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Comment by powertry | Hacker News Reader

Are they pushing stuff to geo-synch orbit? Thats where the big business seems to lie. I thought the article was really vague and surprised it did not talk about Space X and other competitors.

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They're targeting 500km LEO. Here are some specs from their homepage[0]:

  Paylod: 110kg
  Orbit: 500km, Sun synchronous
  Stages: 3
         1st stage: 9x "Rutherford"[1] RP/LOX engine
         2nd stage: 1x "Rutherford" RP/LOX engine
         3rd stage: Solid engine)
  Cost: $4.9M

[0] http://www.rocketlabusa.com/

[1] http://www.rocketlabusa.com/about-us/propulsion/rutherford/

Unfortunate they provide even less information to calculate the plausibility of claimed payloads and orbits then SpaceX. And we all know that SpaceX changed its specs and claims several times, and that none of those specs provide a plausible rocket, if you recalculate it.

I hope Rocket Lab will do better. I just asked them for the missing specs like empty and loaded mass of each stage, maximum and minimum ISP of each stage, maximum and minimum thrust of each stage, burn time of each stage, inclination of launch site, payload, inclination, apogaeum and perigaeum of or proposed orbits.

They're going for very small launches to LEO; they're probably targeting small scientific (NASA/ESA etc) payloads more than anything else. They're not really competing with Arianespace, SpaceX etc, whose major business involves launching multi-tonne payloads to GTO.

Correct, but both SpaceX and Arianespace have rideshares on their large launch vehicles. The Electron is competing with those rideshare opportunities. The current market rate for getting a 1U cubesat to LEO is about $100,000. They will also be competing with NanoRacks.

My impression is that rideshares can be fairly restrictive in terms of timing, available orbits, and so forth. This seems like it could be useful for small research payloads with odd requirements; not a huge market, but not non-existent. The ESA designed the Vega for smaller-than-Soyuz-2 payloads; this would seem to slot in nicely under the Vega.

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