Rocket Lab's engine has electric turbos and 3D-printed primary components

Re:Rocket Lab's engine has electric turbos and 3D-printed pr... by olympus on Saturday April 18, 2015 @04:33PM (#9400903)

SpaceX lists the launch of a Falcon 9 to be $61M. But they can put 13,150 kg into LEO. Rocketlab's is much smaller, only sending 100 kg into LEO. So a Falcon 9 is ~12x more expensive, but delivers more than 125x payload to orbit. Plus you can send stuff into GEO with a Falcon 9, but Rocketlab doesn't have a chance with one their size.

So Rocketlab comes out sounding like a worse deal in the cost/payload ratio, but if Rocketlab can deliver on their launch frequencies then they can capture the market of smaller companies having to buy a secondary spot on a large rocket, and then wait for the whims of the other people to be ready to launch. The smaller company can fork over $5M and have the #1 priority and only payload on the rocket.

SpaceX source: http://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities

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Re:Rocket Lab's engine has electric turbos and 3D-printed pr... by agildehaus on Saturday April 18, 2015 @05:59PM (#9401229)

Won't that $61M figure get slashed by a tremendous amount once they achieve re-usability?

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Re:Rocket Lab's engine has electric turbos and 3D-printed pr... by binoyxj on Sunday April 19, 2015 @04:41AM (#9402434)

The cost is expected to go down from $56M to just 5-$7M http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-04-15/how-huch-doe...

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Re:Rocket Lab's engine has electric turbos and 3D-printed pr... by mbertschler on Saturday April 18, 2015 @08:13PM (#9401565)

SpaceX will achieve reusability in multiple steps, first recovering the first stage, then the second stage and so on. The cost will go down, but probably not very soon and not so fast.

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