Falling Costs, Rising Ambitions
Winning the race to land on the Moon didn’t come cheap. In today’s prices the Saturn V’s thirteen launches cost \$47 billion over a decade – meaning each cost more than \$3.5 billion. Launching twice yearly at its peak, the Apollo program came in at around \$150 billion dollars accounting for inflation.
After Apollo, in order to reduce overheads and enable launches with greater frequency, NASA pursued the Space Shuttle program. Yet even that cost the US taxpayer half a billion dollars per launch, with the system enjoying no more than five flights a year at its peak. Since 2000 and the arrival of a private space industry, however, costs have fallen precipitously. Today a Falcon 9 rocket (much smaller than the Saturn V) costs SpaceX around \$61 million to launch, while the larger Falcon Heavy is less than \$100 million. Nevertheless, even those figures mean many companies and individuals stand little chance of reaching space, and even if they have the means to do so, there is currently a two-year waiting list for launch.
That could all change with Rocket Lab’s commitment to launching every week on a projected cost of as little as \$4.9 million per flight. That is only possible because of its uniquely eficient method of building and launching rockets: using the same amount of jet fuel a plane would need to go from LA to San Francisco, the Electron can put a payload into space.
The rocket’s secret is its Rutherford engine, which takes many of the design innovations first applied by SpaceX further and deploying them on a smaller scale. Perhaps most remarkably, the Rutherford has an entirely electric propulsion cycle, using electric motors to drive its turbo pumps. In addition, it is the first oxygen-hydrocarbon engine to use 3-D printing for all primary components, allowing complex but lightweight structures unattainable through traditional techniques. As a result the company has not only reduced costs but decreased build time from months to days.
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