Ok, so I looked these clowns up and you might wanna strap in gorg, because it's coconuts. It's bananas. It's a full fruit salad.
Ok so basically they're a Californian-Swedish company with headquarters and manufacturing in Bishop, CA, which is a tiny town in the high desert about an hour's drive from Edwards Air Force Base.
The rocket that the monster in the video is presumably a test article for is called Eiger, which is a 2-stage smallsat rocket that can take 150kg to orbit. It's powered by 9 Astrex engines, which use nitric acid and furfuryl alcohol.
From the looks of that interstage, I think it hot-stages, but they're pretty sparse on the details. What they do claim is that it's 100% reusable. That claim is questionable to say the least.
For starters, there's a complete lack of any recovery hardware whatsoever on either stage in the renders, and no mention of it on the website.
But the test article in the video is definitely a hopper, so I assume they want to propulsively land the thing. Which I seriously doubt they can do, considering that the larger Electron doesn't have the propellant margin to do that, and keralox has much better performance.
"But what about the second stage?" Well, here's where it really goes off the rails. These guys have Martian ambitions. And the second stages are supposed to be repurposed into modules for an interplanetary transport.
Here's their proposal. Little tiny artificial gravity spaceship made of spent upper stages. The first of many problems I forsee with this configuration is how toxic the fuels that was in those tanks is. If there's ANY residue, your crew is going to have a bad time.
And those little cones on either end? Those are the landers. And these things are nuts. They serve as propulsion for the ship, and use the same engines as the rocket.
They're expendable (as they ditch most of their aero shielding on takeoff), and they use, get this, UNPRESSURIZED COCKPITS.
ON MARS.
They're seriously building the monstrosity that Mark Watney cobbled together in The Martian to get the 𝚫V he needed, but as the primary system.
I forsee absolutely zero issues with this approach.
UPDATE:
@BingoBoca you might enjoy this:
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.