Every argument clarity score on this site is built from rows on this page. Each
question and answer was assessed with names hidden, the host's own answers included, on
four things from 1 to 5:
directness (does it answer the question asked), coherence (do the ideas follow),
precision (concrete details and clear references), compression (says a lot per word). The weighted
mix (30/30/25/15) is the exchange score. A person's published score averages their exchange
scores on raw tape only, at least 8 of them, shrunk toward the cohort mean.
Full method →
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q For people that don't know, what is the biggest difference between your engines and the other engines that are on the market?
A Um, well, I think our engines are very much designed for the Neutron vehicle, and, um, you know, it is a reusable launch vehicle at its heart, so what that means is, um, our approach to engine design is slightly different than an expendable engine, because an expendable engine, you know, it needs to run for a 190 seconds on the first stage, say, and then it never needs to run again. Whereas, you know, a reusable vehicle, especially the way we're doing it, we want it to just run and run and run and run. So, you know, the qualification, um, burn time for an Archimedes engine is one hour. So the engine, you know, has to do 40 starts and run for one hour. And whereas, you know, Rutherford for Electron, because it's a single use engine, like its qualification or its, you know, acceptance test is, is like five minutes.
AI assessment note: “our approach to engine design is slightly different than an expendable engine”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q So what kind of decisions did you make there?
A Well, I mean, I made a constraint in the very early part of the program where I think I lost a lot of credibility with the engineers, and I, and I said, look guys, we need to be able to turn this vehicle in 24 hours, which is, I'll admit, is a stupid constraint, but what that constraint did is it, it drove a whole bunch of really, really important design decisions like, you know, propellants, engine lights, um, you know, you know, structures. The Hungry Hippo fairing came out of that. Because it's like, guys, we don't have, you've got 24 hours to fish a fairing out of the ocean, recondition it, blow all the salt water out of it, and get it back on a rocket. It's like, that's not going to work. So, you know, that one, that one, you know, requirement drove the design for the Hungry Hippo fairing, so we never throw away a fairing. So sometimes you've got to be cruel to be nice, and that was, that was an example where we put this unrealistic constraint on the team, but it drove a whole lot of goodness everywhere out, you know, throughout the vehicle.
AI assessment note: “I made a constraint... we need to be able to turn this vehicle in 24 hours”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.60
Q Well, I guess before we get there, you went public before other space companies, one of them that recently went public. I don't know if you know SpaceX. I heard of them. Well, what was it like, and why did you make the decision? Well, what was the process, and why did you choose to go public when you did?
A Yeah, so, um, for a number of reasons. One, um, you know, if you can reach a certain level of maturity and go public, um, the capital markets enable you to do things you couldn't do in private markets. Buying Iridium. Like we could have never, ever done that as a private company. So, um, you know, it was, it was the right time for us to become a public company. And then the other part of it, which is a little bit selfish is I didn't want to build a space company that just lives for the lifetime that I'm running it. It needed to be multi-generational and go on and on and on and on. And being a public company really enforces that discipline of profitability and profitability is survival. You know, the, the rockets and satellites, and it's all cool, but at the end of the day, it's all for nothing if your economics aren't there and you're not comfortable.
AI assessment note: “the capital markets enable you to do things you couldn't do in private markets”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.60
Q Why did you make that acquisition, and how does that change the future state of the company?
A Yeah, it's funny because I thought everybody would have picked that well early, right? Um, and I was, I was surprised that people were surprised that we would be doing that because if you just think about it logically and you stand back and you go, okay, what is the biggest TAM in the space industry? It's comms. Okay. If you ignore broadband because, you know, two really well capitalized people are taking care of that. If you ignore broadband, what's the next logical thing to do in comms? And it's like, you know, safety critical, defense critical services. That is Iridium. And, you know, it's a super quintessential Rocket Lab deal. Like, we don't, we don't come with hopes and dreams and bore a big hole in the P&L. Like, Iridium, you know, adds profitability to the entity straight away. It also buys us time to put up a new constellation. So it's like, it's, it's literally the quintessential Rocket Lab deal. Like, we don't, we don't buy companies that are, like, startups that maybe they'll do something one day. It's like, you have to be Proven and successful, and then you're the right kind of target for us.
AI assessment note: “adds profitability to the entity straight away. It also buys us time”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.60
Q Can you explain what Ghost is? I found this completely fascinating.
A Yeah. So, um, uh, essentially, uh, you know, obviously we've got three launch sites, um, for, for the Electron vehicle and, uh, you know, our government customers, um, mainly around the haste missions, where we're really keen to see, um, you know, us go into very discreet locations, uh, to do some of that testing. So it sort of, it was driven from a requirement from the customer that can, can you build this mobile launch site? And, um, You know, now that we're doing Neutron where, like, even the smallest thing needs a crane, you look at an Electron launch pad and it's tiny now, so it's like moving stuff around is not a big deal for us anymore. So it's pretty, pretty elementary for us to, to build these mobile launch sites and flunk them down.
AI assessment note: “a requirement from the customer that can, can you build this mobile launch site?”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 4 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.55
Q How long did it take to design this?
A Uh, about three years, three or four years the team's been working on the engine. I mean, the initial design's quick, but, um, the, the, the challenge with a staged combustion engine is you can't, you can't separate components and then go and test them individually and then bring them together. Um, it's sort of, you know, the first time you, you hot fire an engine, uh, you have to have the turbo pump and everything on it as, as one thing. So, um, you have to be extremely hardware rich at the start of your program because you consume a lot of hardware. I mean, You know, you, you literally eat, eat engines out. Um, so, um, there was one engine hot fire that we did that very early on in the test program, the engine leaned out, and it actually just consumed the whole injector, and which was bizarre, because it was literally just a big hole left, and there was nothing left in the, of the injector, uh, and, but, you know, the, the propellants were still coming together and mixing and producing thrust, and the engine was still running just fine. Well, not just fine, but still running. So, you know, it's, it's one of those things where, um, it's very, very difficult to analyze. You've just got to test. You've just got to spend heaps of time on the engine test cell. That's why we have two test cells, like I said before, running 20 hours a day, seven days a week. So the other end of the …
AI assessment note: “about three years, three or four years the team's been working on the engine.”
