Vector Announces “Pause” in Operations Due to Change in Financing
August 9, 2019
In response to a significant change in financing, Vector Launch Inc (Vector) announced today that it is undertaking a pause of operations. A core team is evaluating options on completing the development of the company’s Vector-R small launch vehicle, while also supporting the Air Force and other government agencies on programs such as the recent ASLON-45 award.
The company plans to make more information available next week.
Vector Launch
15 responses to “Vector Announces “Pause” in Operations Due to Change in Financing”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Vector was very well funded. They had substantial infusions of cash, Pima county paid for a very substantial production facility nestled between Tucson International Airport, Raytheon, and Global View. They also received substantial government investment in a very well done rocket test stand located at Pinal Air Park. Not to mention the spaceports. Vector suffered from the same malfunction that plagued the entire space startup movement that sprung from the Space Access crowd. Namely the mismatch between expectations of investors the over-promising of the founders (as they are encouraged to do, business is all about irrational advocacy for the enterprise.) vs the engineering realities and difficulties of the problem of reaching orbit. Vector took more than they could handle. They were given free spaceports, factories, and test facilities but those require liaison with local and state governments, there are utilities to pay, and people to sweep the floors. All that free equipment costs money. Yes you can borrow money against it, it can serve a purpose. But in the end they never got their engine working. They should have kept a minimal team of 5 or 6 and stayed at FAR until that engine was set in stone and reliable. Instead they opened a chop shop in Tucson made up of hobbyist car hot rodders who were entirely the wrong set of people to start with. When they actually started to design a real vehicle they were really starting from scratch. I’d love to see a nice comparison between investment into, and actions taken between RocketLab and Vector.
This is the sort of thing that always happens during what I like to call “The Era of Wonderful Nonsense” that accompanies pretty much any entrepreneurial gold rush in pursuit of the latest technological “new thing.” It happened with cars, aircraft, television sets, personal computers, other consumer electronics of various kinds – especially TV recording and playback technology – and much else besides. Over the decades there have been hundreds of companies that failed to get their engineering feet properly situated under them before attempting an ultimately failed jump to the big-time. If making it big with new technology was easy, everyone would do it – and everybody doesn’t.
I don’t think Vector ever broke ground in Tucson on the “very substantial production” factory. They’re still in a rented warehouse space. As recently as May 2019, aerial photos of the proposed factory site show that not even a road was cut to planned location. You can’t find the fancy fly-through video they released on their website, or any photos of the factory.
The day of the explosion at World View, I drove over to see if there was any visible damage, and it seemed that there was a new building, I assumed, was the Vector facility. I’ll drive over in the next week and see if I can verify whether the the new factory is up or not. So you’re saying they’re still at the 17th St space? The Bowery Brewery is a great place to eat and drink at, I would not blame them for not leaving. 🙂
Please report what you find. I am going by Google Earth plus the Tucson Aerospace Research Campus flyer: https://www.suncorridorinc….. Would be interested to know where all the Vector cash was burned. Stories about 50-120 employees don’t make sense either. What were they doing?
PS: The Google Earth map last update says it was May, 2019. Seems odd that World View also doesn’t show on the map view either. I guess we need more earth observation satellites……..
Or an observer on the Earth. 🙂
Has anything tangible ever come out of the Space Access crowd? Lots of loud talk for couple decades
Thanks for sharing your insights. Very interesting that Vector and RocketLab were close at investment levels before RocketLab’s first launch. Keep in mind RocketLab went for an advanced structure. I agree with your insights.
You said “… What about PTScientists??”. Does this mean “What about Planetary Scientists?”.
I think Francesco was referring to Part-Time Scientists, one of the Google Lunar X-Prize teams.
Oh, thanks! … I don’t know… I have some reading to do.
If this is the end of Vector, that’s too bad – especially if it was a Potemkin Village from the get-go. If so, I suppose someone might even have a ‘Bad Blood’-type book out about Vector in a year or two. Lord knows the rocketry field has had a lot of All Hat and No Cattle outfits over the years. The vast majority of the “teams” vying for the original Ansari X-Prize certainly qualified. There have been others since.
It’s equally true that hype is, to some extent, anyway, a factor in the success of certain companies. Virgin Galactic was a creature of hype from the first and remains so as its main success has, thus far, been in simply staying alive for well over a decade, most of which passed without much visible sign of forward progress. It’s ultimate success or failure, indeed, is still very much yet to be determined. The company’s main asset has been hype-master-in-chief Richard Branson.
SpaceX and Tesla are different cases mainly in that the engineering was worthy of the hype fairly early on. Less than two years after its founding, SpaceX had a trailer with a Falcon 1 on it parked on the National Mall in DC for an early press event at the National Air & Space Museum where Elon also announced the subsequently abandoned and leapfrogged Falcon 5.
Tesla was also accompanied by more than a bit of horn-tooting in its early days. But Tesla’s technology was good and constantly getting better and it also weathered the transition from artisanal to assembly line production that had fatally flummoxed so many previous new car companies including DeLorean.
All Elon Musk’s companies have been Silicon Valley companies even if they were not, as with SpaceX, physically headquartered there. Hype is part of the culture there and Musk has always been cognizant of its uses. Unlike many others, he has always been able to back his brags – if not always on the originally announced schedules.
So hype, per se, is not a good index of whether or not a company is shell or substance or a good marker of future success or failure either. I covered the Comdex shows in Vegas in the early 80’s and well recall how some hot new PC company would have a display area best measured in acreage rather than square feet one year and be bankrupt and absent the next. NewSpace is hardly unique in this respect.
Hype has another name. Propaganda. Powerful people in all systems do it. It’s part of the human personality cult, of which you are an energetic adherent. Vector started off as a split personality. Garvey had a decent technical base from which the Vector was supposed to evolve from. Cantrell was the carnival barker who mistook his own clouds for substance and commanded the company to create more of what he considered substantive. The balance between hard technical progress and propaganda is hard for humans to achieve. No matter the company, no matter economic system. Even Space X does not have it. Elon’s breaking of the carbon winding tool and the slipshod construction we see being made on beaches is in my opinion a equating of a personality cult with substance. Vector was not getting the kind of help SpaceX got from ex LM, Boeing, NASA and ULA employees. Falcon 1 was a sane design influenced and helped along by the establishment. Vector was also sane, but it was playing with the absolute bottom of the paylaod range which itself is a very risky design approach. Additionally they had little help from established aerospace. My bet is Cantrell was/is a powerful personality who was able to carry along employees, politicians, and investors for a very long ride. Beck comes across as a much more balanced individual. My bet is as we learn more history I expect Beck to be a successful turtle.
Propaganda is lies. Hype is puffery. There is a difference.
You really are fixated on that big mandrel aren’t you?
What I see as a gutsy engineering move, you see as psychological dysfunction. I imagine you see it that way because the alternative, that Musk really is as exceptional as he seems to be – and SpaceX along with him – is simply not permitted by your academic leftist worldview.
That is also part and parcel of your long-running campaign of denial that SpaceX has done anything all that extraordinary and that, to the extent it has, it’s because of all the ex-NASA, ULA, Boeing, LockMart, etc. people it picked up. That is a view you seem to share with RGO – that there are a few real places that know everything and nobody else can possibly do anything without their help.
SpaceX has certainly cherry-picked a few genuine stars from legacy aerospace, but the vast majority of its engineers have been, and continue to be, new grads from good schools.
As for “slipshod construction,” it looks positively clean and antiseptic compared to what goes on in the average shipyard. Stainless steel as the basic construction material accounts for the difference. The most “slipshod” thing – Starhopper – has already been shown to work as intended. I see no reason to doubt the full-scale Starships’ capability to do likewise. It seems we are likely to find out, one way or the other, fairly soon.
I did a post a few years back on how I would do it if I suddenly ran into serious money. I am an inventor and build some of the small construction equipment in my company. In rocketry, I think I have a better turbopump concept, compensating nozzle, highly throttleable injectors, etc. When I said I would park most of the money in safe investments while finding out which, if any, of the game changing ideas worked, most of the responses were “go all in” or basically “damn the torpedoes”. People mostly couldn’t seem to relate to the idea of scout before commit. After all, I could be wrong on every single item, and still be solvent if cautious.
Did the Air Force announce the ASLON-45 contract award, or was it announced by Vector? Was that just more hype or wishful thinking?