[[Home|🏠]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> [[Interviews]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> July 9 2020 **Insider**: [[Peter Beck]] **Source**: [Australian Youth Aerospace Association](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jOy_Ws3QJY) **Date**: July 9 2020  🔗 Backup Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jOy_Ws3QJY ## 🎙️ Transcript >[!hint] Transcript may contain errors or inaccuracies. **Annie Honma:** Good evening, welcome to this special live Q&A with Peter Beck, the CEO of Rocket Lab. My name is Annie Honma, and this evening I will be asking all of your questions to Peter, assisted by Megan and Reilly who are crewing our Mission Control. If you've got a question, type it in the chat and we will do our very best to get to it. This is the second live event put on as part of Aerospace Futures Online by the Australian Youth Aerospace Association. To learn more about the AYAA and Aerospace Features, head to ayaa.com.au, and while you're at it, subscribe to this YouTube channel to get access to all future online content. Now, Peter hardly needs an introduction, but just in case any aliens have wandered in this afternoon: Rocket Lab is a private aerospace manufacturer and small sat launch service provider with headquarters in the US and operations in the US and New Zealand. Peter, welcome and thank you so much for being here. ### Peter's Background and Passion for Space **Annie Honma:** Let's kick off by asking you to tell us about yourself. How did you get interested in space? **Peter Beck:** I've always been fascinated with space for as long as I can remember. I would go outside as a child and look up at the night sky. I remember Halley's Comet coming over—that probably dates me—but everything around that time was just incredibly fascinating. I built a telescope at a very early age and just kept on fueling that passion. The other passion I had was engineering, and when you combine space with engineering, you kind of naturally gravitate towards a launch vehicle at some point. So it was almost precoded that that was a likely outcome. I started building rockets when I was at school and built little engines. Started off with hybrid solids, hydrogen peroxide liquids, and they got bigger and more complicated. It really got to the point where I felt like I could do something with it, and ultimately I went to the US on a bit of a rocket pilgrimage, and that was a catalyst for coming home and starting Rocket Lab. ### Rocket Lab's Growth and Future **Annie Honma:** What an inspiring story that is. I wonder if you could tell us a bit more about Rocket Lab itself. How's the company grown under your leadership, and where do you see it going in the next few years or the next decade? **Peter Beck:** I started the company in 2007, but we really started the Electron program, which is the small sat launcher, in 2013 or 2014-ish. So it was a relatively quick development program. First launch was in 2017, first commercial launch in 2018. We really started out by solving what we thought was the biggest problem, and that was access to space, especially for small spacecraft. We set out trying to build a small launch vehicle for doing dedicated small launch for the small satellite community. As it stands today, we've flown 13 times, 11 successful flights, 11 in a row. At the end of last year, we were the fourth most frequently launched rocket in the world—Falcon 9 was the third, then Soyuz, and then China from zero onwards. A lot of people know us as a rocket company, but we do a lot more than just that. We also have a satellite division, and the satellite division is growing really quickly. We made an acquisition earlier this year of a satellite component company to bring all of that spacecraft componentry in-house, and we manage spacecraft on orbit for governments. Of course, probably a program that a number of viewers may be familiar with is the CAPSTONE program, where we're delivering a spacecraft to the Moon for NASA. That's kind of the most extreme version of our spacecraft division—actually doing lunar and interplanetary work. But there's lots of little platforms and things in between. Originally we started off with the goal to solve launches as a problem. We feel like launch is largely a solved problem now. One Electron rolls off the production line at the moment every 24 days or so, so it's largely just a scaling problem from here on in. But the bit that's still not solved is the next step: how do you enable people to get their innovation and ideas on orbit? Getting there is one element; building the spacecraft is a whole other. That's where we introduced the Photon platform, so that it just drastically reduces any barriers for innovation for businesses to get ideas on orbit. ### Recent Launch Anomaly **Annie Honma:** Obviously we've had a couple of questions about what is a very impressive record of 11 successive successful launches. On Sunday, there was obviously an anomaly after launch, and we've had a lot of questions coming through—and I might add, a lot of really good wishes. But a lot of questions about what happened. I understand there's an investigation going on, and that's formal, and so you're unable to comment on the causes of the failure at this time. But what are you able to tell us? **Peter Beck:** What I can say is, I don't think there's a rocket in history that hasn't experienced a failure somewhere along its lifetime. So we're always prepared for this. Of course, we never want to have it, but build enough space hardware to know that your day comes around. What I can say is that the failure was very graceful, and why that's important is it gives you the ability to capture wonderful data. The rocket just didn't disappear—we saw the failure occur very gracefully, and then once the engine shut down, we were able to also continue receiving data from the vehicle. So we have 30,000 channels of data all streamed lovely. We know really clearly the sequence there. The tricky thing, as always, is rolling in, getting down to root cause. And the tricky thing about root cause is making sure that both you prove what it is, but quite often you spend a lot more time proving what it isn't. So it's not good enough just to prove what it is; you have to go through every single system, turn over every stone, and prove that that system did not have any kind of connection to the anomaly. We're working very quickly. Like I say, it kind of sounds weird to say a dream anomaly, but really as far as anomalies go, it was very good to us. So we'll be back on the pad pretty quickly and ready to go again for a busy rest of this year. **Annie Honma:** It's great to hear, and I think there's a lot of goodwill from the Australian space community and no doubt the New Zealand space community, but also internationally for Rocket Lab and what you're doing. **Peter Beck:** It's been incredible to see the support. Thank you. We just have to thank everybody because it is a tough time, but it really energized the team to see such support behind us. So thank you to everybody who gave us kind words. ### Advice for Students and Young Professionals **Annie Honma:** We've had a question from one of the people viewing this, which goes in a little bit of a different direction. Your question is: You're obviously a bit of an inspiration to many of us young people coming up in the space industry. What would you recommend current students do to get into the space industry? **Peter Beck:** I'm a great believer that the best results are to follow your passion. So find the thing that you're really excited about—if it's analysis, structures, whatever it is—and just pursue that with absolute vigor. That's when the best work is done, and that's when people are most productive and excited, and it's most fulfilling, working on problems that they're really passionate about. So that's really the only advice I would give: choose a thing that you're passionate about and just run at it. Just run flat out at it. **Annie Honma:** I've heard that your parents were actually called into a meeting at your school once because your career advisor told them that your ambitions were "absurdly unachievable" was the quote. Now, my question here is: I think it's great advice to pick something you're passionate about and run at it, but how do you keep going in the way that you have done when everyone around you tells you that your idea is impossible? **Peter Beck:** You have to be selective of who you listen to. There's lots of great advice, and there's some really rubbish advice. So if you really believe in something, then it shouldn't really matter. And what's the worst that can happen? Ultimately, you can turn out to be wrong, but I don't know what's the matter with that. What I've learned over time is that people will say, "That's a really crazy idea," and then you go and execute it, and then they'll say, "Oh, that was just great vision." So you can't win either way. You may as well just follow the things that you think are important. One of the things about life that I've learned is that it's really frustrating—it's unfairly cruel how short a human lifespan is compared to the lifespan of everything else around you. If you look at geological time frames, space time frames, just about every time frame there is, it's measured in thousands of years or millions of years. The stupid human life is just so ridiculously short—it's just cruel. So if you've got this short period of time on the planet, then you really got to make it count. **Annie Honma:** Do you think that brevity of life and maybe a little bit of existential angst is what drives you in your career, or is there something else as well? **Peter Beck:** I'm counting the clock. Every wasted minute is a wasted minute, and you never know when your time's up. So that's certainly there, but I wouldn't say it's a motivator. I think the bigger motivation is that space is one of the few domains, if not the only domain, where you can put something on orbit and it can have an impact to tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of people on the planet. One little stupid box of electronics can have a huge impact on people's lives. Take GPS as the example that everybody can reconcile with the quickest: remove GPS, and apart from everybody getting lost, you've got the entire transport infrastructure that is built on the back of it. There's no Uber, no food delivery—this all goes away. Space just has the ability to influence so many lives globally. It's really about maximum impact. ### Rocket Recovery Efforts **Annie Honma:** We've got a question coming in from Henry. Henry says: "Really impressed with the work Rocket Lab has been doing in the last few years. When will you be doing mid-air recovery in actual flight missions?" **Peter Beck:** The big recovery test is slated for Flight 17. That vehicle is sitting on the shop floor right now. We've done two flights where we've re-entered the stage and got wonderful data. We were able to re-enter that stage, and that was really the hardest thing. We did a test of a media capture—it was great to take that one off. For Flight 17, as we re-enter the Earth's atmosphere, we'll slow the stage down, and we're just going to splash it down into the ocean. Once we've got it into the ocean, we'll go and pick it back up, and then we'll really be able to see what we've got. The helicopter is kind of the next step after that, but we've at least demonstrated that we can do it and we understand the operational limitations and aspects to that. But getting one back in the factory in whatever condition possible, however possible, is the most important thing. **Annie Honma:** It sounds like such a crazy thing to be doing and a real technological achievement if you can make it happen. What problems do you anticipate having when you pick it up and take it back into the factory? What sort of things do you think you'll need to be looking at in terms of getting it ready to use again? **Peter Beck:** We've instrumented the stages pretty well, so we've got a reasonable idea of the environment. The base heat shield that's there for the engines—it was never designed for re-entry, and we're not even trying to make changes to that because until we can really understand the condition of that heat shield, you're flying blind. It's one of those things where you can instrument as well as you can, but the environment is just so unique that really you need to get one back. So it's really too early to say what modifications and what things we'll need to do. But today, the instrumentation tells us that there's only going to need some thermal protection improvements in the bottom end. In the reentry test, the tanks came in fully pressurized and happy, and we had telemetry right down to impact into the water. So it was a relatively happy first stage. ### Dedicated Launch vs. Rideshare **Annie Honma:** Now we've got a question from Hamish, which is: "How do you think the demand for Electron launches from small sat operators will change with the growth of rideshare and space tugs?" **Peter Beck:** That's a great question. Those questions are often asked as: How does rideshare and low-cost rideshare compete with dedicated? The reality is it's a totally different customer. The easiest way to describe it is: if you want to get somewhere and you don't mind riding with a whole lot of people, just think of it as a bus. You stand at a bus stop, you'll stand at the bus stop for a long time, wait for the bus to turn up. The bus is on its schedule. You'll climb on the bus, you'll sit on a seat, you might sit beside someone who smells, you might not, and you'll be taken, driven to a destination—not your house or where you want to go, but to a destination—and you're dropped off. And the bus ticket is cheap, and it works fine. That works absolutely fine. However, if you're trying to go out for dinner and you've got nice clothes on, that might not be the best way to get there. So you call an Uber, and an Uber comes to exactly where you are, it picks you up, and it drops you off to exactly where you want to be, and you pay more for it. I know it sounds like an oversimplistic analogy, but it's actually incredibly accurate. The kind of customers that will ride on a rideshare aren't really the kind of customers who require dedicated service, specific orbits on specific time frames. It's really a different thing, but both have their place in the market, and both are really important. Rideshare is a wonderful mechanism for early-stage companies to get a few CubeSats up—it doesn't matter where the orbit is or what LTN it is—just get it up. But when you're trying to build a business and a constellation, especially if you're trying to build a constellation of ten spacecraft, you need different altitudes, sometimes different planes. There's just no rideshare to those planes or to those altitudes, so that's when you require a dedicated vehicle. The other part of it is we have the uber customer, and then we have the rideshare customers that are on fire. You've got this spacecraft they've booked on a rideshare, the rideshare pushes out and pushes out and pushes out, and sometimes they get kicked off and all those things. The time that you can often spend sitting on the shelf, especially if you're a commercial startup company—the time that you're spending on the shelf is time that you can't generate revenue. So if you're sitting there for six months waiting for your rocket, and you've burned through six months of costs and forgone six months of revenue, you add that up—it's way cheaper to just grab a dedicated ride and just get there than wait for the bus. Space tugs are interesting, but the thing there is that there's this chemical propulsion space tugs and then electric propulsion space tugs. The trouble with the electric propulsion space tugs is it takes forever to get anywhere, so you're back to the same problem where you're three or four months burning plasma to try and do two or three degree plane change or raise your orbit to shift your altitude and things like that. Chemical is a little bit quicker, but still, by the time you factor in the cost of the tug, the cost of the on-orbit mission services in the timeframe, and then couple that with the rideshare, for some missions it absolutely works; for some missions it doesn't. We've run some missions with Electron because we have the kick stage where we've gone way high to 1,200 kilometers or something, dropped off a spacecraft, and we've come back down, dropped off another spacecraft, and then we've done deorbit burns and disposal burns. We did one where we went to 500 kilometers, dropped off a large spacecraft, then shrunk back down, recircularized to 450 kilometers, and put off a bunch of really small spacecraft that had to be below the International Space Station limit. The kick stage in the Electron really is a tug already, so you can do those kinds of plane changes. ### What Rocket Lab Looks for in Employees **Annie Honma:** How dare we think about jobs! Which is: What do you look for in your potential employees, or what achievements or traits make an individual stand out from the crowd within the space community? **Peter Beck:** That's a great question, and we are hiring. We have a lot of—I'm just gonna take this opportunity unashamedly to just plug that we are hiring. We need a lot of people. But seriously, there's kind of two things that we look at, look for in people at Rocket Lab. Firstly is brilliance—so unashamedly, the bar is high, and everybody here working at Rocket Lab is the best at what they do. We don't make any apologies for that. The second thing we look for is cultural fit—someone who is motivated, self-driven, passionate. We will hire somebody with less academic qualification but more drive and passion every day of the week. So it's not good enough if you want to come and work for Rocket Lab; it's not good enough just to be the best. You have to be the best and motivated and passionate. We see hundreds of CVs every week, and if your CV looks like everybody else's, it's impossible. I don't know who teaches how to write a CV, but they all need to be fired because they all look the same format, and I can't tell if you're passionate. I can't tell if you're incredible. So what we look for is: what do you do outside your education? Your education is a given, and I don't place a huge value on whether you're straight A's or B's. I'd much rather see what you've done in the weekend and what you do at nights. If you sit on the couch at nights and play video games, you're not working for us. But if at night you build stuff, if you're passionate, if you've got interests, and you put your all into those things, now we're talking. That's much more interesting for us. **Annie Honma:** We've got a follow-up question from Megan, which is: "Are you running a summer internship program in New Zealand this year?" **Peter Beck:** I think so. Yeah, pretty sure we do. We are this year, yep. The bar is high, but yes. **Annie Honma:** Look, the bar is high, but anyone on this particular call watching this is already miles ahead, I expect. So I expect if I were you, I'd put that in the cover letter. I've got a follow-up question, and this is my own question, but to what extent do you think your own educational background has shaped the attitude you take to CVs and to the balance you give to marks versus other factors? **Peter Beck:** I guess that probably differently colors it, but I don't think it's unique to me. I think all of our managers and in hiring staff, it's just hard culture here. I'm not really sure if it's specific to my background, but if you come here and you meet the people—they are relentless executors. These people in their lives are just the most phenomenal human beings. A company—people get confused—a company is not me, a company is not a logo, or even a pretty-looking rocket. A company is the people that did all that. You can brand a company however you want and market a company however you want, but ultimately, at the end of the day, the product speaks for itself, and then the product is a result of the people. ### Work Experience vs. Postgraduate Degrees **Annie Honma:** We've got a question from Luca saying: "What do you feel is more important to a career in aerospace: doing a postgrad degree or more work experience?" **Peter Beck:** I don't want to upset parents here. My view is work experience. Postdoc is great as well, but it depends on what you want to do and how quickly you want to enter into the workforce. If you just want to be done with school and get into the workforce, I would say work experience. Work experience goes a long way. Certainly, when I'm looking at a CV, I absolutely look at that and see where they've worked. If you're an engineer, then chances are in your downtime, you most likely have worked for an engineering company. That's what we look for. We have your place for internships. If you've gone to Dad's carpet factory, it's probably not really hungry. If you've gone out and you've found new opportunities that interest you, and you've been successful in getting them, and you've put yourself out there, that's really inspiring for us to see. **Annie Honma:** This might be a great moment for me to do my job and plug the Australian Youth Aerospace Association. Subscribe to the channels, and the people in the team put up all sorts of opportunities for internships and those sorts of experiences, as well as providing an opportunity for you to meet the sorts of people who will give you those internships and provide those sorts of experiences. So that's it—I've done my job; now I can relax. **Peter Beck:** And it doesn't have to be internships in companies that are directly space-adjacent. Working in a foundry may not sound like it's very respected, but if someone's gone and put themselves in an interesting position and gone out there, that is super interesting and inspiring. So you don't have to go and work for BAE or Boeing or Lockheed—just really good engineering experience or physics or whatever sector you're going after. ### The Photon Program **Annie Honma:** Now, back to the tech question. What can you tell us about the Photon program? **Peter Beck:** Photon is a satellite platform that shares some commonality with the rocket. If you look at the kick stage on the top of the launch vehicle, that is basically a satellite. It really only required us to put solar panels on it and some torque rods and reaction wheels and star trackers, and that is a spacecraft platform. The whole point of that platform is to enable people to build commerce, to build capability in space. It always frustrated me that teams would go out, raise a whole lot of money, or if it was a government, commission a whole lot of money to build a bespoke satellite. The spacecraft teams are like three times bigger than the sensor teams, but don't forget—the sensor teams are the bit that creates the wealth, the revenue, or the capability if you're talking about a government. So that's where you should be focusing the effort. Everything else—launch, spacecraft bus—should be a commodity. It's not where people should have to worry. If you're going to go to space, you shouldn't need to worry whether your reaction wheel is going to saturate. You shouldn't need to worry about that. What you should worry about is: is my sensor going to deliver the data that I need to generate revenue or to create the capability I want? That's really what Photon is all about. It covers quite a wide spectrum from a very basic hosted payload in LEO, super simple, through to another thing over my shoulder, which is Photon Luna, which can deliver spacecraft all the way into lunar orbit. So it's quite a spectrum of capability. ### The Artemis Program and Lunar Mission **Annie Honma:** And what's the plan with that lunar orbit capability? **Peter Beck:** We've been commissioned to deliver the CAPSTONE spacecraft to lunar orbit, and it will serve as a communications relay test to enable the first man and woman to land back on the moon safely. So it's kind of the first piece of infrastructure for Artemis. It's a really significant mission and a really tricky one. Going to the moon is no joke. ### Manufacturing and Automation **Annie Honma:** We've got another tech question here from Ben, which is: "What percentage of Electron manufacturing is currently automated, and are you looking at increasing the level of automation in the future?" **Peter Beck:** That's a great question. It sort of depends—some areas are highly automated. We put in Rosie the Robot at the end of last year, and that is incredible automation. It took a whole vehicle days and days of work, and we can process the whole launch vehicle—Stage 1 tank, Stage 2 tank, fairings, interstage, kick stage—in 12 hours. That's every hole drilled, every rivet, every sanding, every marking, everything on all the composite parts. So that's an example of wonderful automation. But some processes, the payback might be a hundred years to automate, so you're just not gonna do it. Some things are highly automated. Engine manufacturing is by nature very highly automated because it's 3D printed. Every 12 hours or so, a new engine is kind of on, and like I said before, there's one rocket rolls off the production line every 24 days, and that's got 10 engines. So every 24 days, there's 10 engines that are required. The engine plant up in Long Beach in California is just chugging engines out at a great rate. That was one of the reasons why we 3D printed the engine—because the process lends itself to very complex shapes in a highly repeatable and manufacturable way. Engine test is super cool. Because it's electric turbo, basically the team takes an engine out of the factory in the U.S., bolts it up to the test cell, and runs a couple of blips with electric pumps and checks a few things out. Then they run it for like 20 seconds—just straight in and hot fire, just run it for 20 seconds. In that 20 seconds, they throttle up and throttle down, and they sort of move oxygen mixture ratios and muck around a little bit. In that 20 seconds they build all of the pump maps for the engine, all of the injector CDs, everything. Then they go straight into a full-duration hot fire, and that engine is basically ready to be integrated into the launch vehicle. That whole process of tuning the engine is all done in software. It's all automated, and within that first 20 seconds after the hot fire, that engine is configured and ready for flight. The team has done an incredible job. ### 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing Challenges **Annie Honma:** That sounds incredibly cool. We have a question from Tom just following up on that 3D printing of engines, which is: "What are some of the challenges that you've experienced as part of doing that?" **Peter Beck:** We started 3D printing engines when everyone thought it was weird. I remember when we unveiled the Rutherford at the National Space Symposium, and everybody was sort of like, "3D printing—that'll never work." And now everybody has 3D printed engines, so the technology and the art has come a long way. With any manufacturing process, there are pluses and minuses, and the most important thing with additive manufacturing is designing your part for the process. Where a lot of people go wrong with additive manufacturing is they take a normal, subjectively manufactured part and then just go and print it, and they wonder why it doesn't work, or it costs heaps of money and takes ages of time, and "this whole 3D printing is a waste of time." Really, you have to do the opposite with a 3D printed part. Where a subjectively manufactured part—with a 3D printed part, you want to put the most amount of complexity, the most amount of part count in there as you possibly can and get maximum bang for your buck. So if you design the part right to start, that's a big one. Secondly, it's a rocket engine, so it's running at incredible pressures and temperatures and strains. It's not like a quasi-static part that's relatively easy to load—understand load cases and benign environments. It's just the worst thing you could think of. So there's a tremendous amount of material science that goes into the materials. Then there are all the parameters. There are like 150 parameters to change on a 3D printer, and any one of those can have quite a large effect. Material ductility is always a problem with 3D printing, and when you've got something that's running at 800 degrees, a thousand degrees, ductility becomes a problem. There's a bunch of stuff that's a problem. But the good thing is, the wonderful thing is that once you have the process dialed, it's so repeatable. Engine after engine after engine, it's so repeatable. ### Australia and New Zealand in the Space Industry **Annie Honma:** Now I want to talk about Southern Hemisphere stuff. What do you think that Australia and New Zealand can offer to the space industry and economy, not just now but as we look forward, say, for the next 20-30 years? **Peter Beck:** This is actually really exciting because space is geographically agnostic now, meaning it does not matter where you reside. It really doesn't, especially in the spacecraft area. Launch is a little bit different because you've got to have certain things for a launch to work, like a geographical location that enables the trajectories and all the flight safety corridors and all that kind of stuff. So that's probably less geographically agnostic. But everything else basically is, especially spacecraft. It just does not matter. We build a spacecraft, and all you need to build a great spacecraft is a group of really smart, passionate people with a mission. That's it. I'm really excited to see some of the programs in Australia especially, and some of the spacecraft developments there—some of the commercial companies, some of the startups. I think there's a really bright future for Australia to create not just a satellite industry but a national capability. Australia massively suits very well for the macroscale of space, so I think Australia's direction in small spacecraft is absolutely being on. ### Rocket Lab's Mission and Innovation **Annie Honma:** We have a question from Barry which I think goes to your leadership style and your vision as a CEO and a founder, which is: "How did you make Rocket Lab the most innovative company in the Southern Hemisphere?" **Peter Beck:** At the end of the day, I guess it's about the mission, and the mission statement here is "We go to space to improve life on Earth." As you walk in the door, that's the first thing you read, whether you're an employee or a visitor, and that really drives everything. Once you understand the impact that you can have in space, it becomes very important, and when something becomes very important, then you'll do anything to get it done. So really, I would say the company, the products that we build are a result of just sheer determination to solve a problem. We're just engineers, so we just engineer our way into the best solution. The innovations that we've kind of borne—the 3D printing, the carbon composite tanks, electric turbo pump cycle, all those things—they're not born because we're sitting around a coffee table thinking it would be cool. They're born out of absolute necessity. We needed a composite tank to be able to hit all the mass margins and have something we could reproduce really rapidly, just not having to paint it. There's no such thing as normal paint on a rocket. Any paint on a rocket has to be triboelectrification paint—it has to be able to carry a charge; otherwise you shoot lightning bolts to the ground. So even just painting a rocket is a giant pain. The solution to that is: don't paint a rocket, build it out of carbon. Everything is very practical in a lot of sense. We have a core mission, and everything is about executing to that core mission with the best engineering solution. And if it's new and it doesn't exist, that's fine, because the prize is too big to not try. ### Space Infrastructure and Global Impact **Annie Honma:** When you say "We go to space to improve life on Earth," I wanted to dig into that a little bit. What do you mean by that? What's the underlying philosophy there? **Peter Beck:** I look at space as infrastructure, nothing more complicated than infrastructure. Just like pipes in the ground—you go to your sink, you turn on the tap, water comes out, and how often do you think about all the infrastructure that's behind that water? Through all of the piping networks to the reservoirs and pumping stations—it's amazing, but you never think about all of it. Space is the same because it's all hidden infrastructure. You walk outside, pick up your phone, and you just expect GPS to be there, and it's just a network of spacecraft providing all that service. It's all hidden. The thing is that space is impossible to be country-centric. Once you're really out in space, you're talking about a global-centric environment. I think once you do that, that's when you have the ability to not just influence and have impact in your own country, but other people's countries—in fact, the whole planet. It takes such a small thing to have such a massive impact. GPS is an RF signal, nothing more than a timestamp from space—look what it does. Space is one of those few domains where such small things can pull big levers. Ultimately, as I said before, you've got this unreasonably short time on the planet, and you may as well make the most amount of impact for the species as you can, and that for me is space. ### COVID-19's Impact on Rocket Lab and the Space Industry **Annie Honma:** I think we've all been reminded of our global existence over the last few months with this pandemic. How has Rocket Lab been affected by COVID-19? **Peter Beck:** I think like everybody, we shut down a factory here in New Zealand for five weeks or more. The US factory was able to continue with some pretty extreme social distance measures, a lot of teleworking, and was able to continue through, and they still continue today. In New Zealand, it was just a complete hard shutdown, so everybody worked from home. I'm just so incredibly proud of the team because they got so much done over the break. Everybody just grabbed all the gear. I think some sneaky gas bottles and some experiments went into people's garages just so that the tests could carry on. I know that one of our team took half the looming division home and set up a looming shop at her house and just kept on building looms. So a pandemic's not going to slow us down. It's got to be bigger than that. But it was certainly disruptive, and it continues to be very disruptive. New Zealand's borders are closed. It's very hard to bring customers and experts in to the borders and for us to leave and come back. It's seriously constraining. For the wider space industry, it's kind of interesting because there was a lot of investments made from Silicon Valley and the wider venture capital communities which are very speculative. There's a number of things that we all sort of stood there scratching our heads going, "Hmm, that seems like a hundred-year vision rather than something you're gonna cash out in twenty years." So there was a lot of really weird stuff done, which, by the way, is fantastic—that's truly awesome. Because even though it might not make it to commercialization, it advances the state of the art, and if investors—I don't see that as lost money; I see that as a contribution to humanity. Even if you learn one thing and publish one paper, then that's great value. But nevertheless, there are a lot of businesses in the space sector that, depending on where you were in your raise—whether you were just about to raise or just had raised—were put in pretty difficult positions because venture capital shut down. It's going to take a while for the VCs to come back. So it is a challenging time for the "new space" industry, but it's a road bump. There'll be some teams that fall, but they'll be consolidated or reformed. It's disappointing, of course, but at the end of the day, it's not terminal—it's a road bump. We'll get out the other side and continue to grow, and the industry will be just fine. ### Stage 1 Recovery Economics **Annie Honma:** Let's talk finance and return on investment. We've got a question here from Nick, which is: "How do the lifetimes of the engines relate to the lifetime of the rest of the Electron rocket? How does the cost of refurbishment compare to the initial sunk cost of the system?" So I guess that goes right to the finance question. **Peter Beck:** The answer to that is I don't know because we haven't got one back yet, and that's the whole reason for pushing so hard to get one back in the factory. On one end of the spectrum, you have a vehicle that's perfect that you just charge the batteries back up again, fill it up and fly—that's utopia. Now I'm not naive to think that that's going to happen. And then the other end of the spectrum is just a charred carbon tube. We know roughly where we're sitting in that spectrum from the instrumentation, the flights we've done, but really it'll depend on the mitigation, how well we're able to mitigate the initial loads and damages through reentry. Recovering Stage 1 is less about economics—it's more about production. If we can bring a Stage 1 back and spend half the amount of time refurbishing it that it takes to build a new one, we've just added 50% more production capacity to the factory without having to build any more production lines or do anything major. If refurbishment is relatively simple, you can basically double your production by recovering a stage, and that's by far much more important to us. What is important is to be able to fly out our manifest quickly and support our customers quickly, rather than kind of finesse some microeconomics about whether it's slightly cheaper to reuse an engine or not. **Annie Honma:** So looking at a high volume of launch capability rather than looking at your margins on each launch? **Peter Beck:** Just trying to get our customers on orbit. That's the key. Just trying to get more vehicles out there, and the more vehicles we can get out there, then the more customers can get on orbit and ultimately the lower cost we can drive. ### Going Public and Investor Relations **Annie Honma:** We've got a question also on this finance side coming through from Tom, and I'm gonna say up front: I'm aware you might not be able to answer this question, but do you foresee Rocket Lab going for IPO? **Peter Beck:** It's an interesting thought. You have to examine: what's the rationale for an IPO? If a good reason to IPO is access to capital—well, we've been pretty successful in raising private capital. We've never been short of private capital to execute what we want to do. There's a lot of drag that comes with going public for sure, but if you can remain private and fund the things you want to do privately, that's great. But there does come a point where ambitions might outstrip the available private capital, and at that point, that's a good reason to go public. Another good reason to go public is when investors want a liquidity event. That goes to a really important point here, which I see so many entrepreneurs fail at, and that's really choosing the right investor for your business. The first piece of advice I give any entrepreneur is: the least valuable thing an investor ever gives you is their cash. It's really important to pick your investors and the team. If you create an engineering team and they're a bunch of bad engineers, you end up with a bad product. If you create a board full of unaligned board members that haven't got your interest at heart, then you're gonna have a bad company. It's a challenge for the relatively nascent "new space" industry to be going down the public line because it's hard to know how to value a company like Rocket Lab. It's hard to know whether you're talking about tech or whether you're talking about logistics or whether you're talking about transport or whether it's something entirely different. **Annie Honma:** Working in the current climate, that's tricky. **Peter Beck:** It is entirely different, but it has been a curious experiment. I'm sure probably some people here followed Virgin Galactic, and that's a really interesting stock because the product's not quite developed yet, the market's not developed yet, but yet that stock's been really successful. The question certainly has to be posed: what happens if you bring a company that has a product, has a proven market, and it's a true space play? It would be interesting to see how the public markets would respond for sure. ### The Launch Experience and Inspiration **Annie Honma:** We've got a question coming through, which is: "What is your favorite thing about a rocket launch?" **Peter Beck:** At the moment we put our customer satellites on orbit, we give them the state vectors, and they're all healthy—that's my favorite part. I do not enjoy rocket launches. Really, no. Nope. One day I will. Look, there's just so much effort that goes into it. The team's put their heart and soul into the launch vehicle, the customers have done the same on a spacecraft, lots of money has exchanged hands, and I like to do a good job. So if you don't do a good job, that's not good. The best part is when it's finished. **Annie Honma:** We've got a follow-up question to that from Simon, which is: "What's been the most inspiring payload that you have launched to date?" **Peter Beck:** Oh, there's so many. I would have liked to have said my one, the Humanity Star, but that wasn't as inspirational as I'd hoped. It did inspire a whole lot of people, but it also annoyed a whole lot of people as well. So in hindsight, that was going to be the most inspirational thing that I was hoping to achieve with it. But one of them—we've flown such cool stuff, but one of them that sticks in my mind was on one of our NASA missions. The customer was integrating the payload into the spacecraft. I was standing beside them, and as they're integrating it in, we're just sort of yakking, and that was a $20 million payload, 20 years of work and life to get that payload on orbit, and it was just such a cool machine. **Annie Honma:** The Humanity Star was kind of oddly divisive at the time, and I think I had some conversations with various scientists and engineers about it, and I wanted—maybe it was because we like to think of space as a place for science and technology, and the idea of putting something that's entire purpose is to be artistic in some way kind of—I think it made a lot of people stop and think, and it challenged them. Why do you think it was so controversial? **Peter Beck:** I stand back now and I look at it as a net positive because I think that's an important discussion that needed to happen. We needed to bring it up—I would rather someone else brought it up than me, but I think it was important. There's an important point. The flip side to that is, you know, you create a lot of signal-to-noise ratio. But I can't tell you how many tens of thousands of letters and emails we got, and just, all I wanted was parents to take their children or just everybody to go outside, look up, and look for that flashing star. In doing so, the object of the exercise was for people to understand that they're living on a rock in the inner solar system in the universe, and the rock is highly dynamic. You're largely under—I know that's kind of a little bit depressing, but the point of it is that all your terrestrial day's problems are kind of irrelevant in the scheme of humanity. In the end, we're all the same, we're all one species, no matter what. A lot of people really got the message, and for a lot of people, that really changed the way that they viewed their lives. We made some astronomers mad, but a bunch of kids wrote in and said, "I want to be an astronomer now." So I view it as a net positive, but it was certainly challenging, so controversial at the time for sure. **Annie Honma:** I think it was one of those launches that really got people talking and in the same ways with the, you know, Musk's launch of the Tesla. But I think if we look back historically, the Humanity Star, I say, will be a net positive and something that people will look on as a good thing and an interesting thing, and really a beautiful thing as well. **Peter Beck:** I don't see how Elon can put a Tesla in orbit on a billion-year lifespan and I caught more crap than he does for something that lasted three months, but we'll just have to live with that one. ### Closing Thoughts **Annie Honma:** I think we need to finish up the show at least with the final question, which would be: if people watching this, they're going to go away and do anything, read anything, think about anything—maybe go Google nihilist philosophy—what would you want them to go away and think about or do after this? **Peter Beck:** Most of the people here are probably passionate about space, so normally I would say: go outside and look up. I think not enough people go outside and just look up and think—just sit there for half an hour and just think. I think that's a really refreshing mind experiment. But given that most people already here probably already do that, I would just say, think about the thing that you want to do with your life, and the bigger the better. Because it's all energy that you spend, you can't get back. So go and do something big with your life. **Annie Honma:** Peter, this has been just so inspiring and so interesting. Thank you so much for making time for this, and thank you also to your team over at Rocket Lab for making it happen. I know I've thoroughly enjoyed it, and I hope all of the people we're broadcasting to have enjoyed it as well. Now a little bit of admin from me, and it's very quick: please subscribe to the AYAA channel for upcoming events. We should have a video coming soon from the Australian Space Agency, so you do not want to miss that. Also, please stay tuned to Aerospace Futures Online and to what Rocket Lab is up to as we navigate our changing skies. Peter, thank you very much. I hope you have a lovely evening. **Peter Beck:** Thanks very much, Annie. Appreciate it. Bye. **Annie Honma:** Cheers.