Relativity Space raises $35M for a new process to build and fly rockets
Interesting news. All this newspace startup competition in the rocket launch industry is huge.<p>One concern:<p>&gt; The Terran booster will hit what the company believes is a sweet spot between smaller rockets under development by Rocket Lab (and others) and the much larger Falcon 9 built by SpaceX.<p>The market is moving very quickly right now. I&#x27;m not sure the Falcon 9 will even be flying by the time this launches. Maybe that will mean more opportunity for them, it is hard to say. But it seems to me that all these small-rocket companies are banking on one specific idea: that the convenience or dedicated customer service they provide will exceed the pros of going with a more established low-cost provider like SpaceX. With BFR flying regularly in the same timeframe as this rocket gets its first launch, their only hope is that customers will not want to ride along as a 90th payload in a BFR but will want a dedicated ride themselves.<p>Or perhaps I am being close minded, perhaps the market will grow sufficiently such that SpaceX will not even be able to suck up all the new launches and new demand, and the small-rocket companies will thrive.<p>I just don&#x27;t want to see them left in the dust. A $10M price tag is incredible (I mean, wow, that&#x27;s low! for a dedicated launch!). But will that be the expensive option by the time their rocket is ready for use?<p>Two concerns, it turns out. Will these rockets be reusable? I&#x27;m guessing not, since the article didn&#x27;t mention it and these days in the rocket world, if you&#x27;re not reusable, then who cares? You <i>will</i> be left in the dust.<p>Edit: Wait a minute. I just went to their website. It says nothing about reusability either. But it exclaims how great it would be to build and fly rockets in days instead of years. Are they very specifically making a disposable rocket? If so, fuck this company and fuck everything about it. It&#x27;s not the way of the future to build large objects and throw them away. It&#x27;s evil in fact, to research something like this in the modern era with an attitude of &#x27;fuck you&#x27; to the materials&#x27; sources where they are mined from the Earth.<p>I&#x27;ll hold off on an actual opinion until I know more. But I sure hope Y Combinator didn&#x27;t invest in a fake-new-space-actually-oldspace company. I hope this is better than it looks because it looks awful.<p>Edit 2: What does the success case of this startup look like? Will they ever research reusability? Or are they aiming to make 1,000 <i>new</i> rockets per year? That&#x27;s the success case based on the financials (=$10B revenue&#x2F;year) and it sounds gross. Without reusable rockets that whole thing is extremely wasteful.<p>The efficiencies of 3D printing things quickly are not correctly accounted for in the loss that the planet takes due to increased mining and wasteful dumping that would have to occur (and which the investors and company do not pay for).