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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

You don’t generally make the news for doing things others have done before you. Don’t get me wrong, this company is cool and their success is super exciting, but I see no reason for them to get any press coverage outside of specialty media.

SpaceX was pretty quiet too when they were first starting out, and when they’re all over the news now it’s generally because they’re doing something new.

I doubt nukes have anything to do with it. The Falcon 9 would be an atrociously bad ICBM.

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RocketLab's doing incredibly innovative things. They're using an entirely new kind of rocket engine power cycle. This is the first new power cycle invented since the Full Flow Staged Combustion Cycle in the 1960s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_pump-fed_engine

They're using entirely 3d printed rocket engines and also full carbon composite rocket bodies - another first for a rocket of this scale.

Where it comes to "doing things others haven't done before you" they're doing an amazing job. SpaceX is doing great but nothing close to this.

don't know why this was down voted, it was informative. Thanks.

Agree with everything you said, except

>SpaceX is doing great but nothing close to this.

This isn't just false, it's unnecessary. It takes nothing away from RocketLab to acknowledge that SpaceX has also done "incredibly innovative things," such as propulsive first stage landings.

> This is the first new power cycle invented since the Full Flow Staged Combustion Cycle in the 1960s

Yes, battery pump engines aware new for this scale of a rocket. No, it’s not the first new cycle since the 1960s.

Ok, I'm curious. What rocket engine power cycle was invented between the Full Flow Staged Combustion Cycle (1962) and the Electric Pump-Fed Cycle (2010)?

A new combustion cycle and new construction techniques are really cool, but nothing I’d expect average people to care about, thus nothing I’d expect to be reported on outside of specialty media.

It's a new country launching a rocket though. That seems like reasonably big news to me.

Not front page, stop the press news, but still news.

Technically, New Zealand's a "country", but to call it a "new country" is pushing it. It's a cultural appendage to the U.K. and the U.S. West Coast, with a bit of Hong Kong thrown in. It's the unitary state that never joined Australia in 1901, being listed in the Australian Constitution as one of its 7 candidate states. It would have joined the Australian Federation if refrigerated shipping hadn't have been invented a year before, meaning they could ship their meat products to London instead of relying on a guaranteed open market at Sydney. Meat and other primary production is NZ's main industry, what with the banks and most other large corps being owned by their larger Australian counterparts. The only other industry in NZ of note is "Human Arrivals", which not only includes Tourism and International Education but also Immigration (despite being on the country's capital rather than current account). Of course, New Zealanders refer to Australia as "the 52nd state", so calling Australia a "new country" is also pushing it.

I'm pretty sure that toomanybeersies means new country as in, "a country from which an orbital rocket has never been launched before", rather than "a country which is new".

Edit: Also, as far as I can tell, agriculture including meats is only 8% of New Zealand's economy. Hardly the "main industry". Like most high-income industrialized economies, most of the economy is in services.

Whoops, I should've read that phrase "new country" in context.

As for your edit about NZ's economy being mainly "services", if you subtract industries owned/controlled by Australia/US/UK (e.g banks, TV content), re-apportion industries servicing the Ag/Meat/Milk/Wool/Forestry/Fisheries industry as being part of that industry, and do similar for industries servicing "Human Arrivals" (e.g. house construction being part of Immigration/International Ed), then you end up with the two big drivers of New Zealand's economy: Human Arrivals and Primary Production. They don't fit into the official categories in the govt's accounting system, but they're the real engines of NZ's economy. The rest are just hangers-on.

The fact that certain industries have a lot of foreign ownership doesn't mean that they're not part of the actual economy. They produce in NZ, they employ in NZ, they buy inputs in NZ - they're part of NZ's GDP economy.

And the rest of your statement makes no sense. Some tertiary industries service primary industries, but most don't. Some housebuilding and education services immigrants, but the vast majority isn't, and regardless of that fact, it still counts as part of the local GDP. Services are no less "real" than resource industries.

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