exploration.
> and making nuclear rockets reusable is harder than making chemical rockets reusable
Not sure that is actually true. I don't see a reason why something like a NERVA engine should be just as reusable as any chemical engine.
We have way to much fear of radiation. We should be already living in the nuclear age.
Given that NERVA was a 1960 engine I don't think that answer works for Fermi, specially given how many more smaller planets there are (we just have not found them).
However the paper also assumed a fixed weigh battery pack. On the second stage electron tosses one of it's battery packs overboard. Also raw performance isn't as critical for the first stage.
One other thing, electric feed has much simpler plumbing than a turbo pump feed.
Ans: Maybe, but I have no idea.
https://www.aacademica.org/hernan.emilio.tacca/9.pdf
If I remember correctly simple turbo pump feed engines have to run using a lot of excess fuel. Simple designs just dump the turbine exhaust overboard. That represents a fair amount of wasted energy. Advanced designs feed the exhaust back into the engine. I think they also scavenge some energy from cooling the nozzle.
The page about the actual rocket [1] is more fun for armchair space dreamers like myself.
4.5 m diameter vs Falcon 9's 3.7 means 50 m rocket for same volume as Falcon's 70 meters.
They could design it for really high flight rate off the bat.
Once fully reusable, costs drop dramatically, so I wouldn't be surprised if the price of Neutron is similar to that of Electron. Who would use a small launch vehicle when a medium one is the same price, giving you a lot more room for maneuver propellant.
This is the size of Falcon 9 v1.0, and they once believed full reusability was possible.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sWFFiubtC3c&feature=youtu.be
Edit: they haven't announced full reusability. But I believe they're working on it.
Edit 2: I still don't believe mega-constellations are the reason for Neutron. It being the minimum size for full reusability could be one, but another explanation is it being the minimum size for human space flight.
Wow I forgot SpaceX originally wanted a reusable second stage on F9. Would have been pretty cool.
If Rocket Lab achieve second stage reusability while delivering a lot of payload to orbit it would be revolutionary. Like it will take hundreds of flights for a Starship to become as cost competitive to just a few flights of the Neutron rocket.
If I was SpaceX, I would be worried. Rocket Lab is SpaceX's most fearsome competitor.
That is very much wrong. A second stage always needs a heat shield, and a lot of it too. In fact, Starship moved away from carbon fiber partly BECAUSE it performance in heat.
And we don't know if Neutron is carbon fiber, doesn't look like it from the picture.
> If Rocket Lab achieve second stage reusability while delivering a lot of payload to orbit it would be revolutionary.
They have not even announced that they are working on that. They are planning for first stage re-usability in 2024.
Lets not jump to wild conclusions.
If anybody is gone achieve second stage re-usability anytime soon its SpaceX Starship.
> If I was SpaceX, I would be worried. Rocket Lab is SpaceX's most fearsome competitor.
Actually no. RocketLab is not a competitor in any meaningful way. The whole history of launches on RocketLab rockets could fit easily without in a single Falcon 9 rocket.
The have now announced that they might have something in 2024 that might compete with the price of Falcon 9 for some applications. And that is likely gone slip like most rockets do.
And if you make the argument that RocketLab is the best competitor of SpaceX that just shows how absurdly far away removed from everybody else SpaceX is.
Rocket Lab never wanted to do first stage recover on the Electron, but they later chose to and have succeeded in soft ocean landings under parachutes and will soon try and catch the parachutes with helicopters.
I fully expect they're are running the numbers on second stage reusability but unlike SpaceX [1] they don't tend to announce things until they are sure that's what they will pursue.
Rocket Lab only promised the Neutron will do 8,000kg to low-Earth orbit, and people are suggesting the rocket tanks can be stretched for added performance.
If SpaceX wasn't pursuing Starship they would continue to spend resources on second stage reusability for the Falcon 9. Even less than 2 years ago Elon Musk was still talking about using a ballute to recover the Falcon 9 second stage [1], but they later decided to put all their resources into the Starship.
But yeah 2024 far enough away that Starship (and New Glenn) should be operational by then, so the competitive landscape may be different. But that's all the more reason for Rocket Lab to pursue second stage reusability.
The problem with second stage re-usability is that it is like 25x harder then first stage.
> Rocket Lab only promised the Neutron will do 8,000kg to low-Earth orbit, and people are suggesting the rocket tanks can be stretched for added performance.
Like the Falcon did too.
> If SpaceX wasn't pursuing Starship they would continue to spend resources on second stage reusability for the Falcon 9. Even less than 2 years ago Elon Musk was still talking about using a ballute to recover the Falcon 9 second stage [1], but they later decided to put all their resources into the Starship.
Yeah but a big part of that choice was that they realized they would reduce their payload so much it not really worth it in the majority of cases.
> But that's all the more reason for Rocket Lab to pursue second stage reusability.
Agree overall. Personally I am kind of a fan of the idea to try to reuse them in Orbit. I think there are a couple interesting things that could potentially be done.
Reading about the DC-X, it seems like this was possible in the 1990s but NASA had no interest in funding it for whatever mysterious reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X
If shuttle had continued on tile inspection could have likely moved to machine vision based approaches, maybe they will be able to use something like that to keep refurb costs down on spacex's shuttle/starship.
Replacement is supposed to be "break it and attach a new one" without needing special glues, curing times which was the reason why shuttle heat shield refurbishment took so long at high cost.
The Dear Moon mission in a couple years will have full reentry at extreme speeds, assuming they weren't just ripping off that Japanese billionaire guy. I think they still planned transpirational cooling at that point?
Dragon was supposed to have at least one mission to Mars every transfer period from 2020 onwards and that seems to have been scrapped.
https://www.vox.com/2018/4/11/17227036/flight-spacex-gwynne-...
I based reliability requirements on passenger jet travel and the risk people would be willing to take for non space-tourism transport.
Also, I don't see how the tiles can be fully uniform except on the cylindrical part. The geometry of the nose part I don't think would allow it mathematically. Shuttle tiles often only differed in thickness based on needed heat withstanding, and could be generated by cnc processes automatically. Spacex may want something similar to optimize weight, especially since they are planning computer controlled install as well for most of them.
The engines also required refurbishment.
The boosters had to be fished out of the ocean. Those same boosters that used solid fuel and that could not (and cannot) be shutdown in case of issues. And the Shuttle happened to have two of them, with a decent moment arm on each, so a solid booster failure (even a partial one, with less thrust than expected) meant a mission failure. They had to be highly scrutinized. Given that the Shuttle was also a jobs program, they were built in segments, to allow for transport across long distances. So the o-ring seals were also problematic.
All in all, the Shuttle was very brittle. If they could have been mass-produced, it would have probably been more economical to just throw them away on every flight and rely on economies of scale. At least, that way, one would only have to account for manufacturing issues, not every conceivable stress that could happen during a mission.
It wasn't usefully reusable, refurb costs were too high, but that was as much due to design mistakes as it was to technology limitations in the 70s.
There's also significant improvements in metallurgy that make it easier to do things like long-life turbopumps, carbon-fiber composites help with mass fraction, CNC machining and additive manufacturing that make complicated parts affordable, and other such things that also help. But really it's pocket-sized sense-and-compute that really kicked off the low-cost retro-propulsion thing.
Now that SpaceX regularly flying a booster 5 times or more and have at least 10 boosters in the fleet, the only people arguing that reusable space hardware is not worth doing are people with a vested interest in old-space-hardware designs.
Okay, fine, so it wasn't to Earth orbit, but still...!
Shuttle software was far more complex then Falcon 9 and it runs on 70s computers.
GPS is not really needed, its just there as a backup. Launching on a ship might be tricky, but on land you can target a pretty big landing area.
> advances in stuff like convex optimization and fluid dynamics make a real difference in practicality of doing so, both on the rocket and during design.
True, but if you do more iterations on first stages that you drop into the ocean anyway, you can build design and iterate.
Shuttle didn't fail because of they could figure out reentry conditions.
> There's also significant improvements in metallurgy that make it easier to do things like long-life turbopumps, carbon-fiber composites help with mass fraction,
SpaceX uses very little carbon fiber.
There is truth to the improvements in metallurgy but its not metal issue that caused the RS-25 to not work well in practice is not really the metal.
> CNC machining and additive manufacturing that make complicated parts affordable
While true, that makes the benefit of making it reusable even more worth it.
It seems to me that SpaceX simple had the right design and the right setup to test and iterate. There was nothing fundamentally stopping NASA from doing this instead of the Shuttle. Nobody else even tried to make a reusable rocket.
I would argue this could have been done in the 70s and it would have worked nearly as well.
There's one point I would like to add. This is something that's very difficult to do for well established companies. They tend to have their workhorse rockets - which were NOT designed with reusability in mind. Modifying these rockets is not feasible in many cases. Even when it is, it may not be cost effective. So the usual solution is to design a new "reusable rocket program".
Now, the problem with such a program is: the success criteria is reusability. If the new rocket cannot be put into service quickly enough and demonstrates reusability successfully, it will be scrapped. If it delivers payloads just fine but can't land (or can land but refurbishment is costly), it will be a failure. After all, on one hand you have a working system, which is generating revenue. On the other, you have a problematic R&D program that's draining resources and engineering cycles for the promise of potential savings. They end up getting scrapped on the first resource crunch.
SpaceX was developing their rocket. Their success criteria was that it would deliver payloads into orbit. Given that they started from scratch and had no existing workhorse, they also added reusability as a goal and designed the rocket to allow for that. If it achieved reusability, great! If not, it's just another single-use rocket. They also got "early" adopters, companies that were willing to launch their payloads on SpaceX, on new rocket designs, that only had a handful of flights. So they were, by definition, a little less risk-averse.
On every flight, SpaceX got closer and closer to the reusability goal. But that didn't matter to most customers (they would pay for new boosters anyway), because that part of the mission happened after their payload was already on its way by the second stage, so who cares what happens to the first. All the while cementing their reputation.
In essence, SpaceX got companies to finance the R&D for the reusable boosters, because they only had one rocket. If they tried to start with a single-use rocket, and then created a "Falcon 9-reuse" version, they would have faced the same difficulties. Namely, who would fly on the untested new design?
Rocketlabs might be able to pull it off still, because - while it's a new booster - it's also one that's intended to increase their capabilities (much like Spaceship), it's not just a "reusable rocket program". If it can't be reused, then it's a more expensive rocket, but one that still adds value.
While they are currently spending a lot of effort on recovering the 1st stage of the Electron via parachute the Neutron is going to land on a drone ship just like SpaceX does it. Clearly due to the different size of these two first stages.
Looking forward to their design, particularly the engines they will be using. Is there any info out there yet?
Finally a video by Rocket Lab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agqxJw5ISdk&feature=youtu.be
Doubtful. And that isn't a knock against Rocket Lab, targeting a different niche is smart business, but still doubtful. Because the target of any rocket under development right now that wants to directly compete with SpaceX can't be F9, it needs to be Starship. The fundamentals along with the iterative capability and in-house demand built into the core of the design plan indicate they're going to be about to push costs below $200/kg and eventually even below $100/kg, along with enormous other sets of capabilities. That will represent just a mind blowing paradigm shift in cost to LEO, and SpaceX will probably want to retire F9 completely as soon as they're done with contracts and SS/SH is fully certified.
Rocket Lab should still be able to find a healthy market, like now, for customers who want specific orbits and times for smaller payloads that don't line up well with ride sharing on a big rocket. But it just won't be in the same market slice at all. Which is fine! The entire space market is set to grow a lot, no zero-sum games for a good long while, and in a growing market there can be room for many players to grow together. But everyone not on the leading edge is going to have to stay nimble.
Edit: acd10j says I misread. I still think they're working on full reusability, but that's just my guess, not an announcement.
Of course with Neutron not expected to launch, even under Rocket Lab's target, before 2024 they may have answers for a lot of this. I see nothing about fuel for example, maybe they've been working on their own great methalox design. But either way, F9 isn't going to be the comparison by the time they really get going.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/25/relativitys-reusable-terran-...
Relativity is claiming to be working on a fully reusable, Methalox burning, competitor to the Falcon 9. Of course Relativity has yet to put something into space so Rocket Lab seems better positioned but these companies are all competing for the same funding and launch contracts so they can’t sit back and let another company steal the lime light for long. Really exciting times in the space industry, the US could have four different companies making reusable rockets in the next 5-10 years.
Relevant paragraph: The medium-lift Neutron rocket will be a two-stage launch vehicle that stands 40 meters (131 feet) tall with a 4.5-meter (14.7 ft) diameter fairing and a lift capacity of up to 8,000 kg (8 metric tons) to low-Earth orbit, 2,000 kg to the Moon (2 metric tons), and 1,500 kg to Mars and Venus (1.5 metric tons). Neutron will feature a reusable first stage designed to land on an ocean platform, enabling a high launch cadence and decreased launch costs for customers. Initially designed for satellite payloads, Neutron will also be capable of International Space Station (ISS) resupply and human spaceflight missions.
Not until it is certified for national security launches and/or becomes man-rated. Spacelaunch is about more than cost per pound to orbit. Security, insurance, even politics often trumps cost.
But ITAR-free (effectively "USA-free") is a big important thing to offer if possible.
The revenue potential of selling to the entire US government far outweighs the revenue potential of the rest of the world combined as Europe, China, and Russian already have national champions and closed launch markets.
Going with ITAR, and US sales, and US investors, is exactly why RocketLab became a US company. If you look at their flight manifest so far, it's certainly worked out for them!
Indeed, you can argue that ITAR is the single most effective industrial policy in the US by comparing the health of the US rocket manufacturing base to the relative health of all other US manufacturing industries.
I've understood that the US places restrictions on payloads that carry cameras, and from that alone, I could see that getting out from under those restrictions could be valuable.
But what else?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_...
IV: Launch Vehicles, Guided Missiles, Ballistic Missiles, Rockets, Torpedoes, Bombs and Mines
V: Explosives and Energetic Materials, Propellants, Incendiary Agents and Their Constituents
XII: Fire Control, Range Finder, Optical and Guidance and Control Equipment
XV: Spacecraft Systems and Associated Equipment
https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=86008bdffd1fb2e79c...
(1) Rockets, SLVs, and missiles capable of delivering at least a 500-kg payload to a range of at least 300 km (MT);
(2) Rockets, SLVs, and missiles capable of delivering less than a 500-kg payload to a range of at least 300 km (MT);
[...]
(12) Thrusters (e.g., spacecraft or rocket engines) using bi-propellants or mono-propellant that provide greater than 150 lbf (i.e., 667.23 N) vacuum thrust (MT for rocket motors or engines having a total impulse capacity equal to or greater than 8.41 × 10^5 newton seconds);
(13) Control moment gyroscope (CMG) specially designed for spacecraft;
And lots more stuff.
Not likely. Everything to do with misses/rockets is very restricted. Put GPS guidance on your model rocket and you can expect a visit from the FBI. Sell rockets with GPS/FLIR/INS/TV guidance and you should expect swat teams.
And yes, ITAR-Free is becoming a bigger and bigger selling point both in military and space industries (also, besides ITAR, such high-profile contracts with USA entities are generally bad for you...)
10 years ago this was totally crazy and is now table stakes. Exciting times.
Does that mean that VACQ stock owners will become RKLB owners when the deal goes through?
We're not at that point yet so concern is not as great (but we're working on it).
https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9967/how-l...
We are also getting far better at monitoring both systematic and individual high accuracy measure. Both US and ESA are improving that technology. Commercial startups are also starting to work on it.
ESA is already setting up technology to move objects from the ground with a laser. This is needed for moving dead objects.
The first garbage truck mission is already financed by ESA.
With Starship coming, garbage truck services will be pretty affordable and in 10-20 years removing your own dead sats will very likely be a requirement as well.
Its a problem that needs to be worked on, but I am a bit sick of the endless doom and gloom and everytime anybody does anything in space everybody talks about Kessler syndrome.
Maybe at some point these B and C companies (Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic) can take over the low tier/mundane stuff, while SpaceX is taking us to the Moon/Mars or beyond on a daily/weekly/monthly schedule.
While the extra money is certainly well invested in SpaceX, there's still the potential to lower prices through competition, if nothing else. The different approaches are also great to see. So far the pie looks big enough for everyone.
Don't know if they are going to stay with the electric pump-fed engine design or not for the neutron.
https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/07/31/rocket-lab-identifies-...
I think my thought is that with conventional turbopumps you're uncomfortably close to fatigue and thermal limits. Where with electric pumps you may much farther way.
I wonder if they're planning for a 9m Neutron 2.0, like the 18m Starship 2.0 Musk has alluded to.