There’s a difference between a company that has had 33 successful launches to orbit and a company that has had zero successful launches to orbit. Relativity will likely do fine, but they have not proven yet that they can put something into orbit. RocketLab has, ~33 times. There’s something to be said for the learnings that RocketLab has gone through with electron and relativity lacks.

No less fantasy than Neutron. Relativity is running engines for Terran R right now. And Rocket Labs?

To an extent. If, for example, the funding drops to a half, and you get three times more efficient, ...

Buying a service from someone cheaper that you can source that service elsewhere is not actually a subsidy.

Almost no one has gotten to orbit on their first launch. They even said the mission would be considered a success if they made it to Max Q

I'm sure. But there is some logic in separating sites and putting Space Force near major contractors. Although Huntsville is probably a target anyway. I suppose they have space since they moved the school. But I don't get paid enough to make those decisions.

But the Republican Reps and Senators were advocating for Huntsville, and his coup.

Almost all Falcon 9 launches are reusable, in that case you only have ~16-17 tonnes to LEO and the cost per kilogram is similar, as discussed in the article. A bit less payload, a bit cheaper per launch. Booking an expendable Falcon 9 flight costs more.

What will be the price of an hypothetical terran R ?

Payload is a thing but price/kg is key. If you can send 20T to LEO but they only have 12T of cargo... You're going to go for the cheaper launcher.

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Wouldn't a fantasy imply they have nothing to show? Aeon R engines are being built and tested. And not getting to orbit on the first launch is far from a bad thing in spaceflight, very few rockets work the first time. They made it past Max-Q, even past MECO and stage separation, Falcon 1 didn't get that far during its maiden launch.

All US military space ops were run out of colorado springs for decades, it will cost billions to move it. And yeah trump 100% ordered it.

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JWST is a scientific instrument, not a pretty picture taker. If you want the science, here is the paper. it doesn't have the pretty pictures, because that's not the point.

Terran R is a fantasy. Relativity didn’t get to orbit with their first rocket. They have another 3-5 years of learning ahead

Because 99% of people hasn't heard of Peter Beck.

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> If Neutron is priced at $50M for a 15 tonne LEO payload, that's $3.3/kg.

It is $50M for the 13 tonne configuration.

> SpaceX has largely recouped their development costs so they can afford to compete with Rocketlab on price.

SpaceX has invested at least 10 billions in Starship, including Raptor, getting funding is getting harder and it is likely that its commercial operations don't start this year.

SpaceX is not lowering prices until they don't have other option.

A nicely sintered landing pad would do the trick.

Berms / shields around landing sites are worth looking at.

There's a big market on the government side.

Defense contracts need multiple suppliers for redundancy and NASA is also very far along in its move towards contracting multiple suppliers for all launches (outside of SLS size payloads).

RL has an advantage of already having relationships with both and a long enough launch history that they can bank on reliability.

And while I want SpaceX to succeed I wouldn't call Falcon 9 last generation until Starship successfully delivers a payload to orbit.

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I'm really rooting for them. SpaceX is in desperate need of competition.

• If Neutron is priced at $50M for a 15 tonne LEO payload, that's $3300/kg.
• Falcon 9 launches 17.4 tonnes to LEO (when landing on ASDS, from wikipedia), priced at $67M, which is $3800/kg

This is awesome. The best part about this is that it will cause SpaceX to lower their prices. The purchase price of a Falcon9 launch did not decrease significantly after they achieved reusability, they just increased their profit margins. Gwynne Shotwell was quoted somewhere saying "we spent a billion developing this and we want to recover those costs" (paraphrased). They can do that if no competitor forces them to drop costs.

However, things will be tough for Rocketlab. SpaceX had the benefit of being the only game in town with a reusable rocket, so they got lots of profit. This article claims that Neutron will cost $25 million per launch but be priced at $50M, for a 50% profit margin. But, I suspect F9 has similiar costs. SpaceX has largely recouped their development costs so they can afford to compete with Rocketlab on price. If Rocketlab engages in the price war, they will never recover their development costs.

Rocketlab claims that the biggest cost is the expendable upper stage, and I suspect the same is true for SpaceX. When Starship shows up, what are these other launch providers going to do? How will they make enough money with their partially reusable rockets to fund a fully reusable competitor to Starship?

Edit: I meant to put a $k in my money numbers like $3.3k/kg, my apologies. Changed it to $3300/kg