3D-printed Aerospike Rocket Engine
kickstarter.com
3D-printed Aerospike Rocket Engine
1–10 of 42 posts
Re: 3D-printed Aerospike Rocket Engine
#2After being on a team that was launching cube sats with old ICBMs this reusable launch platform for science excites me!
Re: 3D-printed Aerospike Rocket Engine
#3is it subject to ITAR?
Re: 3D-printed Aerospike Rocket Engine
#4is it subject to ITAR?
Almost certainly, unless they are not operating from within the US: http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/offdocs/itar/p121.htm#C-IV
Re: 3D-printed Aerospike Rocket Engine
#5is it subject to ITAR?
Almost certainly, unless they are not operating from within the US: http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/offdocs/itar/p121.htm#C-IV
when in US the ITAR still applies AFAIK - getting any access to or knowledge transfer from ITAR project to non-US person, etc... Looks like starting from 1K plegde - invitation to test fire the engine - may run afoul of it.
Re: 3D-printed Aerospike Rocket Engine
#6This is really cool.
I would love to see more details about how the engines are 3d printed, and the plans for the designs. Will these engine designs be open sourced?
Also, the rewards are a little difficult to parse. A list format would probably be easier to read, rather than one sentence with each reward concatenated to the rest with 'and'. I think having the 'all previous rewards plus ...' is a better format as well, but that is more personal preference.
[EDIT]
Further, there is no break down of how the money will be used. It seems like 'give us money and we'll do cool things with it' but without any clarification of how much money is really needed to do those cool things.
[EDIT2]
There is a pretty amazing blog over at Rocket Moonlighting [0] that contains a lot of details around 3d printed rocket engines. Well worth a look.
Re: 3D-printed Aerospike Rocket Engine
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
Almost certainly, unless they are not operating from within the US: http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/offdocs/itar/p121.htm#C-IV
when in US the ITAR still applies AFAIK - getting any access to or knowledge transfer from ITAR project to non-US person, etc... Looks like starting from 1K plegde - invitation to test fire the engine - may run afoul of it.
Yes, that is my understanding. I believe that unless they are entirely non-US based, this would be subject to ITAR.
Re: 3D-printed Aerospike Rocket Engine
#8After being on a team that was launching cube sats with old ICBMs this reusable launch platform for science excites me!
Yeah, this is obviously a very highly ambitious project, but I think that it is the right sort of ambitious. Even if their ultimate plans don't come to fruition, it should be very interesting to see what they accomplish. This is the sort of project where the journey is as exciting as the goal.
I'm a little surprised to see that they are going with pumped LOX instead of pressure-fed. With engines that small I would have expected the extra hardware to be a poor tradeoff.
Re: 3D-printed Aerospike Rocket Engine
#9I'm not sure this is really a good fit for a Kickstarter project. I love rockets/space/science/etc and fully support researching cheaper launch methods, but for most people to invest, they want to get something back. There are very few people who will/can donate to something on a purely altruistic basis. These guys aren't a charity and I can't even get a tax write-off. Pushing a button, while cool, is not really a return on investment and only rocketry enthusiasts with extra money (a rare combination) will be willing to pay for that. The cheaper reward tiers offer a "Master-Class on 3d printing and rocket science" which will have more backers due to the 3d printing information but probably not enough to clear their goal.
I think a better way to spur investment would be offering a reward tier that gives a portion of the company (i.e., a $x investment gets you a y% stake in the company). This is just selling stock in a company off of Wall Street and probably a better fit for a company that isn't offering services or a physical product to the general public. I'm not sure what kind of regulations you have to follow (or if kickstarter would even allow it) but it would certainly open up the field of potential backers to include the folks that know/care nothing about rockets but would like to make some money when the company is inevitably bought out by a larger space launch company like SpaceX.
Re: 3D-printed Aerospike Rocket Engine
#10I'm not sure this is really a good fit for a Kickstarter project. I love rockets/space/science/etc and fully support researching cheaper launch methods, but for most people to invest, they want to get something back. There are very few people who will/can donate to something on a purely altruistic basis. These guys aren't a charity and I can't even get a tax write-off. Pushing a button, while cool, is not really a re…
>Pushing a button, while cool, is not really a return on investment and only rocketry enthusiasts with extra money (a rare combination) will be willing to pay for that.
(1) There are a few of us. It feels good to be associated with something breaking ground in this field.
(2) This could be a demo, a proof-of-concept. Those are useful in later attracting investment, or at least attention which can be later translated into capital.