Rocket Lab Inaugurates The Era Of Even Cheaper Rocket Launches (bloomberg.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday July 2, 2017 @05:34AM from the frugal-frontiers dept.

pacopico writes: Elon Musk and SpaceX kicked off the New Space era with low-cost, reusable rockets. But now there's something just as dramatic brewing with really, really cheap rockets and really, really cheap satellites. Bloomberg has just profiled Peter Beck, a self-taught rocket engineer from New Zealand, who has built a $5 million rocket that will be taking cubesats [miniaturized satellites] from Planet Labs and others to space in the next few weeks. The story talks about a new type of computing shell being built around the Earth and all the players trying to fill it up.

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They haven't succeeded yet - first try failed. by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-02 06:49 · Score: 2, Informative

Their first try didn't make orbit. Oh, they are somewhat legit, but I wouldn't celebrate too much until they've proved to have solved the problem and orbited something.
Granted, it took four tries for Mr. Musk to get there and even the Chinese government and all their resources just welped their second Long March 5 launch - space is hard and all that. Still, Rocket Labs still has some ways to go before they are a legit launch provider.