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Comment by panick21_ | Hacker News Reader

Before they ever launched a rocket they were a primarily American company. That literally just a fact.

It was created by somebody from New Zealand and a lot of early operations was in New Zealand nobody is denying that.

That is false. They were a purely NZ operation launching sub-orbital rockets before they got into DARPA contracts. What you meant to say is "Before they ever launched Electron", and I'm pretty sure that is false too, they weren't "primarily" American, the majority of the workforce was in NZ until years after that.

SpaceX has most staff in California.

It's a Texas company.

Plenty of ”American” financial entities are registered to a holding company abroad. Does that make the company not American because a holding company abroad exists?

I'm 99% sure that they went to the US venture to raise money to build Electron and that's when they made the US company that primary and the NZ company the subsidiary.

Yes you are correct. That's one meaning of primary. I just think it's misleading by the more colloquial meaning to say "primarily a US company" when AFAIK basically all the engineering happened in the NZ subsidiary of what was initially more-or-less a USA shell company. Engine manufacture was the first thing they moved to the USA that I know of, after one or two launches IIRC.

Aside, Peter Beck has said (probably at a talk I was at in 2014) that they initially designed and built Electron in NZ so that they would be importing restricted technology into the USA, to minimise ITAR problems, which only covers exports.

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