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RocketLab Discussion Thread


Kryten

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  • 1 month later...
1 minute ago, sevenperforce said:

The weather forecast says partly sunny here at 6 PM but partly cloudy by 7 PM. 

Winds are largely SSE so hopefully we get an unobstructed view of the eastern sky.

Good luck!

Having finally been to a launch that was better than the couple of sounding rockets I saw at White Sands, it's worth seeing (closer even than the ~12 miles I got would be even better).

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4 hours ago, RCgothic said:

Same price, half as capable, over half a decade later to market.

It's honestly a little disappointing.

:mad: Or, you could be supportive and realize that the more it fly's, the cheaper the cost. If you, I'm assuming SpaceX fanboy, were to look at Starship, then you'd see that they plan to get the launch price down to around $10,000,000. It is certainly not going to start this cheap. Rocket Lab will do the same thing. It will go down over time as they reuse it more and iterate it like SpaceX did to Falcon 9. Also realize that they are in a different market. Electron is for small sats. If you launch a smallsat on a dedicated Falcon 9, its a waste of space and money. You also have to understand, most satellites don't use the full capabilities of Falcon 9. So by having a launch vehicle more suited to their size, they get launched at a cheaper cost. So please, take your SpaceX fanboy self over to this forum!

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35 minutes ago, Kerballlistic07 said:

:mad: Or, you could be supportive and realize that the more it fly's, the cheaper the cost. If you, I'm assuming SpaceX fanboy, were to look at Starship, then you'd see that they plan to get the launch price down to around $10,000,000. It is certainly not going to start this cheap. Rocket Lab will do the same thing. It will go down over time as they reuse it more and iterate it like SpaceX did to Falcon 9.

His concern is entirely legitimate.

Unlike SpaceX, Rocket Lab is now on the stock exchange. As a result, they have to exist as a business first and foremost. There is no reason to believe they can accomplish incredibly high flight rates, because there will not be customers to support that. The total commercial launch market is not terribly large. The reason for Neutron is precisely because the small sat market is... weak.

35 minutes ago, Kerballlistic07 said:

Also realize that they are in a different market. Electron is for small sats. If you launch a smallsat on a dedicated Falcon 9, its a waste of space and money. You also have to understand, most satellites don't use the full capabilities of Falcon 9. So by having a launch vehicle more suited to their size, they get launched at a cheaper cost. So please, take your SpaceX fanboy self over to this forum!

Small sats are a dead end IMHO. They exist not because they are best, but because launch costs are high. As launch costs decrease, the need for tiny sats also decreases.

I have to say that while I like Rocket Lab, @RCgothic is right. Neutron is cool, but I think it's still in a tough spot from a commercial LV perspective. On the plus side for them, they are aggressively pushing for a 2024 test date, which very likely has them flying before New Glenn (late 2024, so likely 2025 for NG). We simply don't know what the cost/kg will be for NG. SpaceX pricing has had zero competition, so we have no idea what they could afford to fly F9 for if push came to shove. Then there's Stoke, which seems to also be working pretty aggressively. Any race to the bottom on cost doesn't necessarily help a startup as the total number of payloads is low. Stoke has smaller payloads, but if they can fly with 100% reuse, the cost/flight will be far lower than Neutron—it'll be the price of propellants.

 

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Edited by tater
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