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More detailed article here: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2017/05/rocket-labs-electron... Note that the rocket failed to reach orbit as intended.
More detailed article here: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2017/05/rocket-labs-electron... Note that the rocket failed to reach orbit as intended.
Awesome! Their NZ office is just 10 minutes from my house, I was going to apply for a C++ dev role with them but was warned by the recruiter that everyone was expected to work 12 hours a day, so unfortunately I had to give it a miss as I wasn't comfortable with that.
12 hours a day, but in exchange you get to build spaceships. Of course, it all depends on how passionate you are about space. If I lived in NZ and had the expertise for it (my really serious embedded stints ended in college), I'd be there in a flash.
How about being more passionate about spending time with my own kids, and being able to teach them about all the cool stuff like science, space, robotics etc.. What is it with companies that want claim to build cool stuff to better the humanity, but forget that the people are what's really important?
More detailed article here: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2017/05/rocket-labs-electron... Note that the rocket failed to reach orbit as intended.
"Unfortunately, as the Atea-1 had no telemetry downlink, was not tracked by ground-based assets, and was not recovered, its maximum altitude during its only flight is unknown and it is not possible to verify the claim that it reached space." Edit: I'd delete if I could as this is older launch
> Regardless, the test was considered a success, and Rocket Lab – while not flying a second Atea-1 rocket – proceeded into development of their Electron rocket.
This recent launch was the Electron, which also didn't get to orbit:
> We didn’t quite reach orbit and we’ll be investigating why, however reaching space in our first test puts us in an incredibly strong position to accelerate the commercial phase of our programme, deliver our customers to orbit and make space open for business,” said CEO Peter Beck.
>> Eventually, Rocket Lab says it will be lofting payloads up to 150kg (331lbs) into a 500km-high orbits that go from pole to pole. My first reaction was surprise at the launch-site, since I know much trouble has been taken to be near the equator for launches to aid in achieving orbit (for many types of orbit). Does it help to be closer to the pole for polar orbits? I wouldn't have thought it would make a difference,…
In fact, I've heard that for polar orbits, you actually have to spent extra energy to cancel out all that speed you got for free - in the wrong axis - from Earth's rotation.
This means that polar launches benefit a bit from launching closer to the poles where the Earth's surface velocity is lower. However, in reality the difficult logistics of building an arctic launch site mean that this is rarely done.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is correct, the power density of electric motors (and the batteries to power them) is still very far short of what you can get from a well-designed turbine-based pump (that is, a turbopump), but there's so much ancillary plumbing and and stuff for a turbopump (like the precombustion chamber that has to generate some hot gas to drive the turbine), that doesn't scale down all that well to the small scale of the en…
The F1 engine [1] (Saturn V, first stage) used another interesting way to improve efficiency with a gas generator cycle: using the turbopump exhaust gas as a cooling film in the engine nozzle. The fuel-rich exhaust was relatively cool compared to the flame generated by the rocket engine itself, and thus protected the nozzle from the most intense heat. This is why, close up, the flame looks almost black close to the n…
This isn't used for the regeneratively-cooled portion of the nozzle, but for the large radiatively-cooled nozzle extension, visible here [2].
>> Eventually, Rocket Lab says it will be lofting payloads up to 150kg (331lbs) into a 500km-high orbits that go from pole to pole. My first reaction was surprise at the launch-site, since I know much trouble has been taken to be near the equator for launches to aid in achieving orbit (for many types of orbit). Does it help to be closer to the pole for polar orbits? I wouldn't have thought it would make a difference,…
Electron will be mostly used for low-orbit missions, as geosynchronous sats will generally be too large for it. GEO missions are equatorial, and will benefit from being launched close to the equator. Small sats in low orbits will generally be observation (which often go into a sun-synchronous orbit, which is nearly polar) or radio relay constellations (which will go into highly-inclined orbits like 60 degrees). So for the likely payloads, their launch site is just fine.
And, in reality, the benefit of equatorial launch isn't generally big enough to overcome logistical problems. Only Arianespace has bothered to establish a remote equatorial launch site... because Europe has essentially no appropriate launch site and they had to put one elsewhere anyway.
Rocket Lab's website already allows you to book a slot for your satellite. The cheapest deal is a small cubesat on a rideshare option - prices start at $77,000 (£59,280). Wow a satellite in orbit for the price of a car.
Maybe we all should chip in for a project on behalf of HN for a cubestat?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are all the engineers Non American citizens then? Wouldn't trying to hire American citizens also be a nightmare with ITAR?
I would assume most of their employees in NZ hold NZ citizenship although I'm unsure exactly how NZ handles ITAR. They have engineers/technicians based in the US as well and I would assume most of those are US Persons (US Citizens or Permanent Residents). In the US you can get ITAR exemptions for non-US Persons but from my understanding it's a more difficult and much more expensive process so it is only done to recru…
As satellites are getting smaller, this may be a very efficient launch vehicle. Designed for small payload 150 - 220 kg for $4.9 million per launch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(rocket) Frequent launches, so you can launch CubeSats as main payload, without waiting for one of the big launch which has some extra space: http://spaceflight101.com/2016-space-launch-statistics/
the problem is you can get anywhere between 10 and 20 metric tons depending on the exact LEO/SSO for a list price of $62M on a falcon 9; what SpaceX doesn't have is room in the manifest.
Imagine if they start launching weekly for example. At current prices they could sell 500lb spots for $2 - $3M. And theoretically with re-usable boosters they can cut prices as much as by half.
Obviously I'm speculating as to how soon and how much, but clearly SpaceX intends to increase cadence relatively soon, and eventually lower prices. I don't really like Rocket Lab's competitive position given that. But maybe there is a big enough market in small payloads, esp. those requiring polar orbits, and those requiring their own specific orbits that can't piggyback on someone elses launches, to have room for both.
