logoalt Hacker News

londons_exploretoday at 2:41 PM2 repliesview on HN

If you do all the work in India, you have low materials costs and low labour costs.


Replies

zbentleytoday at 3:11 PM

Somewhat, but rocket engineering has some upward cost pressures that offset the savings from being in India: expertise is expensive even adjusting for the cost of labor (many staff are likely competing on salary with the rest of the world--rocket engineers/scientists are in high demand with lots of likely sponsors for immigration); aerospace materials/fabrication have a pretty global supply and patent chain even given how big and diverse India's industrial base is; safety and engineering tolerances are incentivized to meet global standards (many prospective launch/payload customers and investors are international), and so on.

I'm no expert, but I suspect that even if you apply a generous discount for being in India, Skyroot's economics are still quite impressive.

Edits: clarity

show 3 replies
bell-cottoday at 3:05 PM

True, but:

Consider how many rocket development efforts squandered 10X to 100X the money, and >8 years, without making it to orbit.

Using solid fuel for their first 3 stages also makes it far easier. I'd take that as evidence of their management wisely picking a good shape for the org's learning curve. Vs. chasing the long-odds bragging rights & likely heartbreaks of a liquid-fuels-only version 1.0.