You are totally right and im a complete idiot, I meant to write $3.3k/kg

Until someone lower their prices, which was my point

• If Neutron is priced at $50M for a 15 tonne LEO payload, that's $3300/kg.
• Falcon 9 launches 17.4 tonnes to LEO (when landing on ASDS, from wikipedia), priced at $67M, which is $3800/kg

This is awesome. The best part about this is that it will cause SpaceX to lower their prices. The purchase price of a Falcon9 launch did not decrease significantly after they achieved reusability, they just increased their profit margins. Gwynne Shotwell was quoted somewhere saying "we spent a billion developing this and we want to recover those costs" (paraphrased). They can do that if no competitor forces them to drop costs.

However, things will be tough for Rocketlab. SpaceX had the benefit of being the only game in town with a reusable rocket, so they got lots of profit. This article claims that Neutron will cost $25 million per launch but be priced at $50M, for a 50% profit margin. But, I suspect F9 has similiar costs. SpaceX has largely recouped their development costs so they can afford to compete with Rocketlab on price. If Rocketlab engages in the price war, they will never recover their development costs.

Rocketlab claims that the biggest cost is the expendable upper stage, and I suspect the same is true for SpaceX. When Starship shows up, what are these other launch providers going to do? How will they make enough money with their partially reusable rockets to fund a fully reusable competitor to Starship?

Edit: I meant to put a $k in my money numbers like $3.3k/kg, my apologies. Changed it to $3300/kg

I'm an atheist, and I *really* like this piece of art. I have many reasons for being an atheist, but one of them is this: God, if he were to exist, is the ultimate authoritarian. If you disagree with God's opinion, or fail to worship him, he may imprison you for eternity. This piece of art really conveys that believing in a God who always watches us is akin to living in a totalitarian police state. When I was a theist with doubts, I felt oppressed by the idea of God watching. Now, I am free.

I asked it to solve an algebra problem which had taken me 10 handwritten pages. I was impressed until the third line when it clearly doesn’t know how to cross-multiply fractions.

lol, I know some paraglider pilots. It would be really entertaining to see this. However, I think the altitude of the balloons is a little high for a paraglider

He knows how to get people to work really hard and how to build a cohesive culture. From what I hear, blue is full of cliques pushing different cultures. Ex-Boeing people, ex-SpaceX people, ex-Aerojet people, etc.

And Blue Origin has never achieved orbit, despite being founded a year before SpaceX. BO is kind of a joke, so it’s hilarious to see it held up as a serious competitor to SpaceX.