[[Home|🏠]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> [[Interviews]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> August 2 2024 **Insider**: [[Peter Beck]] **Source**: [Bloomberg Businessweek](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQEnnvdJcng) **Date**: August 2 2024  🔗 Backup Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQEnnvdJcng ## 🎙️ Transcript >[!hint] Transcript may contain errors or inaccuracies. **Carol Massar:** Speaking of rockets, Peter Beck—you may remember just a couple of weeks ago, we spoke with our colleague Ashley Vance about the new HBO documentary "Wild Wild Space." The film based on Ashley's book "When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach." That film follows three space entrepreneurs, including Peter Beck, the founder, president, and CEO of Rocket Lab, a publicly traded company that manufactures and launches rockets, including one scheduled to launch tomorrow carrying a satellite for a Japanese Earth observation company. **Tim Stenovec:** And it's a great film that really gets into it. Rocket Lab's customers, by the way, include NASA, the US Space Force, DARPA, Planet, Canon, the National Reconnaissance Office, and so much more. Peter Beck joining us now from Mississippi. Peter, first of all, great to have you here. We were so excited to have you on with us. How are you, and tell us what you've been up to as of late? **Peter Beck:** Thanks very much. It's great. I'm just doing a multitude of things as all good CEOs should be doing. We're building a big rocket right now, so I'm down in Mississippi doing engine tests with the team here. So there's a lot on Neutron. ### Neutron Rocket Development **Tim:** Well, let's just cut right to the chase then. Give us an update on the development of some of these rockets that you're working on, specifically of Neutron. Tell us what's going on, what's the latest? **Peter Beck:** So Neutron is a solution to the mid-launch monopoly, as you could say. It's scheduled to launch mid next year, and we're working hard right now on lots of things—propulsion, building complete launch sites and factories, and all of the components that go into a big rocket. **Carol:** Can you give us an update in terms of when you anticipate that this is going to be ready for deployment? A little bit in terms of the time frame? **Peter Beck:** Sure, so we're looking to get this vehicle on the pad next year and get it away. So hopefully people won't have to wait long. But what I would say is it's a very different looking rocket. If you see it, it's very much an advanced launch vehicle for modern times. There's lots of innovation in it that should really drive down launch cost even further. ### Reusable Rockets vs. Traditional Approaches **Carol:** It is pretty phenomenal. Folks who listen to us, I mean, know that my dad was involved in doing—he was an engineer, aeronautical, and worked on a lot of guidance systems for the original space program, so we kind of grew up with it. I always think he would find it kind of amazing, you know, these rockets that can come back and be reusable because it's just not the way it was. Talk to us again how you kind of rethink about how you were doing it so differently than it was done in government programs for so long. **Peter Beck:** We start with that small rocket, the little Electron rocket that you pointed out has got its 51st mission tomorrow. We reenter that through the Earth's atmosphere completely passively and then fish it out of the ocean. Neutron is a propulsive landing, so we land it on the barge or back at the launch site. But if you look at the vehicle, when it lands, there's no bit missing, there's no fairing missing, there's no second stage missing. It's literally as it looks as it took off and ready to load the next customer's payload in and go again. ### Competing with SpaceX **Tim:** Peter, I said that you're taking SpaceX on—SpaceX, you're taking on Elon. If we look at the numbers as of mid-July, SpaceX had launched 70 rockets this year, Rocket Lab had launched just eight—again, this was mid-July. How do you compete with SpaceX? Is there enough room for both of you given that they were quite a bit earlier to the game and they're bigger at this point, so much bigger? **Peter Beck:** Look, sometimes it's a huge advantage to be a first mover, and sometimes it's an advantage to be second. I would point out that if you look at the Electron rocket, how quickly that ran was actually the fastest rocket to reach 50 launches in commercial history—faster than SpaceX, faster than anybody else. And it will continue to do that. We expect to be first to get to 100 as well. So yeah, sometimes you can start at the back, but it doesn't mean you finish last, that's for sure. **Tim:** Yeah, just ask Apple. They're doing just fine when it comes to smartphones, and they weren't first out of the gate. **Carol:** Having said that, Elon Musk—there isn't a day, Peter, that goes by that Tim and I don't talk about probably Elon or Tesla or his universe in some way. His antics, though, can certainly get him into trouble, and I think about government contracts and so on and so forth. Do his antics help you in any way? **Peter Beck:** Look, I'm proudly boring. I'm the boringest person you could imagine, and my focus is on building a large, successful rocket company and nothing else. So we have a very clear and laser focus on that. **Carol:** Well, my point being that people are like, "You know what? I don't know that I want to identify—even though Elon is doing so much in this world—I want to go with someone who is, did you say boring? That you were a little bit more boring." So that's what I mean. Does his antics kind of make people say, whether it's the US government or some other government, "Peter, we'd like to work with you"? **Peter Beck:** Look, nobody can contest right now that there is a launch monopoly. The vast majority of all launches are conducted by SpaceX, and they've been very successful—good on them. But no monopoly survives the test of time, and it provides opportunities for others to come in and compete. So we have a number of customers, both government and commercial, who are really desperately looking for alternatives for a variety of reasons. ### The ESCAPADE Mars Mission **Tim:** Peter, earlier this week your company announced that it had completed testing of two spacecraft that are headed to Mars. It's going to enable the ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) mission. I'm wondering if you think New Glenn from Blue Origin will be ready for ESCAPADE? **Peter Beck:** Well, you had an important point actually. Two-thirds of the revenue and scale of Rocket Lab is actually from the spacecraft division. So two-thirds of the company is building spacecraft. Launch is really important and it always steals the show, but what we're trying to build here is an end-to-end space company where customers come to us and we can design and build the spacecraft, launch it, and then even operate it for them. But to your question, our spacecraft are ready. That's all I know, and so we're good to go whenever Blue is. **Tim:** So it sort of doesn't matter to you because your end of the bargain is being held up? You guys are ready? **Peter Beck:** We're ready. Naturally, we want to see the mission launch and be successful, so we naturally are rooting for them to do that. ### Climate Change Missions **Carol:** Hey, you know one thing that's certainly front and center for us, especially I feel like in the last week, but I feel like it's every week, is climate change and what's going on. You've been working certainly with NASA about some climate change missions. What can you share with us about some of the missions that you have been involved in? **Peter Beck:** We've been involved in a number of missions, as you point out. One of them, TROPICS, which was a really important one we launched last year, was a back-to-back mission following hurricanes and providing greater resolution on hurricanes—super topical right now and really valuable. It has already had a massive impact. I think that's one of the great things about the space industry—you can put a couple of little boxes of electronics in orbit and literally impact millions of people's lives. ### Mars vs. Venus **Tim:** Very cool stuff. Hey Peter, before we let you go, how are you thinking, just 30 seconds, how are you thinking about Mars? **Peter Beck:** Look, I love Mars, but I love Venus way more. So I don't actually think about Mars too much. I think much more about Venus because I think there's a closer analogue to Earth, and we actually have a private mission to Venus to look for life in the clouds. So, love Mars, but sorry, Venus. **Carol:** Second planet from the sun, sixth largest planet that's out there. Are you going to send people up on Rocket Lab rockets anytime soon? **Peter Beck:** Not anytime soon. I mean, we're certainly making sure the Neutron rocket is human-ratable. That comes down to making sure that it meets all its criteria, but we need the market to evolve. There needs to be more destinations before I think that's commercially viable. **Tim:** All right, Peter Beck, really appreciate you joining us. Peter Beck is the founder, president, and CEO of Rocket Lab. *This is the Bloomberg Business Week podcast, available on Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Listen live weekday afternoons from 2 to 5 p.m. Eastern on bloomberg.com, the iHeart Radio App, TuneIn, and the Bloomberg Business App. You can also watch us live every weekday on YouTube and always on the Bloomberg terminal.*