Rocket Lab sees payoff from CAPSTONE launch - SpaceNews:
The successful launch of a NASA lunar cubesat mission was the culmination of two and a half years of work at Rocket Lab that, the company's chief executive says, could enable "ridiculously low cost" planetary missions.
Rocket Lab's Electron launched NASA's Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) cubesat and the company's Lunar Photon kick stage June 28. The Photon will gradually raise its orbit over the next several days before a final burn that places CAPSTONE on a ballistic lunar trajectory.
The payload, with an overall mass of more than 300 kilograms, pushed the Electron to the limit. "Electron gave everything that it could give. We've never run the engines as hard as we ran them tonight," Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said in an interview a few hours after the launch, which took place in the evening in New Zealand. "We put the Lunar Photon exactly where it needed to be and we had some performance left over in the vehicle."
[...] The payoff, he said, is a system that can be used for other smallsat missions with high performance requirements. Rocket Lab is already planning to use the same kick stage for a privately funded mission to Venus, replacing the CAPSTONE cubesat with an atmospheric entry probe.
"We can go to Mars and to asteroids equally well," he said. "This really is an entirely new system for deep space exploration at just a ridiculously low cost."
Perhaps we're getting closer to the point where we can crowdsource a Soylent mission to Mars!
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Friday July 01 2022, @08:15AM
And after that we can let the anonymous cowards back in!
(Score: 2) by AnonTechie on Friday July 01 2022, @10:51AM (1 child)
From the article:
This doesn't seem to be a ridiculously low cost option: US$ 19.98 million for 300 kg works out to US$ 66,600 per kilogram. Am I missing something ??
Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday July 01 2022, @11:14AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Mars#Economics [wikipedia.org]
> a published price of US$62 million per launch of up to 22,800 kg (50,300 lb) payload to low Earth orbit or 4,020 kg (8,860 lb) to Mars,[93] SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets are already the "cheapest in the industry"
4000 kg for $60 M is indeed cheaper than 300 kg for $20 M per mass, and absolute costs per launch are comparable, although electron is cheaper per launch.
Maybe 20M$ doesn't cover the launch but a whole load of other stuff (prototypes, payload, etc). I saw something saying Electron costs 5 M$ per launch.
https://www.seradata.com/electron-small-launch-vehicle-prices-revealed-for-cubesat-passengers/ [seradata.com]
That would make more sense, giving electron similar cost per kg to Falcon 9 with smaller per launch costs.