Beck said Wednesday that Neutron’s development remains “on an ambitious schedule.” In previous statements, Beck emphasized Rocket Lab’s focus on quality and its unwillingness to bring an “unproven product” to market.
“Our goal is to achieve orbit on the first attempt,” Beck said last year. “You won’t see us using any qualifier that involves just clearing the launch pad and declaring success and so on, and that means we don’t want to learn anything on Neutron’s first flight that could be learned on the ground during testing.”
Rocket Lab has achieved great success with its Electron rocket, capable of carrying up to 300 kilograms of payload into low-altitude orbit. Electron has completed 97 flights so far, with 56 successes in a row.
With Neutron, Rocket Lab wants to compete for a broader range of launch contracts and is looking for opportunities to sell launches to the US military and operators of satellite mega-constellations. Its lifting capacity into low Earth orbit is nearly 29,000 pounds (13,000 kilograms).
“As we build our first rocket, we are building the program’s long-term infrastructure so we can scale quickly and address global launch challenges. Commercial customers, governments and our own future satellite services are also counting on it,” Beck said Wednesday. “But I also said that we will not rush to take unnecessary risks and that development programs like Neutron have their challenges.”
Neutron’s latest challenge emerged just as the rocket’s potential customers were clamoring for more launch capacity. SpaceX, the market leader, is betting on the giant Starship rocket and will retire its workhorse Falcon 9 from commercial service in the next few years, without which many satellite start-ups would not be able to cost-effectively put their payloads into orbit.
This enables Rocket Lab to poach business from satellite operators whose payloads do not match Starship’s capabilities. But there is tough competition. Other rocket companies such as Relativity Space, Stoke Space and Firefly Aerospace are working on intermediate rockets to target the same market.
