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Relativity Space has gone from printing money and rockets to doing what, exactly? (arstechnica.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/spaceflight

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Oof. They went from being a dubious tech startup to... BO2 without the infinite money drip?

I'm glad they're still working on reuse, but I'm not sure what differentiates them anymore vs SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, and Stoke. All 5 of them are working on (at least) 1st stage reuse. And they all make their own engines.

Relativity was very well funded based on what turned out to be snake oil. There are a lot of armchair engineers fist pumping about being right about that. Now that they're indistinguishable from other companies, why would that investment continue? There are still too many companies working on launch.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Maybe, if they were smart, they used the snake oil round to invest in hardware and real engineering. Now the investors can't simply cash out. They either need to hold and hope, or sell at a loss, and either way the hardware remains?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

But if their initial engineering and infrastructure investments were into ~~welding~~ 3d printing that turned out to be a dead end...