Rocket Lab is about to win the small satellite launch space race
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In January, Rocket Lab reached orbit for the first time with the second launch of its Electron vehicle.
Rocket Lab
Life is pretty good for Rocket Lab and its founder Peter Beck right now. With two test flights of its Electron rocket completed in the last 10.5 months, the company says it will move into commercial operations later this month. The 14-day launch window for the “It’s Business Time” mission, carrying two private payloads, opens on April 20.
In an interview, Beck said Rocket Lab hopes to fly eight missions in 2018 and reach a monthly launch cadence by the end of the year. The company’s initial test flight in May 2017 failed to reach orbit, but a second flight in January of this year was almost entirely successful. Rocket Lab will become the first of a number of small-satellite launch companies to begin serving customers.
As a result of that January test flight, Beck said customers have responded. “Over the years, companies in this market have come and gone, and at some point in time, customers said, ‘show me when it works,'” Beck said. “Now we have proof that it works. Since January, the sales team has just been going flat out. It’s fairly obvious when you have a pent-up market, and you have a solution, life becomes good.”
Already this year, Rocket Lab has shipped 30 engines out of its factory in California, and it plans to manufacture 100 during the entire year. These Rutherford engines are small, with a dry weight of only about 35kg, and they produce a modest thrust of 5,400 pounds. But they can be 3D printed relatively quickly, with much of the structure completed within 24 hours, Beck said. Nine of them are combined for the first stage of the Electron rocket.
A reliable service
Asked about his plans over the next decade, Beck said his primary goal is to truly become an efficient and reliable provider of small satellite launches. The Electron offers delivery of up to 150kg to a 500km Sun-synchronous orbit at a price of about $5 million per launch. There is no comparable, dedicated service at this price point, although there are dozens of companies who are in various stages of developing rockets to serve this burgeoning market.
Beck has no ambitions to build a larger rocket, at least not right now. Rather, he wants to make space affordable to more entrepreneurs and their ideas. “I can clearly state that we’re not building a larger launch vehicle,” he said. “I think we’re in a sweet spot. If we need to grow it to meet a market demand, we can. But really, for us, it’s executing to get down to a reliable service. Although that’s not a great headline like going to Mars, for the purposes of how that much can affect everyday people on the ground, this can have a huge, huge effect.”
The biggest lesson Beck said he has learned is that the rocket business isn’t just about rockets. About one-third of the challenge of reaching space is the rocket, one-third is regulatory, and one-third is the logistics, such as ground support systems. His advice? “Don’t build your own launch site,” he said with a laugh. This was a joke, but it rings true—it took a long time to get all of the permitting and financing for Rocket Lab to build launch facilities on Mahia Peninsula on the east coast of New Zealand.
But now, he added, the payoff will come. With no other launch providers anywhere close, the remote Mahia site has no range issues. And the company has a license to launch as frequently as every 72 hours for the next 30 years. “This is absolutely critical for our business strategy,” he said.
Tech
via Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com
April 12, 2018 at 09:31AM