34 thoughts on “Space Kiwis”

  1. I’d rate the chances of this getting off the ground as fairly high, they appear to have the financial backing (Tindall’s worth a few hundred million), and if we get our teeth stuck into something Kiwi’s usually push on with it, also there won’t be the political BS that cripples private US efforts.

    Foust mentions US export restrictions, but I doubt that anything required need be manufactured in the US.

    1. It appears some Kiwi congratulations are in order. That’s especially so as I am aware of no comparable effort underway in Australia, New Zealand’s traditional enemy. 🙂

      The influence of SpaceX on the basic design of the Electron is obvious as is also the case with the Firefly Alpha. Both have multi-engine 1st stages and second stages using a single engine of the same type, but with a vacuum-optimized bell. The Alpha departs from SpaceX orthodoxy in having its 1st stage engines equipped with vestigial bells to form a plug-nozzle aerospike. The Electron departs from SpaceX orthodoxy only in having a solid-fueled 3rd stage. If the Firefly Alpha can be considered a miniature Falcon 9, then the Rocket Labs Electron is a sub-miniature Falcon 9.

      In the case of both new rockets one wonders if incremental reusability is also on their respective builders’ agendas. I certainly hope so. In any event, I look forward to initial launches by both Firefly and Rocket Labs as quickly as they are able. It would be a very good thing if both firms could beat the initial Falcon Heavy into orbit. Here’s hoping.

      1. Australia is a Moon Treaty nation. Who would want to start a space commerce venture with that legal burden?

        It will be interesting to watch events in New Zealand.

        1. hehe.. as if that’s relevant.

          I’m sure when the Australian government becomes another “Uncle Sucker”, handing out $25M grants for what should be a purely commercial activity, we’ll have our own “entrepreneurs”. Until then, we have guys building rockets in the backyard like everyone else.

          1. Heh, I knew it! How far have you gotten so far with the micro launch system you’re building?

            I’m skeptical about the reported $25 million, I’ve only seen the claim from the Herald and Stuff, no announcement from the Government or coverage of the claimed grant on the TV news and can find none on the TV news web sites, which is weird, government grants that size are very rare, very controversial, and raise a lot of discussion, the Labour and Greens parties would be all over it in Parliament.

          2. Andrew, you’ve probably heard of ASRI and AUSROC. Geeks who can’t raise capital playing with rockets in the garage. I actually joined at one point, found out there was zero organizational momentum, and didn’t renew my membership.

          3. As long as you don’t go beyond Earth orbit it won’t matter. Its when you try to mine the Moon or grab a NEO that the fun will start.

        2. Australia is a Moon Treaty nation.

          Did not know that. I can see how that might make a difference.

      2. The influence of SpaceX on the basic design of the Electron is obvious as is also the case with the Firefly Alpha. Both have multi-engine 1st stages and second stages using a single engine of the same type, but with a vacuum-optimized bell.

        The Soyuz launch vehicle is not that different. Each engine on Soyuz does have multiple combustion chambers but that is an anacronism due to the fact the Soviets did not have the expertise to solve combustion instability in the large combustion chambers. Soyuz has 5 first stage engines and 1 second stage engine.
        If you look at it Soyuz and Zenit were probably the most cost effective launch vehicles in the market. Falcon 9 is likely cheaper still because it uses more recent manufacturing methods and techniques.

        1. Soyuz has some significant differences from Falcon 9 too, but you’re right to point out similarities. Another similarity is its use of horizontal vehicle and payload integration and a transporter-erector to stand it upright, empty, on the pad, a characteristic also shared by Proton. As for being cost effective, the Soyuz has far and away the longest production history of any launcher currently in use and more serial numbers have been built than any other design as well. Soyuz is a long way down the manufacturing efficiency, reliability and cost-reduction learning curves.

      3. Cheers for that.

        O/T
        you keep labeling me a leftist, after some introspection I’m comfortable to dismiss that charge, as I have a sense of humor.
        (Hey, that’s cleverly ambiguous!)

        1. you keep labeling me a leftist

          I call you that because you present that way. Your alleged libertarianism seems to be a mingely and unevenly applied coat of paint over a substructure consisting of a metric buttload of tired Leftist tropes, most of which show plainly through the thin spots.

          For whatever it may be worth, there are – or at least used to be – a fair number of people who self-identified as libertarian leftists. One of the more active libertarian newsletter publishers, organizers and rabble-rousers back in the day, the late Sam Konkin, even founded something he called the Movement of the Libertarian Left. Like too damned many of my friends, enemies, acquaintances and fellow travelers from those days, he’s gone now – died a decade ago.

          1. I call you that because you present that way. . . . a metric buttload of tired Leftist tropes, most of which show plainly through the thin spots.

            Specifically?

            I’m intrigued because I’m pretty sure genocide isn’t actually a right wing policy, if anything it’s more of a lefty thing to advocate.

          3. He calls himself a “moderate exterminationist” with regard to Muslims.

            On December 9, 1948, in the shadow of the Holocaust and in no small part due to the tireless efforts of Lemkin himself, the United Nations approved the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This convention establishes “genocide” as an international crime, which signatory nations “undertake to prevent and punish.” It defines genocide as:

            [G]enocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
            (a) Killing members of the group;
            (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
            (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
            (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
            (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

            http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007043

            I’m confident that extermination of Muslims qualifies.

            Wiki:
            Extermination or exterminate may refer to:

            Pest control, elimination of insects or vermin
            Genocide, the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group.

          4. Well, it literally only means completely wiping out a racial group. The other meanings are po-mo bullshit that have rendered the term meaningless. But if you want to accept that meaningless definition, then if a “religious” group has as part of its religion that it should wipe out all non-adherents of that religion, would that “genocide” be such a bad thing?

          5. As an aside, when I was in school many many decades ago, my teachers would tell me that there’s no such thing as “almost unique” that something was either unique or it wasn’t, the phrase “moderate extermination/ist” is to me irritating in the same way, you either exterminate pest or a people, or you don’t there’s no “almost”, no “moderate”.

            Looking at it that way “genocide” is arguably a lesser crime that “extermination”, or indistinguishable from it using your definition.

            If a “religious” group has as part of its religion that it should wipe out all non-adherents of that religion, would that “genocide” be such a bad thing?

            The Koran doesn’t advocate that, and only the tiniest fringe of Islamist nutters would advocate that.

        2. Thanks for the assist, Rand.

          Unmentioned in that definition is an implicit assumption that targeted populations have done nothing to deserve the violence visited upon them. By the literal letter of that definition, what the Allies did to the Germans and Japanese in WW2 would qualify as “genocide.” Of the five actions listed, we unequivocally subjected both the Germans and the Japanese to the first three.

          Unlike the Germans anent the Jews or the Japanese anent the Koreans and Chinese, the Germans and Japanese initiated aggressive war against their neighbors and then, further and further afield, against people who were not their neighbors. Both mobilized their entire civilian populations for war-related production. In response, the Allied powers did much the same.

          A number of things regarded as unspeakably wicked as recently as WW1, such as unrestricted submarine warfare against merchant shipping, became routine in WW2. The U.S., for example, which had vociferously condemned it in WW1, ordered immediate unrestricted submarine warfare against Japanese merchant shipping after the Pearl Harbor debacle. Except for the three surviving aircraft carriers, submarines were the only class of warship the U.S. had in the Pacific with both the range and striking power to be effective in Pearl Harbor’s aftermath.

          Mass slaughter of civilians was initiated and normalized, in WW2, by the Japanese – e.g., the Rape of Nanking – and by the Germans – e.g., the London Blitz. The Allies responded in kind and proved, in the end, much better at it than their opponents.

          The Israelis face, in the Palestinians, a society that, like the WW2-era Germans and Japanese, has organized itself on a total war footing. And the Palestinians have maintained this state of affairs for far longer than either the Germans or the Japanese were able.

          Given the de facto acceptance of the legitimacy of mass attacks on civilian populations that grew out of WW2 experience, the Israelis have chosen to be unreasonably gentle to an implacably hostile population that shows no smallest hint of reciprocity. Based on the norms of WW2, the Israelis would be fully justified in laying entire square miles of Gaza utterly to waste. Their opponents in numerous wars were certainly not bashful about expressing their intent to do this to Israeli cities, they simply lacked the means to accomplish their red dreams of slaughter.

          I am of the opinion that radical Islam continues its forward march because no Western power has been resolute enough to ignore the numerous and noisy left-wing apologists for monstrosity in the name of Islam and give Muslims a taste of what real total war looks like. The jihadis continue their advances because Western political elites, largely Leftist in worldview, have been unwilling, to this point, to inflict anywhere near the level of pain required to get Muslims everywhere to behave themselves.

          2. This thread is a huge sidetrack.

            Yup. I didn’t start it though. But, as with Israel, I invoke my right to self-defense.

            Pre-provocation, I was perfectly content to confine my contributions to this thread to the heaping of compliments onto Kiwis in general and Rocket Labs in particular for being so cutting edge. Allow me to resume.

            I seem to vaguely recall a couple fairly serious small orbital rocket building efforts in, I think, Sweden and Denmark. To return to the tenor of my initial remarks here, the Rocket Labs effort looks likely to reach orbit before any of the Scandihoovians. Even if the latter manage to do so later, New Zealand would still retain the record for the country with the smallest population to achieve an orbital launch from its territory with a vehicle designed by its own nationals and constructed largely using its indigenous industrial infrastructure. That seems not only a record deserving some full-throated national pride, but one Kiwis are likely to keep for a long time – assuming those patent-crazy Manxmen and Monagasques don’t have secret aces up their sleeves. 🙂

            Middle Earth rocks!

  2. Oh, and expect them to look for any opportunity to raise extra money, the rocket’ll probably be decked out in sponsors logos like a rally car.

          1. Very cool commercial. And it doesn’t even have any shots of the huge vintage plane collection Red Bull has built in Austria.

  3. I tipped a couple of Loose Cannons with Peter about a month ago. He showed me 3D printed engine hardware that was absolutley astonishing. Yes, they are going to make it.

      1. Considering how many orcs and cave trolls you guys could put in the field, I’m surprised the Aussies feel free to be so shirty. 🙂

  5. I see from the Rocket Labs web site that the launch site for their previous projects was Great Mercury Island. I assume that will be Electron’s launch site as well given that it is well-situated for launches to a broad range of azimuths and is not far, by water, from Rocket Labs’s HQ city, Auckland.

    Earth observation seems to be among the fastest growing applications of smallsat constellations. Such birds need to be placed in orbits ranging from fairly high inclination to polar. Great Mercury, being over seven degrees further south than Canaveral is north has a geographic advantage for such launches. Of established American launch ranges only Wallops is a couple degrees better situated for moderately high inclination missions. For very high inclination and/or polar orbital missions, Both Vandenberg and Kodiak are competitive. As Rocket Labs is both a Kiwi and a Yankee firm (“It’s a non-dairy creamer and a floor wax!”), perhaps it will acquire another similarity to SpaceX by eventually launching from multiple facilities. It already coincidentally mimics SpaceX in having its principal launch site cheek-by-jowl with a wildlife refuge.

    Another advantage of Great Mercury Island is that launches from there are least likely to draw unwanted attention from marauding Nazgul as the rockets won’t overfly any part of Mordor. 🙂

    1. Cameron is shooting his Avatar sequels down here so I expect the Nazgul and Orc’s to fade out a little, we’ll be trying to maintain good relations with the Na’vi, even though they have this really weird religion.

      1. Hey, if that microwave space drive thingy actually works out, you Kiwis should have a leg up on joining the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne. You’ve already got so much experience with alien races.

  6. They want to charge $4.9 million (US?) per flight. The payload is 110 kg. That’s $45k per kilogram or $20k per pound. That’s twice what Firefly Alpha is charging ($8-9 million for 400 kg). They must be anticipating rapid integration and launch, getting your bird to orbit fast as the primary payload.

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