A Convo with Rocket Lab’s Peter Beck on Reusability, Launch Demand, and More

Back when I was a barely supervised teenage boy we tried that strategy of pulling a 20+ foot structure upright with a truck, and managed to limit injuries one participant getting a bad rope burn. It seemed sketchy even to us, I can't guess at the thought process that lead to a bunch of grown literal rocket scientists trying it.

To be honest I'm jealous that they're still at it. You think they're hiring?

I predict a Darwin award at some point of these people don't get with the program - several programs, in fact.

That reminded our ROTC training on handling SCUD missiles which also had nitric acid as oxidizer - even for training without actual fuel/oxidizer we had to don the protection suits :) Anyway, looking at those guys i think i definitely can go ahead with my SpaceX competitor rocket project.

Sub-orbital launches are simply not useful, and a new type of engine only makes sense if it gives you a shorter path to the finish or a capability that you otherwise would not have. As for the military depending on them: SpaceX has been awarded a whole pile of contracts and the only thing that BO has going for it is to be able to ride the gravy train without delivering anything so far except for some research that may one day be useful.

Instead of competing in the marketplace it seems BO is better at playing politics and competing in the courts, but the latter they've lost and the politicians will sooner or later want deliverables and without those the gravy train will sooner or later roll to a halt. Note that the engine program is now 4 years behind schedule and not a single BE-4 has flown. Even BO admits that the engine has problems, which makes me wonder if it will ever fly with the present design, and if they have to go back to the drawing board you can add a couple of years more worth of delays.

Meanwhile, SpaceX launches a payload to orbit on average every 8 days for 2022 (once every 12 days in 2021), the amount of experience they are gaining alone is going to add up to a sizeable barrier.

F9 Heavy can do a lot of good science missions, and many payload sizes are coming down. I'd personally include the Ariane stuff as well, James Webb launched on a Ariane 5 (around $200M per launch - so can get 20 launches on that or 10 launches + 10 new $200M science missions for one SLS).

This ignores the DEVELOPMENT cost of SLS which is mind bogglingly large as well as some of the ongoing just sustainment costs (also insane).