Main Engine Cut Off - T+182: Rocket Lab Neutron, Relativity Terran R

Episode Date: March 2, 2021

Relativity sorta-announced a bigger launch vehicle, Terran R. A few days later, Rocket Lab really announced a bigger launch vehicle, Neutron. I hate one announcement, and love the other.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 38 executive producers—Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, David, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, The Astrogators at SEE, Chris, and seven anonymous—and 483 other supporters.TopicsRelativity's reusable Terran rocket competitor to SpaceX's Falcon 9Relativity Space on Twitter: “We've officially completed and buckle-tested the Stage 1 Iron Bird tank demonstrator model! Check out these shots of the tank moving outdoors, going fully vertically and being installed into our LA1 Structures Test Stand.”Neutron | Rocket LabIntroducing Neutron - YouTube2020 NASA Announcement of Collaboration Opportunity (ACO) Selections | NASAThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOListen to MECO HeadlinesJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe wherever you listen to podcastsSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterBuy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off ShopMusic by Max Justus

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo, and we've got two very similar stories to talk about today. We've got two small launchers that have now announced much larger launch vehicles over the past week. Two very similar yet very different stories. One from Relativity announcing Terran R and one from Rocket Lab announcing Neutron. Now, if you are a headlines listener, if you're a member of the $3 crew over at mainenginecutoff.com support, you will have heard me on the most recent episode of Headlines totally flummoxed by the Relativity announcement. And it kind of makes a little more sense now with the context of this Rocket Lab announcement.

So we'll talk about that. But I want to talk first about why these are so different and why, honestly, I hate one announcement and really like the second announcement. The relativity announcement, the long and the short of it is that they're announcing that instead of Terran 1, which they are going to fly this year, hopefully, that's about 1,000 kilograms to orbit, something around that range. They are working on Terran R, which would be about 20 tons to orbit. They are working on Terran R, which would be about 20 tons to orbit, they say, a fully reusable launch vehicle, a very similar size class to Falcon 9. We'll talk about the details in a second, but that's the basics of it. Rocket Lab, on the other hand, announcing Neutron, which is 8 tons to orbit, reusable as well. So that's similar to Antares, Soyuz 2, some of the things in that size class. Now Relativity has not put a vehicle on a launch pad anywhere. I don't think they've even shipped a vehicle to a launch

site anywhere. I don't even think they've completed a launch site yet. The announcement that they've rolled out was by way of a single exclusive interview with CNBC that was extraordinarily light on details. They don't have anything on their site about Taryn R. Go ahead and do one of the site searches on Google and try to find any reference to Taryn R on relativityspace.com. You will not find it. The visualization they released as part of this announcement was one of those silhouetted images, which usually does not indicate we're not ready to show you things yet. It usually indicates we don't actually have anything to show you yet. So here's the rough shape and size of a thing, and that will get you scintillating details later.

Rocket Lab, on the other hand, they are an established launch provider at this point. They're almost to 20 launches. They've built two launch sites. They have a third in the works. Their announcement of Neutron was this royal rollout where they had an incredible video with Peter Beck eating the hat that he said he would eat

if they ever made a larger launch vehicle. Amazing production quality, hilarious bits in that. Very exciting. They had a bunch of details on their website. They've got a full page dedicated to Neutron. They have a lot of details on that page, and they also had a lot of details to share with several interviews with journalists.

They have actual visualizations of the vehicle. They gave this thing the grand rollout. So they're two very different announcements. Relativities is just downright weird in a lot of ways, and I'm left with very few reasons as to why they did that announcement. Rocket Lab, on the other hand, they are announcing this big initiative with a lot of confidence, and I think that says a lot. So let's dive into the details now on the Relativity one, but I just kind of wanted to set the table with, I hate this Relativity announcement. I really like this Rocket Lab announcement. Okay, so a couple of the details

that I gave you already. Fully reusable vehicle called Terran R, 20 tons to orbit. They say they'll be able to make this with the same factory, the same teams that they're making Terran 1, the same machinery that is printing Terran 1 would be able to do Terran R. It does sound like they're going to use some new materials. Apparently those printers can handle it. I'm interested to see if that's accurate or not. They will be using the same upper stage engine on Terran R, but they're going to be using a new engine on the first stage. Terran 1 is using an engine called Eon 1. This would be using Eon R, so it's a different version of that rocket engine. They say there'll be more details on the design and the specs later this year. They have not said

anything about timing. They have not said anything about price. So again, very few details on that front. I am very curious about both those things, the timing and the price. If they can make this business case close at 20, 30 something million, then that's a really strong offering to the market. They are pushing up in this range into a very crowded market, especially as we get into the late 2020s. And if they're so light on details now, I don't think this launches anytime before 2025. are so light on details now, I don't think this launches any time before 2025. And at that point, you've got a very mature Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy. You've got New Glenn, hopefully a couple of years into operation. You've got ULA's Vulcan. You'll have things like Neutron coming online as well. And that's in addition to the international offerings in that range, which are

Ariane 6. You've got a couple of Indian launch vehicles that are in the works, Chinese launch vehicles that are in the works, the venerable Soyuz, however often that's flying by the late 2020s. So they're pushing into a very crowded market space there. And when you look at some of these offerings, right, Falcon 9, right now we know that that launches for, and it costs internally to SpaceX, something around $28 to $30 million per the sort of leaked details on that. Now you figure if that's what it costs SpaceX, they'll never fly it much lower than, you know, $30 something, $40 million to be able to make some profit on top of that. than $40 million to be able to make some profit on top of that. And that's assuming that they have maxed out the reusability factors that they're getting here, and that that launch price is actually kind of sticky. They could drop that further. It could be $20, $25 million to launch

these things, which puts them at $30 to $40 million range still to make that profit. But I don't see Falcon 9 getting much lower than that. And honestly, as I always say, they don't have a reason to. There is no pressure on them to make Falcon 9 cheaper. But there will be soon. New Glenn is going to put pressure on Falcon in some ways because from things that I've heard, it sounds like they are going to be selling launches to GEO or even these Constellation launches where they can fit a ton of satellites under that fairing for prices that does put pressure on Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. And this is commercial stuff we're talking about. The defense market is a totally different thing. In the defense market, ULA was actually the cheapest option in this most recent Space Force funding round and launch contract round,

which is an interesting wrinkle to this all. But in the commercial market, Newt Glenn is probably the nearest thing that would put pressure on Falcon 9. And as we heard last week, that's not going to happen until 2023 at the earliest. So could relativity come in at exactly Falcon 9's flight rate and price point as now and make some money? Probably. Is that a very solid bet to make five years out when there's so much variability in the launch market? I'm not so sure. Maybe the timing is wrong that I'm talking about here. Maybe this is much closer and they really can stress their benefits of having a factory that does not have specific tooling and they're able to launch this within a couple of years. But if they're working on a new engine, I am not quite sure about that. So there's a lot of unknowns there that make me skeptical of exactly

how this fits into the market. I hope there's enough wiggle room that they're able to finesse it as they get closer to the launch pad and the industry has changed a bit, the market has changed a bit. Are they going to be pushing a lot into rideshare? Are they going to be trying to win part of phase three US Space Force launch contracts? Who knows exactly what they're targeting with this? Nobody does because they gave us almost no details. And that's what I want to talk about last here. There's very few theories I have on to why they're announcing this at this point in their company's life cycle. They certainly have plenty of funding to take on this kind of initiative. They raised $500 million November 2020. They raised a couple hundred million dollars previous to that. So they certainly have plenty of funding to start new

initiatives like this. But they are still a couple of months out from putting Terran 1 on the launch pad for the first time, let alone launching it successfully. That leads me to my first theory. Maybe Terran 1 is farther behind than they planned. The same day this announcement went up, they tweeted out some pictures of their, of a, or maybe this was the day before this announcement went up, they tweeted out pictures of a demonstration tank. went up. They tweeted out pictures of a demonstration tank, just one tank of the first stage that they were doing buckle testing with out back of their headquarters. If that's the point they're at now, that they don't have a full first stage that they're doing these kind of tests on, and they're still doing these like component level or maybe larger than component level, but still not a full up test, maybe they are farther out in turn one than we'd think, and this is the

classic one-two punch, good news, bad news. And they didn't say the delay yet, but sometimes when you're saying, look at this new shiny thing, also here's a progress update on our current thing, and it's a little further behind than we thought it would be, that's not a totally unforeseen situation. So maybe turn 1 is later than that, and maybe they still say they're on track for later this year. If they're saying Q4 2021, the number one rule of Q4 rocket launches is that means it's not happening this year. Now, the other option, and this is, you know, like I said up front, I was flummoxed on headlines because that was the only reasoning I could make, or I could make sense for as to why they announced this.

their name out there working on Terran R to keep themselves top of mind for customers and investors because now Rocket Lab and Relativity are going after the same customers and the same investors. Neutron jumps over Terran 1's capability, which means it already puts them in competition for Terran 1 launches. As part of this rollout, Tim Ellis, who's the head of Relativity, said that they're already selling or talking to customers about Terran R. And if they're doing that, then think about what Rocket Lab is talking to customers about for Neutron. So there could be a little of, hey, our competitor has a thing coming down the pipe. Let's just call CNBC up. Right, Michael Sheets, the pipe. Let's just call CNBC up. Right, Michael Sheets, great reporter.

Let's just call him up, talk to him about Terran R, put it out there. Do zero other work on the press release aspect of Terran R's rollout. Do zero work on the website. Don't put any visualizations together. Just call Michael Sheets up. Put it out there. Put our name out there. Let everyone know we're working on a thing too.

And also say it's bigger than the other thing. It's totally believable that that's what happened. And the more I think about it, the more I think that's what happened, which bums me out even more. And yeah, I don't know if I have much more to say on it. I hate this announcement from Relativity. I'm skeptical of it, and I would love to be proven wrong. All right, before we dive into all the Rocket Lab news, I need to say a huge thank you to everyone out there who supports Main Engine

Cutoff over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. There are 521 of you supporting every single month. I'm so thankful for that. That's a huge amount of people. I'm incredibly thankful every day for your support. And this episode of Main Engine Cutoff was produced by 38 executive producers. Thanks to Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, David, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, TheEverDashanaut, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, TheAstrogators at SEE, Chris, and seven anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for your support. And if you want to help, if you want to join that crew, help support the show, and if you want to get a little extra podcast in your life, you've got to head over to

mainenginecutoff.com slash support and join up at the $3 a month or more level, because if you're at that level, you get Miko headlines in your podcast player every single week. It has been a couple of weeks since I've done a main show here on the main feed of the podcast. I try to keep this feed very high in the signal to noise ratio. If I have an opinion or analysis of something, I'm going to do a show. If I don't, I'm not going to do a show because that's what I do here, opinion and analysis. But there's a ton of news that happens, and I'm reading all of it so that I can have opinion and analysis. And what I determined a couple of years ago was I should do something with all of that time spent reading all

of the news. And I put together this thing called Miko Headlines. I do a show every single weekend, run through all the stories of the week. I have a lot of thoughts about those things, but they don't fill an entire podcast. So a lot of my hot takes and a lot of my quick analysis or short snippets of thoughts is over on Miko Headlines. And I've done a ton of shows within the time between this show and the last show I'd done on the main feed. And they're all like 20 or 30 minutes long because it's been very, very packed full of a lot of news happening. So if you want to help support the show, if you want to get that in your podcast player every single week, mainenginecutoff.com support. Thank you all so much for the help. All right. One thing I forgot to mention about this Rocket

Lab news is they're also going public. They are joining the hottest thing in space. You can't spell space without SPAC. They are going public by way of the Special Purpose Acquisition Company. We talked a lot about these with Megan Crawford a couple of shows back. If you want to hear some thoughts about SPACs generally and hear her convince me that I should be more open-minded about SPACs and that I was making an assessment of SPACs based on companies that don't have their shit together. Well, Rocket Lab is really going to test my opinion on SPACs because I strongly believe in Rocket Lab. I think what they're doing is great. I think they have their shit together. Let's see how this goes

for them. They are going to be merging with Vector Acquisition Corporation, which was established last year by a venture capital fund, Vector Capital. The merger is going to provide Rocket Lab about $320 million plus an additional $470 million as part of an investment after they go public here. At the time of the announcement, this pushed the valuation of Rocket Lab to $4.1 billion. It's much higher than that now because the stock is bumping on the news. I'm really curious to talk, hopefully, maybe to Peter Beck about why they chose this route. Obviously, this is a ton of money to raise in one go. You know, the $790 million that's coming their way. Maybe they weren't able to

raise that amount of money by traditional means. Relativity, like I said, they raised $500 million in November 2020. Maybe with the state of the world, Rocket Lab wasn't able to raise the amount of money that they wanted to. Going public also gives early investors or staff an exit opportunity. You know, IPOs typically provide that option for people to make some money on their investments. And if Rocket Lab needs a bunch of cash, wants to cash out some on their own right, or for their early investors, then maybe this was the right option for them. So that's a little bit of a longer storyline of how the whole SPAC thing plays out generally, because everybody's going SPAC. Name a space company, they probably went SPAC recently. And we'll see how that plays out long term. But for now, Rocket Lab is getting this huge infusion of cash and they're going to take on Neutron among other projects, I'm sure.

Let's talk about Neutron in more detail here. So the payload range, eight tons to low Earth orbit, that is the reusable payload range. It sounds like Neutron is going to take the kind of new Glenn tactic and say tactic and say, we're never flying expendable, we're flying reusable. So that's the figures that we're giving you. That range is roughly comparable to the H-2A with two solid rocket boosters. It's comparable to Antares, to Soyuz 2, the Long March 2F, and surprisingly, the Atlas 5 501 does a little bit more than 8 tons to low Earth orbit. They can also, because it's Peter Beck, he mentioned the Venus payload, they can do 1.5 tons to Venus or Mars, so quite a lot of payload to interplanetary destinations,

which is an obvious interest of Peter Beck, and I would be shocked if a lot of that $790 million was not put towards some sort of Venus exploration program, because he's wanted to do that forever. The fairing on this is four and a half meters, so bigger than Antares, not as big as Falcon or Vulcan, just to give you an idea. It's all inline, so it's the exact diameter of the vehicle. Pretty much every vehicle that shows that off as their initial rendering eventually upgrades the fairing width and goes to that kind of hammerhead design where, like Falcon has, where the fairing's wider than the vehicle. Electron got one of those. Terran 1 got one of those. Wouldn't be shocked to see Neutron get something like a five meter fairing as well down the line. Now the vehicle is going to be reusable. It has landing legs in the visualization.

They say it's going to do propulsive landing on an ocean platform of some sort. It's going to be made out of some sort of metallic structure. The avionics, the computers, a lot of that hardware, the brains of the vehicle, they're going to take from Electron and use the work that they've done on Electron, bring that over to Neutron. They haven't talked about pricing yet. I have a very similar feel about the pricing on this that I do about Terran R, where can they do it for in the $20 million range and still make money? If they can, I think that's going to be huge. If they can do it for the $30 million range, I think they're still in the running. But again, it's all about putting some pressure on the lowest price in the market right now.

They don't have to launch this thing for $2 million a launch to be able to make money. The class of vehicles that's in the 1 to 1.2 ton to low Earth orbit range, they're typically like $10 to 15 million dollars right now. If Rocket Lab can bring out Neutron and do it for 20 some, 30 some million dollars, I do think that they could win a lot of launches that way and obviously compete pretty directly with a lot of Falcon 9 launches because for low Earth orbit missions, Falcon 9's typically putting about that much of payload into low Earth orbit. Now, some of the higher energy launches, Neutron's not going to be able to do. They're not going to

be able to do really heavy payloads to geosynchronous transfer orbit. They're not going to be, well, maybe they'll have a neutron heavy, but Falcon heavy obviously puts a lot of payload out to geostationary orbit. Obviously could be some upgrade paths there for Neutron, but out to geostationary orbit. Obviously could be some upgrade paths there for Neutron, but for a typical commercial range, they are going to be able to compete for a lot of payloads. Now they say this is going to launch out of Wallops initially. I would not be shocked to see them add a launch site in New Zealand as well, but I think that tips its hand towards some of the types of missions that they're looking to fly. Two things specifically called out by Rocket Lab is mega constellations and human spaceflight capability or cargo resupply to the ISS.

Let's take those one at a time. Mega constellations are all the rage right now. Starlink being the biggest. No one's competing for Starlink launches because they're all flying on SpaceX launches. But there's a lot of other ones out there. Even in the investor documents that Rocket Lab put out, they're talking about Telesat's Lightspeed constellation. There's OneWeb. There's Amazon's Kuiper constellation. There are plenty others. There's all the imaging constellations as well, and the electronic surveillance constellations that are out there. And then there are all the Department of Defense constellations. And I

do think that this is probably where Rocket Lab sees the biggest opportunity. The DARPA Blackjack program is working on small satellite constellations. The Space Development Agency is working on small satellite constellations. I wouldn't be shocked to see the Missile Defense Agency get involved in some of this as well. It seems like one of the early opportunities for Department of Defense small satellite constellations are those missile warning satellites that we've already seen some contracts be awarded. Small scale stuff right now, four or eight satellites at a time. But if that works out, if those initial projects work out, I think they're going to see, you know, hundreds of satellites being put up in some of these constellations. Rocket Lab is a sweetheart of the Department of Defense right now. They are

someone that has flown a lot of Department of Defense missions for such a young launch company. The National Reconnaissance Office has been loving them. The U.S. Air and Space Force has been loving them. They seem to have some pretty good ties to the Department of Defense. And that's where Wallops comes in, because Wallops has this facility that they can process some of these more protected payloads in, in a really safe environment on mainland US. That seems like a thing that not only are they going to use it a lot for Electron, but they would want to use it a lot for Neutron as well. Now, same goes for what they've called out as human spaceflight capability or cargo resupply. An eight-ton launch vehicle launching from Wallops Island, Virginia.

Which one am I talking about, Antares or Neutron? One of them has a contract right now to put a bunch of cargo up to the ISS. The other one does not, but certainly in that range, could do it a lot cheaper, maybe even by dropping a zero off the end of the launch price. So on day one, they would be able to launch Cygnus. You know, they could fit that under the fairing. It's got a bigger fairing than Antares. It's got about the same payload range. They could do that on day one. Could they work on their own thing? Certainly. Are they maybe going to work on their own human spaceflight spacecraft? Maybe. Seems plausible, but much longer term, bigger budget timeline on that.

But they are in the range that it would work for, right? I called out the comparable payload ranges, Soyuz 2, Long March 2F. Those are both what Russian and Chinese crew vehicles launch on top of. Now, in addition to being the right payload range for human spaceflight, they also won this Space Act agreement with NASA a couple of months ago. Let me look when this was. This was back in November of 2020. This was a Space Act agreement that Rocket Lab won with NASA. I'm going to read the blurb from the press release on this. Rocket Lab is developing a recovery system for the first stage of its electron rocket in order to reuse engines, motor controllers, and battery packs. The small satellite launch provider will partner with three NASA centers, Ames, Langley, and Armstrong in Edwards,

California, on flight software, aerothermal analysis, decelerator design, and a fiber optic sensing system. The recovery system will enable more frequent and less expensive launches for government and commercial customers. Here comes the kicker. It will also allow for payload return from the International Space Station, entry systems for small spacecraft, and a flight testbed to mature related entry, descent, and landing technologies. All of that in that last bit sounds exactly what you would need for either cargo resupply and return or human spaceflight. When this went up in November, I sent a note to the Rocket Lab comms who said they did not have any comment on that and they could not talk further about it.

And now I know why, because it sounds super, super related to all of this neutron rollout and potentially any projects that they have going on for small cargo missions or small crewed missions to low Earth orbit. Very exciting stuff. Stuff that Neutron is right in the range for. I like Wallops because I can drive there. The Cape is very busy, so I understand not wanting to go in there. They've already got some hardware at Wallops. They've got that Department of Defense facility that they can use as well. If they want to get the sun synchronous orbit, they could technically dogleg from Wallops, though that would be a pretty big payload hit. So I would bet that

they start shipping these things down to New Zealand. All of this stuff is really making sense. It's a really attractive offering from Rocket Lab, and it's coming from a company that is doing it confidently. As I said up front. They have Electron working, they've got upgrades coming on that, they've got this reusability effort that's going to play into Electron and Neutron, they've got a good plan overall, a ton of ambition, and I'm really excited about this announcement, I'm really excited for the things that they can get involved in. I have some general questions about entering this market in the mid-2020s, as we touched on with both of these vehicles, but I think they could both play a big part in that market,

depending on how everything shakes out. So it's going to be a lot of fun to follow these both. I'm pretty thrilled that this came out in a way that allows me to talk about it on the same show, because it's good context back and forth between both of these. But anyway, for now, that's all I've got for you. Thank you all so much for listening. And once again, if you want to help support the show and get headlines in your life, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support. And hit me up on Twitter at wehavemiko or an email anthonyatmainenginecutoff.com. Until next time, talk to you soon.