All of this also allows rapid scalability. As the company’s CEO Peter Beck puts it, ‘The vehicle was designed from the outset to be mass produced … [we have a] 3-D-printed engine – with six printers [we] can produce one in twenty-four hours. So to scale up there we just buy more printers. The whole launch vehicle has been engineered and designed around manufacturability.’
Because its key technologies – from its high-performance electric motors and lithium-polymer batteries, to the 3-D printers used in construction – are on the same experience curve as the technologies outlined in the last chapter, these rockets will, like so much else, only get cheaper from here.
Rocket Lab isn’t the only new player eager to use 3-D printing to reduce overheads in a still prohibitively expensive business. Relativity Space – like SpaceX, based in Hawthorne, California – wants to reduce the cost of a rocket launch from the \$60 million mark to a fraction of that by simplifying production and all but removing human labour from building rockets, something which still accounts for as much as 90 per cent of overall cost.
The company’s 3-D printers, with their eighteen-foot robotic arms, are among the largest ever built. Equipped with lasers that can melt a steady stream of aluminium wire into liquid metal ready for shaping, they represent a qualitative leap in the tools available to medium-sized businesses. The company’s founders claim that by mid-2020 a handful of such arms will be able to build the entire body of a rocket, measuring ninety feet tall, seven feet wide and capable of carrying 2,000 pounds into orbit. They anticipate that construction time will take less than a month – and all for a booster which, while comparatively small, will be larger than SpaceX’s original Falcon 1 rocket launched in 2008.
Mining the Sky
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