Companies like this make me wish I had the gall to sell snake oil to venture capitalists.
What a classic recipe. It's a YC company with a McKinsey CEO.
Companies like this make me wish I had the gall to sell snake oil to venture capitalists.
What a classic recipe. It's a YC company with a McKinsey CEO.
I dunno. A lot of people messed up. Across the board. A successful landing doesn't change any of the previous failures that led to NASA pulling the plug.
Flight software, test planning, program management, root cause analysis, systems engineering / requirements management, material sourcing, simulations, etc.
The thruster firing show is fun
Good riddance!
Welp. Hopefully Blue keeps the pedal to the metal and still launches something this year. I feel bad for the Rocket Lab team.
Not if the probes can't slow down on the other end! Their delta V is important, too.
What about call Boeing a "committed partner" after they fail at something?
NASA should put out an RFI now for the next gen of commercial crew going to commercial stations in 2030+. Given that Blue Origin is working on a capsule and Rocket Lab teased a capsule concept for Neutron, I'm not convinced that Dreamchaser would win, but it would be great to see another round of actual competition.
But if their initial engineering and infrastructure investments were into ~~welding~~ 3d printing that turned out to be a dead end...
Radiation shmadiation
Hopefully someone FOIAs the test results. The Starliner saga has left NASA comms with a black eye, so I'm worried that they put a big "use-as-is" stamp on this issue and are plowing forward with additional risk.
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.
That's much more interesting than the $70k+ suburban grocery hauler.