Rocket Lab opens engine facility in former Virgin Orbit headquarters
Rocket Lab has opened a new engine development center in a building that, six months earlier, was the headquarters of a former competitor, Virgin Orbit.
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RocketLab - Commercial Launch Company trying for Reuse
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Rocket Lab plans to resume Electron launches in late November
Rocket Lab expects to resume Electron launches in late November after concluding a “largely improbable” combination of events caused a September failure.
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Rocket Lab wins $515 million contract to build 18 satellites for U.S. government agency
Rocket Lab wins $515 million contract to build 18 satellites for U.S. government agency
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Appreciate the video, but it really turns me off to companies when I see these "hype videos" that blur the line with all the talk about what they are doing in the present tense and their grandiose plans, when in reality they've managed to launch a couple of cube sats.
Being able to launch anything successfully is very cool... don't make yourself sound like you are/have done more than you have...
They're talking about their business of satellite building, not launching. As satellite providers, they've had "components and subsystems on 1700 missions" so far, and it looks like they're getting into the business of building whole custom satellites.
What capability, exactly, is being exaggerated/misrepresented in that video?
They’ve built and launched some sizable science missions. Their constituents have collectively been part of a *sugar* ton of satellites. They’re actively building a number of satellites for Globalstar. They just won an SDA contract of similar size.
I don’t see anything in that video that overstates capability beyond the above notes.
What I said was the video "blurs the line with all the talk about what they are doing in the present tense and their grandiose plans." They just got a small SDA contract they haven't executed on yet...
The title of the video, however, is Building Satellites at Scale (present tense).
A few seconds in they again say they that are a "major space prime, designing, manufacturing, and operating" satellites for customers. In the next breath they refer to "flight proven platforms" and "constellations", and then say "we are building satellites that make it possible". (present tense).
So while they haven't said anything technically untrue, what plans they have and their proven capability are two different things, but they try to not sound like it.
Lots of players in different industries crow about things they haven't done yet. Like Bezos recently saying they are "'going to become the world's most decisive company across any industry,' he said. 'We're going to get really good at taking appropriate technology risks, making those decisions quickly. You know, being bold on those things. And having the right culture that supports that.'", when they've yet to do it... at least he used future tense.
Still would prefer you either crow about what you have done, or have some circumspection about what you will do, and then make it clear it's future plans....
Rocket Lab’s $515M contract is close to, if not in the top 10 largest commercial FFP contracts ever for satellite design/build/delivery.
Notes on big contracts:
- Few GEO satellites come even close to $500M. Viasat-3 is one of the exceptions (the contract is three sats at something like $650M each).
- Telesat Lightspeed was just awarded to MDA for $2B (with a TON of subsidies from both Canadia and Quebec).
- MDA’s contract a few years ago with Globlalstar is $330M. (Rocket Lab is supplying the platforms to MDA and reasonable logic would land their piece of that pie probably somewhere between 1/4-1/2 of the total CV.)
- SES mPower sats are ~$150M or so each and there’s 13 of them on the books right now (ordered over a few contracts). Feel free to do maths there.
- I may be missing something in there, but…that’s pretty much it for recent big awards. We need to start poking around the self-funded constellations like Starlink, Worldview, and Kuiper to get other commercial missions that cost Big Monies…and of course there’s plenty of state funded missions that could give a *sugar* about bottom line and come with much higher cost plus CVs.
If we jump in the pre-one web wayback machine to “before newspace”:
- Thales was awarded $2.1B for Iridium next (significantly subsidized by Le France).
- In the way-ago before that, Thales landed the original O3B contract; I suspect the 20 sats rack up to something on the order of $1.5-2B, again significantly Frog Subsidized.
- And again Thales from the before times—kicking off their period as Constellation Kings, Le France help subsidize the close-to-$1B Globalstar 2 constellation. There’s some other oddballs, like way way back (like, the 80’s and 90’s) when Intelsat used to buy GEOs in big batches of 5-10 or so…so that would be Big Monies too.
Which they are doing in the present tense. Go into their facilities right now and there are satellites sitting on stands next to racks of satellite parts waiting to be bolted onto satellites.
Check. They’re actively building more contracted [non-cubesat] satellites right now than any other mfg. You need to go to the Big 4 legacy primes (Maxar, Airbus, Thales, Boeing) to find bigger monetary backlogs.
Check. Literally doing that right now.
In other words, your whole beef here comes down to umbrage over Rocket Lab's editorial acumen.
No crowing from RL on this one.
Love the company and the humor, which is even more amusing with Beck’s comedic timing and delivery. 
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