
Rocket Lab Reveals Secret Engine and “Kick Stage” for the Electron Rocket - curtis
https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a15854376/rocket-lab-engine-kick-stage-electron-rocket/
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jernfrost
Not sure I get the significance. Isn't this a part that satellites would
contain themselves in other cases? So the benefits of this is satellite makers
don't have to add a part themselves to move themselves into orbit. Instead
Rocket Lab gives them a standard part which will take care of precise orbit
placement?

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dogma1138
Not all bus manufacturers make their own engines quite often they would offer
different options based on the specific station keeping and in orbit
maneuvering requirements of the client.

There are also a few startups that develop solutions these days for extending
the life of satellites in orbit by essentially grabbing it and using their own
engine for station keeping.

While I don’t know how much room there is in the market for more engines I
would say that likely as long as you can have any usecase specific advantages
you can probably find a customer.

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TeMPOraL
Old article :(. I had hoped that by now, we'd have some details about the last
stage - like, what are the engine's parameters and what fuel it uses exactly.

Still, great to see this happening. Electron fills an important niche in the
launch market.

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versteegen
I'm guessing you already know this, but speculation is that it's Rocket Lab's
patented thixotropic monopropellant, VLM, developed when they were working on
propulsion tech for missiles and sounding rockets, before they started
Electron

[https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLab/comments/7sg0vn/rocket_la...](https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLab/comments/7sg0vn/rocket_lab_launch_also_tested_new_kick_stage/dt4jegj/)

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igravious
You know it'd be great if governments around the world started a patent pool
of space-related tech in order to kick start the Space Age.

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TeMPOraL
I'm usually pretty supportive of government involvement, when it comes to
fixing up the failures of the market. But for now, I think government should
stay away from space industry. The market there _isn 't broken_ (yet). Nobody
is preventing competition through holding critical pieces of technology;
companies are innovating different ways to reduce launch costs and increase
reliability. The overall atmosphere is that of friendly competition towards
the same goal, not cut-throat business. Governments don't have much to fix
there.

(Some funding and less strings attached would be nice, though. For instance,
NASA could be orders of magnitude more useful if the US Congress would stop
micromanaging them and treating them as a large jobs program.)

Space Age is happening by itself, it's almost at the critical mass now - I
hope nobody tries to _interrupt_ that.

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simonh
It depends what you mean by 'stay away'. If you mean in the form of
interfering by skewing the commercial incentives, yes ok, but we're nowhere
near the point where current space technology development can survive without
government support. I don't mean in the form of subsidies, those can be
retired, but in the form of investment and contracts for commercial services.
SpaceX launch manifest would collapse without NASA contracts and in fact the
company wouldn't exist in anything like it's current form without them. The
military contracts they're getting are very valuable too.

There has been talk recently, in military and security circles, that reusable
rocket technology could give the US a decade or more lead over their rivals,
in terms of technology and space infrastructure. It's possible the military
and security contracts SpaceX are starting to get are part of a deliberate
effort to funnel funds into this new technology. You could view that as
interference, but equally you could view it as a well funded client supporting
a supplier, much in the way Apple funnels funds into suppliers to bootstrap
new technology for their products.

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TeMPOraL
Yeah, I meant heavy-handed skewing of incentives. Government contracts are
absolutely crucial at this point, I agree.

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moh_maya
so, if I understood this correctly, this would allow satellites to reduce
weight by not carrying fuel required for orbit raising / changing maneuvers..,
that would otherwise increase the weight & complexity of the satellite
payload?

Sort of like, instead of releasing the satellite in GTO, from where the
satellite expends fuel / reaction mass to reach GSO, in this case, the rocket
uses a tiny secondary engine to move the satellite to the GSO?

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olympus
I suspect that you can save some weight if you have multiple satellites going
to the same orbit, or if you have a chain of satellites that can be dropped
off into similar orbits as the kick stage can be stopped and started several
times. But while each individual satellite doesn’t need an engine, you now
have to launch an engine and fuel capable of moving a batch of satellites
together, so it’s not like you’re eliminating the weight entirely.

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TeMPOraL
A serious satellite will still need an engine and some fuel for
stationkeeping. But the extra stage would be useful for dropping various
cubesats at different orbits, which is what I think is Electron's target
market.

