8 thoughts on “Vector”

    1. I haven’t been following them. It it possible that the AF contract put them in a put up or shut up mode?

  2. I wonder if this had anything to do with it. NASA has a long history of destroying startup launch businesses by saying that it was going to compete with them. Not in those words, of course; it just announces that it is developing a new launch vehicle, and signs up the entire market for free rides. Investment in startup businesses immediately vanishes. They did it with X-34 (twice), X-33, and now SLS. And the really galling part is that they never actually develop a new launch vehicle.

    This one is especially bizarre. “NASA’s Space Launch System will be the most powerful rocket we’ve ever built,” they brag on their website. So they’re signing up…smallsats to ride on it. Why?

    2. Doubt it. SpaceX’s cube sat launch proposition is 1E6 more times credible than the threat of SLS, which should be obvious to anybody remotely involved in the industry.

  3. Watch one of the shows about Spacex’s development of their line of rockets and listen when they tell how close they were to the edge a couple of times. This will not be an isolated failure. Nor the last.

  4. As a (minor) investor in Vector, I’m limited in what I can say here. But I can emphatically state that there’s no hint of any impropriety (financial, HR, or whatever) involved in Jim’s departure.

    When boards and CEOs disagree, the board always wins.

    1. Over on Arocket, Paul Breed says that the problem was that Jim was prioritizing appearances over actual technical progress to…well…if not snow, then to impress investors. If so, not necessarily improper, but not good management.

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