Quote:
Originally Posted by Wavytone
It says the altitude of an airliner. That's just 10 km. A long way to go to get into orbit. And the choice of site suggests they don't understand much about the dynamics of getting it up there - there is s huge advantage to being near the equator and NZ is hopelessly too far south.
|
The intended orbit is clearly stated as an having an apoapsis of 500km, a periapsis of 300km, with an inclination of 83 degrees.
This is consistent with their business plan of launching small payloads to a sun-synchronous orbit. Also given that polar or sun-sync orbits are their intended destination, they would gain nothing from being near the equator - in fact for a SSO, which is usually slightly retrograde, an equatorial launch would require more energy than a launch from NZ.
Not sure why the skepticism? Sure rocket engineering is hard, as has been proved repeatedly with every rocket program in history - but the Electron is a good design, the engines have been successfully test fired, and the rocket has completed a full wet rehearsal. Machines like this don't make it off the drawing board without being well scrutinised.
This isn't a bunch of hacks working out of a shed, it's an international company staffed by competent engineers and I don't see any reason why they won't succeed.