
New Zealand space launch is first from a private site - Thorondor
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-39971843
======
HappyKasper
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.

~~~
disordinary
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.

~~~
sand500
Question, doesnt ITAR prevent the team from being multinational?

~~~
ballooney
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.

~~~
sand500
Are all the engineers Non American citizens then? Wouldn't trying to hire
American citizens also be a nightmare with ITAR?

~~~
Inconel
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.

~~~
punkrex
While it's not exactly the same as ITAR, NZ already allows citizens of five
eye countries to get security clearances without any ties to NZ.

So I would imagine that from NZs perspective it wouldn't be a big deal to let
foreigners work on export controlled projects.

------
TallGuyShort
>> 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.

~~~
emiliobumachar
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.

~~~
chimere
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.

~~~
emiliobumachar
"rarely done"? Has it ever been 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])

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_Satellite_Launch_Vehicle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_Satellite_Launch_Vehicle)

------
jakozaur
As satellites are getting smaller, this may be a very efficient launch
vehicle.

Designed for small payload 150 - 220 kg for $4.9 million per launch.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(rocket)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_\(rocket\))

Frequent launches, so you can launch CubeSats as main payload, without waiting
for one of the big launch which has some extra space:
[http://spaceflight101.com/2016-space-launch-
statistics/](http://spaceflight101.com/2016-space-launch-statistics/)

~~~
baq
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.

~~~
valuearb
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.

------
nkoren
More detailed article here: [https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2017/05/rocket-
labs-electron...](https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2017/05/rocket-labs-
electron-inaugural-flight-new-zealand/)

Note that the rocket failed to reach orbit as intended.

~~~
doldge
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?

~~~
gliptic
It's only the turbopump that is electric. The efficiency of the turbopump is
counteracted by the need to bring batteries along.

As I understand it, the electric turbopump makes the plumbing simpler, but it
doesn't scale to large engines.

~~~
ballooney
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.

We live in exciting times.

~~~
msl
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].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocketdyne_F-1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocketdyne_F-1)

[2]
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/F-1_Engi...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/F-1_Engine_Test_Firing.jpg)

Edit: Hopefully clarified a little, and changed the link in [2] (from
[https://youtu.be/DKtVpvzUF1Y?t=125](https://youtu.be/DKtVpvzUF1Y?t=125)).

~~~
chimere
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].

[1] [http://imgur.com/HvtBYIi](http://imgur.com/HvtBYIi)

[2] [https://i.stack.imgur.com/9qIFO.jpg](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9qIFO.jpg)

------
MattPearce
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.

~~~
lukealization
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...

~~~
valuearb
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.

------
carlosgg
For Business Week's Hello World series, Ashley Vance did a report on Peter
Beck and Rocket Lab. 4 minutes.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKvZPpdGjiM&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKvZPpdGjiM&feature=youtu.be&list=PLMM0a7ZGnITr1ZgoLXG1CXAZ9JCH-L7an&t=824)

------
bbcbasic
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).

Wow a satellite in orbit for the price of a car.

~~~
vermontdevil
Maybe we all should chip in for a project on behalf of HN for a cubestat?

~~~
ehnto
Heck, count me in. I don't care if all it does is play Rick Astley tunes, a
crowdfunded HN cubesat would be super fun to be part of.

~~~
bbcbasic
Just need a few SF people to chip in a week's rent :-)

------
valuearb
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.

------
plugger
direct from Rocket Lab. [https://www.rocketlabusa.com/latest/rocket-lab-
successfully-...](https://www.rocketlabusa.com/latest/rocket-lab-successfully-
makes-it-to-space-2/)

