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I sincerely hope these folks get customers & funding to pursue this as it will only help grow the nascent industry. I'm perplexed by the economics, however. A

• ericd 12y ago
  That seems to match intuition - that there are large fixed costs involved in making a rocket of any size that can reach LEO, and that scaling up the payload wouldn't necessarily increase the R&D and other fixed costs proportionally. Then again, with increased size potentially comes nonlinearly increasing complexity requirements - multiple stages, more exotic fuels/engines, more parts to coordinate, etc. But I'm guessing LEO with these sorts of payload sizes isn't demanding enough to cause the complexity to overwhelm the fixed costs.
• e12e 12y ago
  Does anyone know how these things compare with the trusty old Russian Proton rocket (family). The only thing I can find, is that the proton can supposedly do 20000 kg to LEO, but I don't know at what cost. I'm guessing the problem is that they don't scale far enough down? [edit: Also it looks like the Russian Luna probes/satellites from the 50s and 60s had a payload of around 360(?) kg -- but perhaps whatever lanuch vehicle/method was used hasn't been brought up to date?]