Rocket Lab's engine has electric turbos and 3D-printed primary components
rocketlabusa.com
rocketlabusa.com
Comparable prices for small sats: Nanoracks quotes 60,000$/1U (usually ~1kg) to the ISS. Interorbital quotes 12,500$/kg at a 310km orbit (or 8,000$ to use their 0.75kg tubesat).
But a lot of smaller companies don't need gargantuan satellites like that and can get a lot done with 100 kg. If you only need to put one or two satellites up it is not cost effective to spend lots of money on a large launch vehicle, so you buy space on another launch that has spare capacity and is launching at a compatible time/inclination. When you do that, you are not given priority and will have to wait if the #1 priority delays the launch for any reason. So Rocketlab can capture a market segment by letting small companies have their own launches.
It's kind of like getting the individual packets of ketchup from McDonald's vs the family size bottle of ketchup from the grocery store. Sure, the family size gets you more ketchup for your dollar, but you don't normally need that much.
EDIT: RP-1 now, not methane
I suppose it makes sense, as it is very difficult to have a turbo with rocket exhaust on one side and cryogenic oxygen on the other. Its quite creative if it is actually cheaper. It might also allow finer control over throttling back, but thats not useful unless you're spaceX.
Staged combustion motors run the exhaust of the turbo-pump into the main combustion chamber, and have far better specific impulse, but are much harder to design and build.
The the electric pump design, you can have the simplicity of and reliability of the open cycle main engine, with the efficiency inherent in not effectively throwing a percentage of your fuel overboard.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/01/saturn-v-moon-rocket-...
Yes, the turbopump is run off its own rocket engine --- which drove a 40MW turbine, which ran a pump that could push three tonnes of rocket fuel a second.
Admittedly, the Saturn V was a little bit bigger than this rocket's going to be, and had special needs, but it goes to show that rocket fuel powered turbopumps are scary.
(Incidentally, SpaceX use a rocket fuel powered turbopump for the Falcon 9. I believe the scary-looking plume of flame that comes out sideways is the exhaust. It's a mere 2MW. Per engine.)
Rocket engine with electric pumps: http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/73571-rocket-engine-with-...
It has, actual quote "3D printing for all primary components."
Big difference.
Also, I'd never heard of Rocketlab before but it turns out that they're back by Khosla Ventures. Pretty cool.
Do you have any sources I can read on that? I know reusing some of the hardware will have cost savings, but you are more than an order of magnitude cheaper than I have heard claimed. I would be very surprised that even if all of the hardware was 100% free that there would not be a few hundred thousand in labor costs alone for analysis and launch operations.
I do not believe that raw material procurement and manufacturing account for 99% of current launches or 97% or 90%. Even if it did, I believe there would be significant amount devoted to quality inspections and testing before you could trust a used rocket that not only fired, but impacted the ground to be used again.
So Rocketlab comes out sounding like a worse deal in the cost/payload ratio, but if Rocketlab can deliver on their launch frequencies then they can capture the market of smaller companies having to buy a secondary spot on a large rocket, and then wait for the whims of the other people to be ready to launch. The smaller company can fork over $5M and have the #1 priority and only payload on the rocket.
SpaceX source: http://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities
SpaceX Falcon 9 is the only current offering, with 13,150kg to LEO for $62M; it's a major difference in capability.
SpaceX Falcon 1 (no longer offered) was demonstrating 185kg up to a claimed 670kg to LEO for (contract numbers vary) between $7M to $11M USD.
But this is just a minimum. In practice, everything depends
on our means of transportation. If we’re using rockets,
it’s going to take a lot more. This is because of a
fundamental problem with rockets: they have to lift their
own fuel.
If we want to launch a 65-kilogram spaceship, we need to
burn around 90 kilograms of fuel. (Gasoline has an energy
per pound comparable to that of rocket fuel, so we’ll
stick with that example). We load that fuel on board—and
now our spaceship weighs 155 kilograms. A 155-kilogram
spaceship requires 215 kilograms of fuel, so we load
another 125 kilograms on board ...
Fortunately, we’re saved from an infinite loop—where we
add 1.3 kilograms for every 1 kilogram we add—by the fact
that we don’t have to carry that fuel all the way up. We
burn it as we go, so we get lighter and lighter, which
means we need less and less fuel. But we do have to lift
the fuel partway.
Talk about the capabilities of the rocket instead! The rocket looks cool though.
[1] I know he's actually from New Zealand, but since he might end up being famous, I'm going to start the process of pretending he's Australian.