Should be noted that while the article calls Rocket Lab a US firm operating in NZ, it's been an NZ firm since its first day, and only went to the US for funding.
Exciting news not only because it shows commercial spaceflight is becoming global, but because Rocket Lab has one of the most ambitious launch schedules out there.
Yeah, It's officially a US firm with a NZ subsidiary.
But any project like this is a multinational effort - while all the engineering, design, manufacture, operations, etc. are in NZ there is nowhere near enough space expertise located here so the team itself is very multinational.
I've done space projects with US companies and so am fully marinated in ITAR processes. In answer to your question: No, you can get around ITAR by just being careful about what information is imported and exported to and from the US. If there was a US engineering office and an NZ engineering office and all the engineering effort was evenly distributed among the two, it would be a nightmare as you'd be 'exporting US technology' constantly, but if all the important stuff is being done in NZ and very little know-how has to go back-and forth across the virtual border with the US then it's more manageable (still involves lawyers and experts though). It doesn't matter than the US owns it financially, it's the transfer of knowledge and stuff across the border (virtual and real) that is the hard bit. As this is basically a NZ company which had to do a paperwork fudge in order to accept US investment, ITAR is not such a problem.
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 recruit very high level talent.
I'm at SpaceX, which is a much larger company than Rocket Lab, and I can probably count on two hands the number of non-US Persons working here.
I'm fairly certain that Peter Beck, Rocket Lab's founder and CEO, who is a Kiwi, lives in Socal now.
>while all the engineering, design, manufacture, operations, etc. are in NZ
I'm not sure how Rocket Lab splits design/manufacturing but they just moved into an pretty sizable facility in Hungtington Beach, CA a few months ago and I know for a fact that they have engineers and technicians on staff there.
Turns out I was mistaken. If you look at their careers website (https://rocketlabusa.com/careers/positions/) it seems as though the engines are being designed and/or built in California and the rocket and software is being done in NZ.
>> 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, but this is the first time I can remember I've read about a launch so far from the equator.
edit: Wow - my mental image of where Orlando and Kazakhstan were relative to the equator is WAY off. Orlando sits at about 29* N, and Kazakhstan is about 40* N at best - further than the site in New Zealand. I guess that's just about as far south as the US and Soviet Union could practically get, respectively. Although I'm still curious about the optimal launch site for polar orbits.
Helps to be near the equator for two reasons:
1) the earth's rotation is added to your speed, so it takes less energy to get to orbital velocity. Further away from the equator, the less you're moving in the same direction as earth.
2) geosynchronous orbit is a very popular destination and requires the satellite to be at a very specific height directly over the equator. Starting at the equator makes this a whole lot easier.
Neither of those apply to polar orbits. Going south is just as easy no matter where you are.
Location essentially doesn't matter for polar orbits, other than for safety purposes. (Technically, most polar orbits are not quite 90 degrees, and thus get some benefit from the Earth's rotation, which is greater when closer to the equator. But for high-inclination orbits, the cosine losses mean that this is a pretty marginal effect.)
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.
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.
That's right. The most common polar orbits, sun synchronous orbits (SSO), are actually inclined at ~97 deg from the equator. This means that they're moving slightly opposite of the earth's rotation, requiring it to be more than cancelled out.
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.
Searching for "polar launch" found nothing. (There's actually a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle [1], but it does not launch from the poles [see Launch History at 1])
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.
Their risk is if SpaceX uses re-usable Falcon 9s to up their launch cadence and clean up their 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.
One fairly interesting note there is that the electric engine that propels the rocket runs at 95% efficiency, in contrast to the 50% efficiency of the standard gas engines of the larger rocket.
Is anyone familiar with A) why this is, and B) why the larger companies aren't investigating the use of these electric engines more? Is it too costly/difficult to do at a larger scale?
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 engines on the Electron, that the power density advantages of a turbopump tend to asymptotically tail off. Also, they require a lot of expertise to design, compared to almost any other kind of pump. There are turbopumps and turbopumps, though, and here I will paste in an HN comment of mine from a number of years ago:
"""
There are three kinds of rocket engine cycle (well, there are maybe more but these are the three that have been flown historically). The Expander Cycle, the Staged Combustion Cycle, and the Gas Generator cycle. I'll mention the last two.
Merlin, as the article mentions, is an example of a Gas Generator cycle. In this cycle, you take off a little bit of fuel and oxidiser to burn outside the main combustion chamber, to generate some hot energetic gases that you can exhaust over a turbine. This spins the turbine up, which is connected to a shaft with a compressor on the other end. The compressor increases the pressure of the propellents so that they can be injected into the main combustion chamber. This assembly (turbine, shaft, compressor) is called the turbopump. It's necessary because the engines require very high flow rates to get the thrust they need, and that has to be at a high pressure - higher than the pressure of the combusting gases inside the combustion chamber, else you wouldn't be able to inject it!
Back to the bleed-off to drive the turbine. You usually don't want a perfect stoichiometric mix of fuel and oxidiser for this, or even close, because it generates extraordinary hot gases that no turbine would last long in (The turbines are spinning at many tens of thousands of RPM usually so would be subject to much higher forces than the actively cooled walls of the main combustion chamber). For this reason you usually have a large imbalance of one propellent to the other to keep the temperature down. Usually you run with excess fuel, or 'fuel-rich', as the opposite - oxidiser rich - means you have hot oxidising gases which are harder on the metallurgy. I do know of some russian exceptions to this, though, where fuel rich would have left sooty deposits in the plumbing (The materials science employed in the turbines was apparently so witchcraft that when the US got intelligence of oxidiser-rich turbine precombustors, they thought is was deliberate counterintelligence from the russians to get them to waste billions researching the impossible). The gas generator cycle, as the article mentions, dumps this turbine exhaust overboard separately. The problem with this is that there's a load of uncombusted fuel in this exhaust, which you're just wasting, and this hits your rocket performance - the Specific Impulse ( I_{sp} ), as you're not getting as much bang out of a given mass of fuel as you could.
The answer to this is the Staged Combustion Cycle, where you also inject the exhaust of the turbine into the combustion chamber to finish off combustion. The performance of these engines is higher but the thermodynamic balance to design a working system is a greater challenge, and some of the engineering is a bit harder too. Staged Combustion engines are mostly russian, although the Space Shuttle Main Engines are a US-design example of Staged combustion.
"""
Staged combustion engines are extremely efficient and on a big engine no electric pump system will even touch them, unless there is some materials-science breakthrough that will allow us one or two orders of magnitude improvement in flex density in electromagnetic materials. Electric pumps will probably remain in their niche for small engines and satellites.
I do think that small turbopumps are worth further research, although I don't know if the market needs higher performance small engines over more cheaper-to-produce small engines, but certainly there was fascinating work done in the uk in the 70s with tiny turbopumps (about the size of a coke can) that ran at hundreds of thousands of rpm, with a power of megawatts, and compressors very cleverly shaped to run sustainably far beyond the cavitation point of the fluids, which is usually the point at which you can't pump anymore, in traditional pump design literature. In combination with an expander cycle you could probably produce some extremely high performance, simple, small rocket engines. Maybe.
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 nozzle [2].
This is called film cooling, and SpaceX actually does use it on their second stage engine, the Merlin vacuum variant (MVac). You can see the beautiful exhaust plenum wrapping around the nozzle [1].
This isn't used for the regeneratively-cooled portion of the nozzle, but for the large radiatively-cooled nozzle extension, visible here [2].
I read a paper some people wrote on the subject. Take away is battery powered pumps can be built as big, or importantly as small as you want. Turbo pumps on the other hand don't scale down well very well. Batteries win at the size of the electron rocket.
I would not be surprised if someone starts work on a larger electric rocket engine because the difference in efficiency is not huge. But however electric is a far simpler and potentially more reliable design. If electrics are super reliable the difference in insurance costs might tip things in their favor[1].
[1] Trade 1:10 chance of losing your sat vs a 1:50 chance for 25% higher launch costs? There are companies that would readily take the latter option.
I remember reading about a plan to use an actual V12 vehicle engine to power turbopumps at one point - supposedly simpler and more reliable than trying to drive it from another turbine. Can't find it on the internet now.
Efficiency alone is not sufficient to be an advantage - energy density and reliability are other factors. If a 50-lb battery at 95% efficiency produces the same energy as 40 lbs of fuel at 50% efficiency, the battery is at a disadvantage.
"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
The article is confusing, the Atea-1 was for 2009 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.
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.
I'm in a similar position to yourself here. Would love to apply as I think working on something essentially similar to a space program would be incredible, but as someone who values days off and a work-life balance, I cannot commit to that level of employment.
It's a shame RocketLab have adopted such a SpaceX-esque policy of employment. Surely it must be possible to build a rocketry company where employees work only 40 hour weeks...
You realize if you sleep 8 hours a night, you have 112 hours in a week. With careful organization it's possible to work 60 each week for long periods and still maintain some balance.
Of course if you have kids, it's way harder. But I can get close to 60 hours a week by working 50 hours Monday though Friday, and then half days Saturday/Sunday. Still time for workouts, games, hikes, fun. The reality is school events/conferences will interfere, so 50-55 is probably more reasonable long term.
It's all in what you want to accomplish in life. To me my work is my hobby so I don't need time for others.
A really good friend of mine moved there from Welly. He works insane hours, but he says her loves it. The day of the launch, he was up since 3am and he'd need some Red Bull for the party.
I wonder about the trendy startup high pressure environment applied to safety critical engineering areas... to an outsider, it seems like Red Bull fueled 3AM sessions wouldn't combine well with rockets.
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.
>Of course, it all depends on how passionate you are about space.
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?
I remember the bittersweet interviews of many Apollo program engineers. That work cost many marriages but, in the end, they sent people to walk on another world and brought them back, forever changing the way we see ourselves in the universe.
To do hard things is hard. I won't say this specific job requires 12-hour days - that's probably because this is such a capital-intensive endeavor. There aren't many hard deadlines when launching to LEO.
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).
What I like about the Electron is it's 9 engine booster. I think the Falcon 9 has shown with modern engine management systems that large number of engines can be as safe, if not more so given redundancies. Building massive boosters should be easier as well, given you don't have to scale up individual engines as large. I still don't know why the SLS didn't dump the solid rockets and go with a 9 engine configuration and reusability instead of the 4 engine disposable design.
The biggest problem with Electron is that it's disposable. Rocket Labs isn't NASA, and the Electron isn't the SLS, getting funded regardless of cost. Electron is launching in a competitive market.
Falcon 9 launch cadence will increase and it's already much cheaper per pound. Some customers can't piggyback on Falcon because they need a custom or polar orbit, so they'll choose Electron even at a higher cost. But there other competitors are coming in the small payload space, they all have seen that reusability can work, and some have to be building reusable designs.
Rocket Lab looks like it could be out in front for serving these small payloads. But to stay there I'm betting they'll need a re-usable Electron, and fairly soon.
Exciting news not only because it shows commercial spaceflight is becoming global, but because Rocket Lab has one of the most ambitious launch schedules out there.