Rocket Lab revealed the details of its medium-sized Neutron rocket this morning with CEO Peter Beck promising “the rocket of 2050, today.”
Rocket Lab had announced the medium-sized Neutron rocket in March of 2021, during an event where he blended and ate a Rocket Lab cap to reference his previous insistence that he’d “eat his hat” before they made a medium-sized rocket.
Calling Neutron an “absolute beast,” Beck said that it was designed for the SmallSat mega-constellations that are being built in low Earth orbit (LEO) over the coming years. Rocket Lab is also positioning Neutron to be usable for geostationary deployment, cislunar travel, and interplanetary flight.
He then started describing the Neutron, assisted by a variety of 3D animations of the rocket. He showed off the “nice big static base” that the Neutron is using to land, instead of deployable legs like the Falcon 9. The upper stage is being built to be low-cost (as it won’t be reusable) but still “the lightest and highest performing structure” in the Neutron rocket. Part of their approach is “hanging” it from the upper separation plane, without hard attachments. Beck said that it is the “lightest upper stage in history.”
He then showed Neutron’s outer shape, which features a smooth taper from the wide base to the narrower fairings at the top. He said that this “decreases pressure along the vehicle,” and avoids shockwaves during re-entry. He also revealed its base dimensions: 40m in height, 7m wide at the base, and a 5m internal width at the faring. It weights 480,000kg, can carry 8,000kg into LEO with a stage 1 return, and can carry a 15,000kg max payload without returning. That compares favorably to the Falcon 9’s 22,800kg payload.
The section on materials was dramatic, with Beck standing aside as 1 square metre (sqm) panels of various materials were hit by a steel girder. He showed a stainless steel panel crumpling under the damage — a clear shot across the bow at SpaceX’s stainless-steel-bodied Starships — and showed aluminum taking a serious dent. He then revealed a panel of their “carbon composite,” and hit it with the girder to no visible effect.
Calling it a “real 2050 material,” he explained that they’ll be 3D-printing it to speed up their manufacturing process. Saying that “3D printing really changed the game,” Beck cited their own 3D-printed Electron engines, and said that their “automated fiber placement” printing technique “can be measured in meters per minute.” This is reminiscent of Relativity Space’s entirely 3D-printed metal rocket bodies, raising the question of whether Rocket Lab will be able to match or beat Relativity Space’s promise of 60-day rocket manufacturing.
The rocket’s comparatively low weight also affected the design of their new Archimedes engine. The Archimedes is a gas-generator-cycle LOX/methane engine with 1 meganewton (MN) of thrust. While it isn’t as efficient as a staged combustion engine, like the Raptor engines used by SpaceX’s Starship rockets, Beck said that “these are all the things you want when you have to build an engine that can be reused over and over again … at very low stress and very high margins.”
Turning to this question of re-use, Beck said that Neutron’s stage one is intended to land on the same pads that it was launched from, rather than (SpaceX’s) “barge in the middle of the ocean.” (Though he also said he wouldn’t rule out landing on a barge either.) The Hungry Hippo fairing, a James Bond reference, is also designed to be radically reusable. Neutron will not jettison its fairings, but simply open it to launch spacecraft and close it again for landing. “What lands back on Earth,” Beck said, was “a complete first stage, fairings and all.” And since the whole rocket returns, fairing and all, Beck anticipates that it can be reused almost immediately, saying “All they need to do is load in a second stage and a payload, close the fairings, and go again.”
That said, none of this has been demonstrated yet. The event featured 3D modelling of the Neutron, but no actual footage of it in development. Beck said that their engineers are “working flat-out” on creating prototypes, and that Archimedes will “breathe its first fire” next year. Considering SpaceX’s decisive move away from carbon composite for Starship, Rocket Lab may encounter unexpected challenges.
If it works, though, the ease of production and reuse could point to a truly dramatic increase in launch tempo over the coming years. That could have an enormous effect on the rapidly growing LEO economy heralded in SpaceQ by space-focused investors like Seraphim’s Mark Boggett and Spaced Venture’s J. Brant Arseneau.
