On December 17, the news from the recruitment website showed that Xiaopeng Automobile released the job recruitment announcement of "Senior Ballistic Design Engineer" on the relevant recruitment website on December 16, and the business scope of the recruitment position mainly revolved around the direction of the small rocket business.
The new car-making force that "does not do the right thing"
When everyone knows Xiaopeng through electric vehicles, they think that car building is all that Xiaopeng owns, but in fact, in addition to making cars, Xiaopeng has some other unknown businesses.
As one of the three new car-making forces, Xiaopeng Automobile's business is naturally the top priority of the entire group, but in addition, there are flying cars, intelligent machine horses and other products that are still in the research and development and experimental stage.
In the case of flying cars, the aircraft has now iterated to the sixth generation of products. As the producer of aircraft, Xiaopeng Huitian was jointly founded by Xiaopeng Automobile and Guangdong Huitian Aerospace Technology Co., Ltd. In December last year, He Xiaopeng also shared some design sketches before the second generation of Xiaopeng Huitian flying cars on Weibo, proving that Xiaopeng Automobile had a layout in the field of flight.
At the 2021 Shanghai Auto Show, Xiaopeng brought a newly upgraded fifth-generation aircraft - the Traveling X2, which has a maximum take-off weight of 560kg and an empty aircraft weight of only 360kg, officially saying that its endurance time is 35 minutes and the maximum flight speed can reach 130km/h. At the same time, the aircraft has autonomous flight path planning capabilities, through multiple sensors, the aircraft can achieve ground monitoring, no dead angle environmental perception, self-service return landing, 100 kilometers of two-way real-time communication.
In terms of commercialization, Xiaopeng Huitian announced in late October that it had received a US$500 million Series A financing, which was led by IDG Capital, Wuyuan Capital and Xiaopeng Automobile, while Sequoia China, Zhong Ding Capital, GGV Jiyuan Capital, Hillhouse Venture Capital and Yunfeng Fund chose to follow suit, with a pre-financing valuation of more than US$1 billion.
He Xiaopeng is the controlling shareholder of Xiaopeng Automobile, Huitian and Pengxing, of which Huitian is mainly engaged in the research and development, production and sales of aircraft, and Penghang is mainly engaged in the research and development of robots with human-computer interaction functions. Previously, Pengxing Intelligent Research Company also released a smart "machine horse" product, the internal code name of the product "Little White Dragon", in fact, it is already the third generation of products, which can load the weight of a 3 to 6-year-old child.
This machine horse uses the mainstream technology in the current car. For example, it has the intelligent driving technology developed by Xiaopeng Automobile full-stack, and has a perception system of vision and lidar, which can mainly move.
While other new car-making forces are focusing on car-making, Xiaopeng has expanded its business scope to the fields of flight and robotics, which makes it easy to connect He Xiaopeng with Musk.
Venturing into private rocketry?
Judging from the recruitment announcement released, Xiaopeng Automobile is recruiting "senior ballistic design engineer" and marked with the "urgent" logo, "senior ballistic design engineer" will be responsible for the overall program design of small rockets, ballistic performance numerical calculations; responsible for small rocket landing area and safety analysis; cooperate with flight tests and test data analysis work, and put forward optimization suggestions.
The position requires a master's degree or above, a major in aircraft design and ballistic design, proficient in flight mechanics, orbital mechanics, missile flight mechanics and other knowledge, with more than 3 years of relevant job experience.
From the recruitment announcement, it is not difficult to guess that Xiaopeng Automobile is ready to get involved in the field of private rockets and is ready to build rockets. From cars to rockets, there seems to be a huge industry gap, but it is not without industry precedent.
As the most successful brand in the history of electric vehicles, Tesla's founders also founded SpaceX, the world's largest private rocket launch company, while developing electric vehicles. Even in China, the national automobile brand Geely has also stepped into the field of private rockets after developing satellites, and at the beginning of this year, it hired more than 40 positions including rocket chief engineer, guidance design engineer, power engineer, rocket structure engineer, rocket chief craftsman, etc.
The layout that seems to cross the chasm is actually intrinsically linked. At present, intelligent networking and automatic driving are becoming a hot spot in the competition of global automobile companies, and are also the development trend of future automobiles. The rocket launch business is closely related to the layout of low-orbit satellites, on the one hand, the launch technology of low-orbit satellites is not too complicated, and it is also in a state that private enterprises can accept in terms of cost, on the other hand, the low-orbit satellite layout relying on rocket launch will provide high-precision positioning services for intelligent driving of automobiles, which is expected to become the competitive advantage of Xiaopeng Automobile in the future.
What is the value of the private rocket field?
In October this year, SpaceX's valuation has exceeded $100 billion, and SpaceX's high valuation has also helped "Silicon Valley Iron Man" Elon Musk become the first trillionaire in human history. Over the past 13 years, SpaceX's valuation has grown exponentially, especially in terms of light, compared to Musk's Tesla Electric Vehicle Company.
In terms of achievements, SpaceX, founded by Musk, has dominated the new commercial space industry at an astonishing rate, and beat Boeing with its leading technology in early October this year, causing NASA to announce that the two astronauts who were scheduled to fly on Boeing spacecraft will fly into space instead of SpaceX's spacecraft.
Of course, it is not accurate to summarize the value of the private rocket field with SpaceX's market value of 100 billion, because SpaceX's 100 billion US dollar market value mainly comes from the support of Starlink's business, leaving aside the dream of Mars, which is an important reason for Musk to start SpaceX.
SpaceX leadership previously estimated that StarLink's construction costs would reach $10 billion, but also believed that the network would bring the company up to $30 billion in revenue per year, and even the spaceX rocket launch business, which is currently in the global attention, cannot be compared to the former in terms of making money.
Compared with the rocket launch field, private satellites have lower technology and cost, but have more room for value. It seems that Xiaopeng Motors is preparing to venture into the field of private rockets this time, but in fact it may be aiming at small satellites in low orbit.