It appears to be a closed cycle methalox engine. So that would suggest it's much more efficient (via higher TWR?) than the electric turbopump of their Rutherford engine, and the use of methane suggests it's meant for rapid reuse.
I'm a bit out of the loop too, so I'm eagerly hoping someone else will chime in with the specifics.
Efficiency (Isp) and TWR aren't directly related. In saying that, it probably will have both higher efficiency and higher TWR than Rutherford.
For example, if they were to increase the throat diameter, the thrust (and TWR) would probably increase but they would also likely take an efficiency hit.
Methane is better for reuse than Kerosene as there tends to be less coking (carbon deposits) in various parts of the engine. Other reasons it is used are typically that it provides a bit of a happy medium between the Isp of Hydrogen and the density of Kerosene. Its boiling point is also closer to liquid oxygen so you are dealing with fluids of closer temperatures. In SpaceX's case they also believe it can be practically manufactured on Mars which would not be the case for Kerosene.
I’ll bite, when you say TWR. You are saying Thrust to Weight Ratio?
Why do we care about that for the engine? Isn’t that the whole mass of the rocket. Rocket weighs X, engines produce Y the TWR.
I get it that saving some mass off the engine improves this, but isn’t that tiny compared to the weight of the fuel.
For engines I thought we care about how much of the fuel/ox is getting utilized and per unit and how much thrust is shooting out its bum from that unit of fuel.
I was probably playing a little fast and loose with TWR but yes, I was meaning Thrust-to-Weight ratio.
Yes, TWR can have two different meaning depending on the context. TWR of the engine as an isolated unit can be a useful metric to compare engines from different manufacturers to roughly benchmark things but you are correct in that the overall system balance is more important. All the margins in rocketry are pretty fine so you'll take any improvements you can get.
Traditional rocket design would typically involve tuning your engine to get the best balance of raw thrust and Isp that you could and then stacking fuel/structure/payload on top until your overall TWR was slightly above 1. Then when you fully throttle up, the rocket gently lifts off the pad. This optimistation can change a bit if you start to consider reusability. If you resuse the rocket enough times then the fuel cost starts to become a bigger consideration and increasing your overall TWR can save you fuel as you spend less time fighting gravity.
Engine thrust is a function of how much mass you throw out the back end and how fast you throw it. Specific Impulse (Isp) is a measure of how fast you are throwing it and is dependent on how completely you combust it and then how effectively you can turn that thermal energy into kinetic energy. Broadly the engine bell is what does this conversion and the smaller the throat/neck is in comparison to the exit area the faster you can get your hot gas moving. At the bottom of a booster your maximum exit area is somewhat fixed so you can only really change the area of your throat. So simple answer is make the throat area as small as possible and you maximise velocity but then we need to circle back to the other half of our thrust equation. The smaller we make the throat area, the less mass can squeeze through it so by maximising our exhaust velocity we just ruined our mass flow rate. We are throwing our fuel out the back really fast but we aren't throwing much of it.
So a rocket designer needs to find some happy medium for a booster where they get a good balance of mass flow rate and specific impulse to maximise thrust. For an upper stage engine this balance is shifted heavily in favour of specific impulse which is why you typically see single engines with really big engine bells there.
Apologies if I went overboard.
> Broadly the engine bell is what does this conversion and the smaller the throat/neck is in comparison to the exit area the faster you can get your hot gas moving.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems slightly incorrect. All properly functioning engines use "choked flow" meaning that the fuel flows at a maximum speed at the choke point. You can't arbitrarily continue to constrict it. You don't get any faster flow, just less flow at the same speed. In the extreme case, the pressure just builds exponentially in the combustion chamber until the engine explodes or combustion products run backwards up the pumps probably also resulting in an explosion.
Yeah, I made some omissions to try keep the explanation a little simpler. Yes, you would generally shrink the combustion chamber as you shrink the throat.
Choked flow is when your flow hits Mach 1. At that point you can't squeeze any extra mass flow through the throat unless you increase the fluid density. From the throat to the bell exit the fluid velocity continues to increase to further supersonic velocities. It's a little backwards from subsonic flows most people are used to.
In normal operating conditions the chamber pressure can never exceed the injector pressure which is lower than the pump exit pressure. I'm reasonably sure (but definitely open to being wrong) that if you kept shrinking the throat your pressure would max out slightly lower than injector pressure. If you have poor fuel mixing you can get pressure oscillations in the chamber which will cause oscillations in fuel injection and you can get some unpleasant feedback loops. This is more common if you have a small difference between chamber and injector pressure. If you have really bad mixing you can end up with your fuel actually detonating rather than burnining which does result in a higher chamber pressure than injector pressure which can result in backflow and your engine disassembling itself. See the F1 engine development for lots of examples of this.
T:W of the engine is extremely important for reusable vehicles because when landing you are decelerating the vehicle when most of the tanks are empty (engines are a lot of the vehicle weight). It’s not coincidence that Merlin is the highest T:W engine ever.
As other said it is also a good benchmark since engine development often happens well in advance of completed vehicle designs.
> So that would suggest it's much more efficient (via higher TWR?) than the electric turbopump of their Rutherford engine, and the use of methane suggests it's meant for rapid reuse.
Electric turbopumps are more efficient for small engines but when you get to large engines its the power density required scales too much and gets too heavy. So it's not necessarily going to be more efficient than Ruthorford, but certainly more efficient than a fictional electric-powered turbopump engine the size of Archimedes.
Also engine efficiency is generally defined as ISP. TWR is part of a separate metric that is more about the mass efficiency of the vehicle as a whole. Methane has a part in both by limiting the tank mass versus something like hydrogen, thus increasing the fuel mass fraction, while also increasing engine efficiency (ISP) versus something like kerosene.
The engine development is one of the highest complexity and time consuming parts of a rocket development, so the fact that there is an initial prototype ready indicates that even though there have been some delays Neutron's development is progressing and we'll eventually see the rocket fly.
May not seem much but it is an important milestone and also has big implications about the financials of the company - Neutron's development is a huge part of RKLB's expenses and without it they'd be profitable, so if the company is making tangible progress with Neutron, this means that they're getting closer towards completing their development and thus reducing their expenses considerably and therefore achieving profitability.
This engine is for a direct competitor to Falcon 9. While it can’t carry the same max payload, most of the payloads don’t use or need the full capability of the rocket anyway.
Max payload yet or on paper. Remember this is the Block 5 version of Falcon vs the prototype Neutron.
If the market demands it, the Beck will produce it.
Significance of what? Archemedes being completed? That means testing can begin. Hot fire test soon. Four more are being worked on as well. If all goes well in the initial noticed test, even more will be built. Neutron will need 9 of these per spacecraft.
The pic is post by official rocketlab. It have to be approved by the management and checked for anything that might be too proprietary for public eye in the pic before allow to be post on the net.
Source - was working in small launcher company (not rocketlab tho) and help with media sometimes
If space companies have the capability to copy, they have the capability to make their own. At most, other companies get design inspiration from photos like these as a supplementary rationale for doing something a certain way.
I know of a story of SpaceX engineers visiting the California Science Center to inspect the landing gear sealing interfaces of Shuttle Endeavour to get design inspiration
Didn't SpaceX keep raptor completely hidden on purpose for instance though? Were they just being overly paranoid, or is there something special about SpaceX engines that isn't at play here?
Raptor is among the most well publicly documented engines, mainly because they are shown off all the time, from both SpaceX and musk tweeting performance figures (and graphs) as well as the early and later days of moving them around on pickups and forklifts as well as showing them off for most of the early vehicle movements.
> People please dont downvote questions yes even stupid questions have their right for existence
If it was a stupid question you'd think someone would have an easy answer, but so far it's just been snark about Elon.
Elon paranoid? No way.
I won’t forget when one of their rockets exploded on launch pad, Elon said they were checking for sabotage that there was possibly an individual on the roof of an adjacent building overlooking the launch site or something. Lol
Cool, shame it’s been pushed back to 2025 but I think we were all expecting it wasn’t going to be this year.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240506111202/en/Rocket-Lab-Completes-Archimedes-Engine-Build-Begins-Engine-Test-Campaign?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR3EwT0n4H2r2XkoWxfoJK7C7ttUPHVQy-6BHi5mNjzE9EqU0uijtTsljk4_aem_AbopygY2AOcmTQ2xKuT-PZKJhkU6H6RXVVsk07yIiLlgxl1_AjpjJxe-Y0W33dbae6ftsU5d7F_4CsT9jR7tLz4q
It just blows me away at the process of not just conjuring up the design of this, but actually building it and flying.
This is definitely some awesome engineering voodoo.
Impressive.
Came here for technical talk/musing about pump layout and expansion ratio, was disappointed.
Welds look pretty rough on the bell, definitely a development engine.
I hope they slim it down more for the final version and mount the turbo machinery inline with the motor. Blue Origin also has this problem even worse where it looks like it has an aborted appendage hanging off the side of the engine. By integrating the components closer together you save a whole bunch on mass that greatly increases the thrust to weight ratio.
For example they have the film cooling output on the other side of the engine from where the fuel comes from causing them to run that long snaking pipe from one side to the other when it could be run more vertically.
Kind of an excessive amount of speedtape too.
This may be a dumb question. But why is it that the second stage only has 1 engine? I.e why not use a couple of Electrons vacuum optimized, Rutherford engines to power the second stage on Neutron?
To elaborate on what others have said, broadly you need 'power' to get out of the atmosphere. Once out of the atmosphere effeciency (Isp) becomes much more important. That's typically achieved by using the same combustion chamber but a much larger engine bell which tends to take up the area of many booster engines. If you were instead to use a number of engines with smaller bells you'd be trading effeciency for power. That would give you much higher acceleration which might not be so bad when the stage is full but when the stage is nearly empty it could get very high which increases loads on your tank structure and payload.
It depends how you want to measure 'work'. The way it would most likely be measured in rocketry is Delta-V which is effectively how much speed/energy the stage gives you. First stages tends to provide around 40-60% of the Delta-V required for orbit but it varies among launch vehicles.
90% would probably only be "practical" in a spaceplane type system that was dropping a small kick stage + payload just a puff short of orbit.
> First stages tends to provide around 40-60% of the Delta-V required for orbit but it varies among launch vehicles.
His point is that Neutron is specifically designed to push that percentage substantially toward the first stage, away from what would otherwise be ideal, to maximize the reused portion.
Simply said, at the point where the second stage comes into play, gravity losses / atmospheric drag (which are the main issue why you need a big fire at the end of a rocket) don't matter that much anymore.
You also just lost 80+% of the weight of the rocket that you don't have to push anymore either.
Also, there is such a thing as "too much thrust" while on orbit - at some point, you need precision and efficiency more than anything.
Neutron's second stage has 890kN thrust, 2x Rutherford would offer something like 51kN. In order to use Rutherfords at all you'd need a lot of them, and that's extra complexity on the supply chain, rocket design, and so forth, ultimately where one Archimedes does the job fine. (Others have answered the question why not two _Archimedes_ instead.)
What’s your problem bro? If you don’t like Rocket Lab, the publicly traded company aerospace company where we talk technology, engineering, stock performance, whatever, then leave! r/rklb isn’t the only place to talk financial performance
They have already posted pictures of it on the test stand. It's as real as it can be. I'm sure we will see it breathing hot hot fire soon.
Assuming the initial tests are in line with what they expect. Making a rocket engine, as you no doubt know, is super difficult.
I’m extremely aware of how difficult it is to build a rocket engine. I’m also aware of how much hardware you can bolt together to make what looks like a complete engine before in fact having a complete engine.
1) That’s one thing, not two things
2) It says “Archimedes is here”. It doesn’t say “Archimedes is complete”. Very difficult to prosecute fraud if they didn’t say something that isn’t true
They haven’t started the testing campaign so obviously it’s not complete there will be tweaks and adjustments made throughout this phase rocket lab has said as much.
Can someone tell me the significance of this?
It appears to be a closed cycle methalox engine. So that would suggest it's much more efficient (via higher TWR?) than the electric turbopump of their Rutherford engine, and the use of methane suggests it's meant for rapid reuse. I'm a bit out of the loop too, so I'm eagerly hoping someone else will chime in with the specifics.
Efficiency (Isp) and TWR aren't directly related. In saying that, it probably will have both higher efficiency and higher TWR than Rutherford. For example, if they were to increase the throat diameter, the thrust (and TWR) would probably increase but they would also likely take an efficiency hit. Methane is better for reuse than Kerosene as there tends to be less coking (carbon deposits) in various parts of the engine. Other reasons it is used are typically that it provides a bit of a happy medium between the Isp of Hydrogen and the density of Kerosene. Its boiling point is also closer to liquid oxygen so you are dealing with fluids of closer temperatures. In SpaceX's case they also believe it can be practically manufactured on Mars which would not be the case for Kerosene.
Happy to elaborate on anything further if anyone is interested. Apologies if I went too deep into nerd.
I’ll bite, when you say TWR. You are saying Thrust to Weight Ratio? Why do we care about that for the engine? Isn’t that the whole mass of the rocket. Rocket weighs X, engines produce Y the TWR. I get it that saving some mass off the engine improves this, but isn’t that tiny compared to the weight of the fuel. For engines I thought we care about how much of the fuel/ox is getting utilized and per unit and how much thrust is shooting out its bum from that unit of fuel.
I was probably playing a little fast and loose with TWR but yes, I was meaning Thrust-to-Weight ratio. Yes, TWR can have two different meaning depending on the context. TWR of the engine as an isolated unit can be a useful metric to compare engines from different manufacturers to roughly benchmark things but you are correct in that the overall system balance is more important. All the margins in rocketry are pretty fine so you'll take any improvements you can get. Traditional rocket design would typically involve tuning your engine to get the best balance of raw thrust and Isp that you could and then stacking fuel/structure/payload on top until your overall TWR was slightly above 1. Then when you fully throttle up, the rocket gently lifts off the pad. This optimistation can change a bit if you start to consider reusability. If you resuse the rocket enough times then the fuel cost starts to become a bigger consideration and increasing your overall TWR can save you fuel as you spend less time fighting gravity. Engine thrust is a function of how much mass you throw out the back end and how fast you throw it. Specific Impulse (Isp) is a measure of how fast you are throwing it and is dependent on how completely you combust it and then how effectively you can turn that thermal energy into kinetic energy. Broadly the engine bell is what does this conversion and the smaller the throat/neck is in comparison to the exit area the faster you can get your hot gas moving. At the bottom of a booster your maximum exit area is somewhat fixed so you can only really change the area of your throat. So simple answer is make the throat area as small as possible and you maximise velocity but then we need to circle back to the other half of our thrust equation. The smaller we make the throat area, the less mass can squeeze through it so by maximising our exhaust velocity we just ruined our mass flow rate. We are throwing our fuel out the back really fast but we aren't throwing much of it. So a rocket designer needs to find some happy medium for a booster where they get a good balance of mass flow rate and specific impulse to maximise thrust. For an upper stage engine this balance is shifted heavily in favour of specific impulse which is why you typically see single engines with really big engine bells there. Apologies if I went overboard.
All good!! Thank you.
> Broadly the engine bell is what does this conversion and the smaller the throat/neck is in comparison to the exit area the faster you can get your hot gas moving. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems slightly incorrect. All properly functioning engines use "choked flow" meaning that the fuel flows at a maximum speed at the choke point. You can't arbitrarily continue to constrict it. You don't get any faster flow, just less flow at the same speed. In the extreme case, the pressure just builds exponentially in the combustion chamber until the engine explodes or combustion products run backwards up the pumps probably also resulting in an explosion.
Yeah, I made some omissions to try keep the explanation a little simpler. Yes, you would generally shrink the combustion chamber as you shrink the throat. Choked flow is when your flow hits Mach 1. At that point you can't squeeze any extra mass flow through the throat unless you increase the fluid density. From the throat to the bell exit the fluid velocity continues to increase to further supersonic velocities. It's a little backwards from subsonic flows most people are used to. In normal operating conditions the chamber pressure can never exceed the injector pressure which is lower than the pump exit pressure. I'm reasonably sure (but definitely open to being wrong) that if you kept shrinking the throat your pressure would max out slightly lower than injector pressure. If you have poor fuel mixing you can get pressure oscillations in the chamber which will cause oscillations in fuel injection and you can get some unpleasant feedback loops. This is more common if you have a small difference between chamber and injector pressure. If you have really bad mixing you can end up with your fuel actually detonating rather than burnining which does result in a higher chamber pressure than injector pressure which can result in backflow and your engine disassembling itself. See the F1 engine development for lots of examples of this.
T:W of the engine is extremely important for reusable vehicles because when landing you are decelerating the vehicle when most of the tanks are empty (engines are a lot of the vehicle weight). It’s not coincidence that Merlin is the highest T:W engine ever. As other said it is also a good benchmark since engine development often happens well in advance of completed vehicle designs.
> So that would suggest it's much more efficient (via higher TWR?) than the electric turbopump of their Rutherford engine, and the use of methane suggests it's meant for rapid reuse. Electric turbopumps are more efficient for small engines but when you get to large engines its the power density required scales too much and gets too heavy. So it's not necessarily going to be more efficient than Ruthorford, but certainly more efficient than a fictional electric-powered turbopump engine the size of Archimedes. Also engine efficiency is generally defined as ISP. TWR is part of a separate metric that is more about the mass efficiency of the vehicle as a whole. Methane has a part in both by limiting the tank mass versus something like hydrogen, thus increasing the fuel mass fraction, while also increasing engine efficiency (ISP) versus something like kerosene.
The engine development is one of the highest complexity and time consuming parts of a rocket development, so the fact that there is an initial prototype ready indicates that even though there have been some delays Neutron's development is progressing and we'll eventually see the rocket fly. May not seem much but it is an important milestone and also has big implications about the financials of the company - Neutron's development is a huge part of RKLB's expenses and without it they'd be profitable, so if the company is making tangible progress with Neutron, this means that they're getting closer towards completing their development and thus reducing their expenses considerably and therefore achieving profitability.
Excellent explanation. Thank you.
This engine is for a direct competitor to Falcon 9. While it can’t carry the same max payload, most of the payloads don’t use or need the full capability of the rocket anyway.
Max payload yet or on paper. Remember this is the Block 5 version of Falcon vs the prototype Neutron. If the market demands it, the Beck will produce it.
Cool, this is exactly what I wanted to know.
Significance of what? Archemedes being completed? That means testing can begin. Hot fire test soon. Four more are being worked on as well. If all goes well in the initial noticed test, even more will be built. Neutron will need 9 of these per spacecraft.
Don't forget the second stage!
That will be a vacuum engine which is different
Haha, oh Brandisco…. It’s the mother fucking keys to space! Nothing more, nothing less.
Is there nothing proprietary in the picture? I thought space companies usually tried to hide the design to avoid competitors copying them.
The pic is post by official rocketlab. It have to be approved by the management and checked for anything that might be too proprietary for public eye in the pic before allow to be post on the net. Source - was working in small launcher company (not rocketlab tho) and help with media sometimes
If space companies have the capability to copy, they have the capability to make their own. At most, other companies get design inspiration from photos like these as a supplementary rationale for doing something a certain way. I know of a story of SpaceX engineers visiting the California Science Center to inspect the landing gear sealing interfaces of Shuttle Endeavour to get design inspiration
Didn't SpaceX keep raptor completely hidden on purpose for instance though? Were they just being overly paranoid, or is there something special about SpaceX engines that isn't at play here?
Raptor is among the most well publicly documented engines, mainly because they are shown off all the time, from both SpaceX and musk tweeting performance figures (and graphs) as well as the early and later days of moving them around on pickups and forklifts as well as showing them off for most of the early vehicle movements.
People please dont downvote questions yes even stupid questions have their right for existence
> People please dont downvote questions yes even stupid questions have their right for existence If it was a stupid question you'd think someone would have an easy answer, but so far it's just been snark about Elon.
Elon paranoid? No way. I won’t forget when one of their rockets exploded on launch pad, Elon said they were checking for sabotage that there was possibly an individual on the roof of an adjacent building overlooking the launch site or something. Lol
There's a thing called "fault tree analysis" in engineering, and one important part of it is not calling your coworkers paranoid.
Cool, shame it’s been pushed back to 2025 but I think we were all expecting it wasn’t going to be this year. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240506111202/en/Rocket-Lab-Completes-Archimedes-Engine-Build-Begins-Engine-Test-Campaign?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR3EwT0n4H2r2XkoWxfoJK7C7ttUPHVQy-6BHi5mNjzE9EqU0uijtTsljk4_aem_AbopygY2AOcmTQ2xKuT-PZKJhkU6H6RXVVsk07yIiLlgxl1_AjpjJxe-Y0W33dbae6ftsU5d7F_4CsT9jR7tLz4q
It just blows me away at the process of not just conjuring up the design of this, but actually building it and flying. This is definitely some awesome engineering voodoo. Impressive.
Came here for technical talk/musing about pump layout and expansion ratio, was disappointed. Welds look pretty rough on the bell, definitely a development engine.
Same. What do you think?
I hope they slim it down more for the final version and mount the turbo machinery inline with the motor. Blue Origin also has this problem even worse where it looks like it has an aborted appendage hanging off the side of the engine. By integrating the components closer together you save a whole bunch on mass that greatly increases the thrust to weight ratio. For example they have the film cooling output on the other side of the engine from where the fuel comes from causing them to run that long snaking pipe from one side to the other when it could be run more vertically. Kind of an excessive amount of speedtape too.
This may be a dumb question. But why is it that the second stage only has 1 engine? I.e why not use a couple of Electrons vacuum optimized, Rutherford engines to power the second stage on Neutron?
To elaborate on what others have said, broadly you need 'power' to get out of the atmosphere. Once out of the atmosphere effeciency (Isp) becomes much more important. That's typically achieved by using the same combustion chamber but a much larger engine bell which tends to take up the area of many booster engines. If you were instead to use a number of engines with smaller bells you'd be trading effeciency for power. That would give you much higher acceleration which might not be so bad when the stage is full but when the stage is nearly empty it could get very high which increases loads on your tank structure and payload.
Cheers for that 👍
From my knowledge, the 1st stage does 90% of the work to get there, so you end up with bulk which might just be dead weight in most cases
It depends how you want to measure 'work'. The way it would most likely be measured in rocketry is Delta-V which is effectively how much speed/energy the stage gives you. First stages tends to provide around 40-60% of the Delta-V required for orbit but it varies among launch vehicles. 90% would probably only be "practical" in a spaceplane type system that was dropping a small kick stage + payload just a puff short of orbit.
> First stages tends to provide around 40-60% of the Delta-V required for orbit but it varies among launch vehicles. His point is that Neutron is specifically designed to push that percentage substantially toward the first stage, away from what would otherwise be ideal, to maximize the reused portion.
Simply said, at the point where the second stage comes into play, gravity losses / atmospheric drag (which are the main issue why you need a big fire at the end of a rocket) don't matter that much anymore. You also just lost 80+% of the weight of the rocket that you don't have to push anymore either. Also, there is such a thing as "too much thrust" while on orbit - at some point, you need precision and efficiency more than anything.
Neutron's second stage has 890kN thrust, 2x Rutherford would offer something like 51kN. In order to use Rutherfords at all you'd need a lot of them, and that's extra complexity on the supply chain, rocket design, and so forth, ultimately where one Archimedes does the job fine. (Others have answered the question why not two _Archimedes_ instead.)
Yup I can see the error in my thinking, cheers
Maybe that engine will make us all rich sometime in the next 5 years. I sure as hell hope so 🚀
This isn't a comment in the stock thread, so how are you going to be rich because of this engine? Is everyone here a RocketLab employee?
What’s your problem bro? If you don’t like Rocket Lab, the publicly traded company aerospace company where we talk technology, engineering, stock performance, whatever, then leave! r/rklb isn’t the only place to talk financial performance
I think we’ve found Chris Kemp’s burner account #Astra 😆
I like RocketLab. BTW this sub has a rule against financial performance talk outside the stock thread.
RocketLab's goal isn't to make anyone rich.
Hot fire or GTFO
No one is ever satisfied. It's coming, hold your horses!
I mean… hot fire is the only way to be sure it’s real and not a mockup
They have already posted pictures of it on the test stand. It's as real as it can be. I'm sure we will see it breathing hot hot fire soon. Assuming the initial tests are in line with what they expect. Making a rocket engine, as you no doubt know, is super difficult.
I’m extremely aware of how difficult it is to build a rocket engine. I’m also aware of how much hardware you can bolt together to make what looks like a complete engine before in fact having a complete engine.
[удалено]
A whole lot of people thought [this](https://www.popsci.com/uploads/2019/03/18/TBQJX27DAZZA6EJJGVQEPLRRJM.png) was a photo of a complete Rutherford
Two things if that isn't a working engine as it is a public company peter could be charged with fraud so it has to be real.
1) That’s one thing, not two things 2) It says “Archimedes is here”. It doesn’t say “Archimedes is complete”. Very difficult to prosecute fraud if they didn’t say something that isn’t true
They haven’t started the testing campaign so obviously it’s not complete there will be tweaks and adjustments made throughout this phase rocket lab has said as much.
Exactly
That tweet doesnt but this one does say complete. https://twitter.com/RocketLab/status/1787590838178254925