The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has selected Rocket Lab’s medium-lift reusable Neutron for the Rocket Cargo mission…Earlier this year, the company announced that its Neutron rocket will land its payloads at sea. To facilitate this, the company is modifying an offshore barge, named “Return on Investment,” to serve as an ocean landing platform for returning missions…Rocket Lab, along with Stoke Space, will now be eligible to bid against established giants like Blue Origin, SpaceX, and United Launch Alliance.
I honestly can’t think of a single situation where completely discreet orbital payloads costing a billion dollars makes sense.
Even if the payload is split up into dozens of cube satellite like payloads. what on earth is valuable enough to send and keep in orbit but disposable enough that it burning up in the atmosphere is not the end of the world?
Honest answer? Nukes.
Or rods from god.
But the system doesn’t chill in orbit- it launches on Sub-O trajectories to get the cargo or payload in place quickly.
The problem is it’s only slightly more subtle than a nuke in the face, costs ridiculous per launch, has extremely limited capacity, and is only a few hours faster than say, Mach 6 (aka hypersonic.)
We already have a best in class logistical system that makes either of the hypersonic or sub-o systems… extremely niche.
Am I misreading the article? They are using rockets to ship payloads anywhere in the world in the span of a few hours.
I initially thought nukes too. But why “ship” nukes using this? An ICBM is already the preferred mode of shipping a nuke to an intended target anywhere in a few hours. Rods of god don’t make sense either since they are kinetic weapons and need to be dropped from orbit.
I guess, this could make organ donations an international effort at some point.
they’re talking about sub-o cargo things, yes. But the only thing you need that kind of global delivery window, and don’t want to keep, you know, mostly discrete… all make really big explosions.
the launch vehicle could just as easily be used as a ballistic missile of any sort as a cargo thingy.
But again, we have Best-in-Class military logistics; and we have bases all over the world staged with teams ready to go. any conceivable thing that would need a 90-minute response is so niche, it’d probably never actually get used. the cost of just a single launch vehicle is probably a fairly large chunk of the operating costs for those bases; and those methods of deployment don’t come with the added issue of being really freaking obvious.
It’s point to point delivery. The cargo isn’t in orbit.