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Comment by hourislate | Hacker News Reader

It's exciting to hear about all these companies trying to bring more to the table but while they (Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic) talk about what their plans are, SpaceX continues to push forward with real world results. It's the dollar short and the day late scenario.

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.

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Rocketlab does have "real world results" - they've launched customer payloads to orbit 18 times in the last few years. AFAIK, blue origin has not achieved orbit, and virgin orbit is still doing (years-delayed?) demonstration missions (which have achieved orbit), so I don't think it makes sense to lump all "not spacex" together.

Interesting thing to me is they haven't had any failures of primary components either. 18 launches, 10 engines per rocket, 180 total, no failures as far as I've read.

Don't know if they are going to stay with the electric pump-fed engine design or not for the neutron.

They had one mission failure last year that destroyed all payloads:

https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/07/31/rocket-lab-identifies-...

Yeah but that was far as I understand a loose connector.

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.

Virgin Orbit launches their LauncherOne to orbit from a 747 Jumbo Jet. Virgin Galactic aspires to launches people for suborbital tourism on SpaceShipTwo. Different companies.

As far as I know SpaceX don't offer substantially low prices for launching reused rockets yet. Why should they - there's no competitor forcing them to do it.

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.

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