Welllll.... Remember this? How a bunch of clever kids at Ames grabbed a '60s vintage rocket motor out of the warehouse and scanned it and rebuilt parts and examined blueprints and stuff to try and reverse-engineer what we've lost in documentation? Orbital is straight-up using Soviet surplus. This is the equivalent of taking an AH-56 out of mothballs because there's a shortage of S-72s to get your executives out to the oil rig. It's not going to end well. “Their rocket honestly sounds like the punchline to a joke,” said Elon Musk, founder of rival SpaceX, in an interview in 2012. “It uses Russian rocket engines that were made in the 60s. I don’t mean their design is from the 60s — I mean they start with engines that were literally made in the 60s and, like, packed away in Siberia somewhere.”