Rocket Lab Launches Highest Mission Yet To Put Astro Digital Satellite In Orbit (space.com) 27
XXongo writes: Sometimes it seems that all the space news focuses on SpaceX, but another private rocket company, Rocket Lab, is also making history with their bargain-basement space launcher, the Electron. The Electron booster just completed its seventh launch, this time carrying a satellite to the highest orbit yet, 1000 km. The launch carried the Astro Digital "Corvus" satellite. At $5.7 million per launch, the company is the first of many space start-ups competing for the small-satellite launch business, a market too small to be of interest to the major launch companies like SpaceX and United Launch Alliance. To lower costs further, Rocket Lab has announced its intention to make their booster reusable -- with plans to capture Electron's first stage in mid-air by helicopter.
Really.. (Score:2)
''with plans to capture Electron's first stage in mid-air by helicopter.''
Sounds like a serious amount of exposure for the helicopter pilot. Test pilot type exposure.
Re:Really.. (Score:5, Informative)
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There's been prior work by Lockheed on trying this with rocket engines, and ULA is working on a similar idea to just capture the engines of their Vulcan rocket. We've been doing midair captures since the 1960s when it was used to capture film canisters dropped by spy satellites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-air_retrieval [wikipedia.org]. Rocket stages which will be captured will vent all their fuel and oxygen before they are in the capture range, so there's no risk of explosion. Doing this sort of thing will be not easy but not substantially more dangerous to pilots than flying a helicopter.
It sounds extraordinary to me! And indeed the wikipedia link says:
This is a risky technique, and so is only used when other forms of landing are infeasible. ... The need for human aviators to perform a manoeuvre which would normally be classed as a stunt may in the future be avoided by advances in unmanned aerial vehicles.
That does make it sound substantially more dangerous.
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Am I being naive here or does a parachute and a boat seem less risky and highly feasible?
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Parachutes are incapable of controlling the descent well enough to land in a specific spot as small as a boat. That's why SpaceX abandoned plans to return their Falcon 9 first stages with parachutes. Also it's harder to get it to land exactly upright and not tip over with parachutes.
Electron can't land propulsively though because they have an extremely weight-sensitive vehicle that can't afford to carry extra fuel and still be able to get anything useful to orbit. Thus they have to design a system of parach
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So no it is not less dangerous.
I like Rocket Lab. (Score:4, Interesting)
I also feel bad for them, though, in that I feel they showed up too late for the party. They've had a market so far, but SpaceX's new dedicated ride-sharing launches for a third the price look like they're going to relegate the Electron stack to a bit player, only getting customers who want a dedicated rocket specifically for themselves.
I'm not sure how Rocket Lab plans to respond. I doubt that recovering the booster by helicopter (if they can pull it off consistently... that's not easy) will be enough. Maybe it'll help them close the gap enough to attract customers, though. But SpaceX keeps getting more cost efficient, too; Starship launches will be far cheaper than Falcon launches, despite having a vastly higher payload capacity.
Still, there should always be some market for cheap dedicated rockets. Rocket Lab definitely took the right approach to fill that niche, despite the naysayers pooh-poohing the choice of an electric pump-fed engine. I look forward to seeing what path they take on the road ahead.
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According to Gwynne Shotwell, the company is profitable, and “We’ve had many years of profitability” [cnbc.com]
I know, she's lying, right?
SpaceX is of course a growth company, so the focus is on expansion rather than dividends, and adverse years (such as with rocket failures) may go negative. With a growth company, you don't want to rack up large amounts of profit, and thus have to share your money with Uncle Sam; you want to reinvest it, grow, and continuously increase your competitive advantage.
Re:I like Rocket Lab. (Score:5, Insightful)
You think Musk is a fan of public companies? Lol. He tried to de-IPO (e.g. privatize) Tesla. He hates having his companies public, which means a vast number of third parties betting for or against them, which means a vast number of people incentivized to try to harm them. He hates the quarterly cycle that public companies go through. He hates pretty much everything about companies being publicly traded. He likes there being a small core group of like-minded investors with a similar vision for the company, and all new investments having to be approved.
Tesla went public because it needed to at the time. Musk isn't going to do it again with any of his other companies if he has any say in the matter.
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I think Musk is a fan of getting as much money as he can to prop up his other failing (financially) companies. And no, no one is out to "get" Musk. You are just a fanatic. You need to find a real hero.
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That's literally the entire goal of TSLAQ. As well as every short-seller of Tesla, the second-most short-sold company in the US.
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SpaceX isn't a growth company, they had a big 2018 but future years will be much leaner. The launch market is only so big.
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Please, Anonymous Coward, please - come in and write a dismissive post without actually indicating on what grounds you're being dismissive, and for what reasons. Because that's the sort of high-quality dialogue this site needs.
* Do you disagree with Gwynne about the company's finances? Are you in the accounting department?
* Are you saying that SpaceX's announced pricing for ridesharing is a lie? A pretty bold charge if true. If so, how come nobody has called them out on it? You'd think a pro
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You don't understand. The pricing is not be a lie, but that doesn't mean that is what the LAUNCH COST is to SpaceX. Just like Uber they are likely not charging cost. No one knows if SpaceX plan to bring down the cost of launches actually worked, or if they are just losing massive amounts of money on every launch.
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Now we bounce back to Gwynne's statement.
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Please, Anonymous Coward, please - come in and write a dismissive post without actually indicating on what grounds you're being dismissive, and for what reasons.
That particular troll seems to be a new bot. It has a couple of formulas and posts on several different story types, always with that pattern of claiming insider knowledge, then delivering none whatsoever. It always ends with those last three sentences about "bad information get[ting] passed around" and "believe anything they read." It's a form letter troll. It isn't worth engaging with.
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SpaceX loses money on its commercial launches, they're subsidised with the margins they make from the NASA and DoD launches.
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..I work for SpaceX..
And I am Mickey Mouse.
Dedicated launch versus ride-share (Score:4, Informative)
I also feel bad for them, though, in that I feel they showed up too late for the party. They've had a market so far, but SpaceX's new dedicated ride-sharing launches for a third the price look like they're going to relegate the Electron stack to a bit player, only getting customers who want a dedicated rocket specifically for themselves.
Their plan seems to be that flying a dedicated launch instead of joining another launch as a secondary payload gives you more control, and that there will be customers who want that. Flying as a ride-share has been the classic way to get small payloads into orbit, but flying as secondary payload means you have no control over things like when you launch and to what orbit, and means you give the main payload the right to tell you what to do (and to boot you off if they don't like what you're doing). And you're dependent on the main payload not cancelling the launch because they have a problem, which is something that happens.
So, Electron is offering a service that fits a market niche. A niche for how many launches? Hard to say.
This was originally Pegasus' intended market niche (and Pegasus just launched again last week: https://spacenews.com/pegasus-... [spacenews.com] ), but Pegasus is much higher than that five-million-per-launch niche (to be fair, it launches twice the mass of Electron, and has more flexibility to hit high-inclination orbits... but it's more than twice the cost).
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Agree wholeheartedly about a niche remaining, but a niche of unknown size. One minor nitpick, however:
That's not how SpaceX's new dedicated ride
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You might as well say that cars are doomed because buses exist and are clearly a more economically efficient means of transport.
SpaceX isn't a big threat to Rocket Lab. SpaceX can't provide a timely, assured launch for a smallsat -- you're one of dozens of customers on the flight and the schedule will depend on everybody else. SpaceX can't provide the exact orbit your satellite needs, unless you're lucky. SpaceX has serious trouble with launch cadence too.
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Actually, this [everydayastronaut.com] is the main reason the Falcon 9 can't use chutes and the Electron can.
No, the reuse is NOT "to lower costs further"! (Score:2)
Read the first paragraph of the announcement: "The move aims to enable Rocket Lab to further increase launch frequency by eliminating the need to build a new first stage for every mission."
The primary reason to do this is simply to reduce their launch backlog as fast as possible, to greatly reduce customer delays, to increase launch frequency, and to let Rocket Lab them keep their factory small and efficient.
First stage recovery was seen as a ***much*** better option than building an entire new factory!
It m