Just noticed an article from last week (hence, out of date opening sentence) by Tim Fernholz at the Space Business newsletter. He asserts that the industry is hungry for mid-sized rockets, discusses competitors and timelines. Speaking well of Rocket Labs' track record, he mentions Neutron as a possible leader in this area. Full text pasted below link.
https://qz.com/emails/space-business/1850352835/space-business-lab-rats"How do you have a space renaissance without rockets?
All eyes will be on today’s attempt to fly SpaceX’s next-generation Starship rocket, but the bigger near-term problem is with the current generation of launch vehicle development. The issues aren’t just with the new rocket firms fighting their way to orbit, but aerospace giants as well: It’s not clear when United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan will be ready, and now Europe’s latest rocket, Ariane 6, is so delayed that it will have to hire SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket to launch its next set of Galileo navigation satellites.
Indeed, if you’re a Western company and want to launch anything weighing more than 500 kg or benefit from the efficiency of sharing a launch vehicle with multiple customers, you have to go to Elon Musk’s space firm.
This isn’t the ideal situation for driving down the cost of going to space—SpaceX will happily grow its margins and its volume picking up more business, just as it did with rival satellite operator OneWeb when Russia stopped letting Western firms launch on its Soyuz rockets.
The demand for medium-lift rockets, which generally carry between two and 20 metric tons of payload to low-earth orbit, is so clear that many start-ups with plans to deploy and operate smaller rockets are pivoting to bigger ones.
Astra, which scrapped a smaller design after a failed mission for NASA, is working on a vehicle that could carry 600 kg to orbit. Relativity Space tested its smaller Terran 1 rocket for the first time in March; after it failed to reach orbit, the company decided to take those learnings and focus on a larger, reusable vehicle called Terran R. This is exactly what SpaceX did nearly 15 years ago—abandon its small Falcon 1 rocket to build the Falcon 9.
The most interesting of these efforts is from Rocket Lab, the only winner thus far in the race to operate small rockets. Despite a regular flight cadence with its smaller Electron rocket, the company has made clear that its future is in developing a larger, reusable vehicle called Neutron capable of launching 13,000 kg to low-earth orbit. That vehicle could head for orbit as soon as next year. One key sign of the desire for bigger vehicles comes from the US military, one of the biggest spenders on rocket launch, which changed its bidding process to allow new entrants like Rocket Lab.
What makes Neutron promising is Rocket Lab’s record of execution, which includes Electron and two recent announcements. First is that the company will fly one of its rocket engines on an Electron rocket after recovering it from a previously-flown vehicle and refurbishing it. That kind of practice bodes well for scaling up. The second is that the company will use a version of its current rocket dubbed HASTE (Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Test Electron) to test hypersonic vehicles for the US military. “HASTE is not the promise of a future capability—it’s a completed launch vehicle ready for flight now,” Rocket Lab executive Brian Rogers said in a statement.
Starship is exciting, but even with a successful test flight today, it’s hard to see the vehicle coming into full service for years. Serious testing likely to be focused on NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to use the huge spacecraft as a lunar lander. The rest of the world needs a completed launch vehicle ready for flight now."
