Of course, all of you.
Comparable launch development timelines
Let’s start with a little history. SpaceX became the first purely commercial launch startup to announce plans to build a new medium-range rocket about two decades ago, in 2005. The company holds the record for the fastest time to orbit with the Falcon 9 vehicle, with a development time of 4.7 years.
But SpaceX had significant advantages. At that time, the company had been in business for more than three years, had extensive experience with the Merlin engine, and was less than a year away from the first launch of the smaller Falcon 1 rocket. In retrospect, it is also clear that the company had an incredibly talented team of engineers. Finally, the Falcon 9 was a bit smaller than the recently announced Blacklift and Big Iron vehicles. In its initial form, the Falcon 9 had a lifting capacity of approximately 10 tonnes.
What about other companies? Since 2015, a number of other US companies – United Launch Alliance (Vulcan), Rocket Lab (Neutron), Relativity Space (Terran R), Firefly/Northrop Grumman (Eclipse), and Stoke Space (Nova) have announced medium to heavy lift vehicles, ranging in payload capacity from around 7 to 27 tonnes (Blue Origin’s New Glenn is much larger than any of these).
Among them, only Vulcan has reached its orbit. It took 8.7 years, with an incredibly experienced launch team behind the vehicle and approximately $2 billion in overall federal support between its suppliers.
Generally speaking, the track record of these existing launch companies suggests that development of a new medium- or heavy-duty rocket takes five to nine years from public announcement to first orbital launch. Additionally, many of these companies either started with smaller rockets or leveraged other valuable experience.
Yes, they get engines, at a certain price
AST SpaceMobile’s counterargument is that it won’t start from scratch. The company announced Friday that it has signed an agreement with Firefly to deliver engines for the first three Blacklift rockets, provide engineering services over a three-year period and acquire the perpetual license to manufacture Firefly’s Miranda and Vira vacuum engines. Nine Miranda engines will power Blacklift’s first stage.
Gn bussni
