[[Home|🏠]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> [[Interviews]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> May 14 2020 **Insider**: [[Peter Beck]] **Source**: [Bloomberg Originals feat Ashlee Vance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F_Airx6tIc) **Date**: May 14 2020  🔗Backup Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F_Airx6tIc ## 🎙️ Transcript >[!hint] Transcript may contain errors or inaccuracies. **Ashley Vance:** Hello, I'm Ashley Vance, a writer at Bloomberg Businessweek, and you are here to see a chat with Peter Beck, the CEO of Rocket Lab, who's kind enough to join us from New Zealand and obviously from the rocket factory that I've been to before. Thanks for joining us, Pete. **Peter Beck:** Thanks Ashley. **Ashley Vance:** I think we must be catching you pretty early in the morning, 8 o'clock or so? **Peter Beck:** 8 o'clock is not early in the morning. **Ashley Vance:** 8 o'clock is early in the morning! So I'm sure we have a lot of space buffs on here, but for people who aren't space buffs, I was just going to do a little bit of the back story on how I heard about you and met you the first time. I think it was around 2016. I'd been following the space industry, and I'd been hearing about Rocket Lab, but then I started to hear about "who's this crazy guy in New Zealand building a rocket?" So I went down there for Hello World, the TV show we make, and you were actually the first episode we ever shot. You were kind to put up with us. I remember it was 2016, you were in a different factory, and you guys had, I think, three rockets kind of ready to go. Since 2016, you guys have gone on this tear. I mean, there's tons of companies trying to launch these small, cheap rockets to get lots of stuff to space, and you're really the only ones who have been able to make it and launch successfully so far. I think you're up to about 12 successful launches, correct? **Peter Beck:** We just listed the 11th just before the lockdown. **Ashley Vance:** So you guys carry satellites to space, and you're on this mission to bring down the cost of rockets and to be able to launch just... you know, most of the big launchers go about once a month, and you guys want to get to every three days, and maybe every day? **Peter Beck:** Yeah, the target right now is to get to one every month and one every two weeks this year, and continue to drive down the pace and increase the frequency and drive down the cost. ### Impact of COVID-19 on Operations **Ashley Vance:** That sets the stage a little bit. I don't want to make this too virus-heavy or anything, but obviously this is the reality. We've all seen the reports about what's going on in New Zealand, that you guys have had a very strict lockdown that's tamped down the virus. What has this done for an industry like the aerospace industry? Have you been able to operate during all this? **Peter Beck:** For us, obviously we had to shut down the entire factory and production, but Rocket Lab people are very resourceful. We took this opportunity to do a lot of work that we've often wanted to do but just never had time in the production schedule. I would say that the team has been really productive down here in New Zealand. We have a very big program right now, which is the NASA mission to the moon. That's a very big project for us, so that project got a lot of attention, which was really great to move that forward quickly. A lot of the company was able to be really productive through this. Some of the teams took various equipment home. We had Stef, who leads our harness group, building harnesses at her house, and the test team took home equipment. Not even a virus can stamp out Rocket Lab—the team was very resourceful and able to make good use of the time. We certainly won't be launching again till the end of the month, and that certainly inhibits our ability to launch, which is tough. But as you can see behind me, there's a whole bunch of rockets all stacked up, all ready to go. ### Launch Facilities and Expansion **Ashley Vance:** I'll give you props for the background on our live events, I think you win! So the next launch that you mentioned... You guys, along with SpaceX, have private launch facilities. You have a pad in New Zealand on the North Island on the East Coast, in sort of like the most beautiful place you could ever imagine. Then you're building another launch facility on the east coast of the United States, and you have another pad coming in the New Zealand site as well. How have things been affected with the construction at the U.S. site? **Peter Beck:** The U.S. site is complete. We actually rolled the rocket out just before lockdown. The site is complete, ready to go. The final thing there is certification from NASA for an AFTS system—an autonomous flight termination system—that we fly out of that range, and we're good to go. The pad is complete. There's a rocket sitting there already. There's another vehicle sitting down at Wallops. The second pad at Māhia here will be complete by the end of the year. So we'll have three operational pads by the end of the year, and currently have two. ### New Space Industry Outlook During the Pandemic **Ashley Vance:** This is a capital-intensive business. There's a bit of a race going on—there are dozens of small rocket companies, though only a handful you might consider more legitimate than others. Funding is tougher to come by right now, but you guys have this huge head start having already completed so many launches. This was a very exciting time for the new space industry because we had all this money pour in. We had tons of rocket and satellite companies. We've already seen OneWeb, a big satellite company, file for bankruptcy as they were not able to raise funds. How damaging do you think this pandemic will be for the new space industry? **Peter Beck:** I think it's fair to say that the new space industry has had a long, warm summer with a lot of capital flow and good times. Probably around November last year, I really felt that things were getting out of control because the kinds of things being invested in had very tenuous business plans attached to them. It's great to look decently down the road, but at the end of the day, venture capital still requires a return at some point. You saw some business plans that were pretty skeptical get funded. Even I was sort of thinking, "Good on them, that's awesome." I'm slightly biased because I remember the days of walking around the Valley trying to raise capital, and everybody looking super cross-eyed at me. It sort of became the norm, and I think we saw a tremendous amount of capital flow into small launch, and it's just not sustainable. Unfortunately, there is going to be some consolidation, but with any crisis, it's a good opportunity to leverage it. There are a lot of really good entrepreneurs and space companies and technologies that I think will combine and build bigger entities and do good things. I take a much longer-term view than just a one or two-year view. I think the overall temperature for the industry will be just fine, but it's going to be a pretty rough road in the next 12 to 18 months because capital is going to be non-existent. **Ashley Vance:** Especially on the satellite side too, because obviously you guys need customers to fly, and there were several dozen satellite companies that had appeared. Even though it doesn't take quite as much money as rockets, it takes a lot of money. **Peter Beck:** Yeah, we had always previously divorced ourselves from accounting for the mega constellations and any of their business plans. The moment you start to build a business plan around an imaginary constellation or somebody else's startup, that's when it gets pretty dodgy. We've never taken into account or proclaimed that we're going to fly 300 rockets a week. Some of the numbers out there are just crazy. We're very much a bespoke service for customers that care about being on orbit, on time, exactly in the right place, when they need it—rather than being a Costco service. We're more like a limousine service. ### Lunar Mission and Beyond Earth Orbit Ambitions **Ashley Vance:** I want to throw a couple questions at you that are coming in. You've focused on putting satellites into low-Earth orbit, but you mentioned you've got a lunar mission. Could you describe the lunar mission, and we're getting a lot of questions about Rocket Lab's ambitions through the solar system and what kind of things you guys would do? **Peter Beck:** I'll answer that the other way around because it makes more sense. People look at Rocket Lab as a rocket company, and it's probably a failure on my behalf calling it Rocket Lab, because it was never intended just to be a rocket company. The rocket was the first piece of the building block that we needed to solve—there's no point in solving satellites if you can't get them there. We're very much a Space Systems business. We've started with spacecraft, hence the reason everyone's seen that we won that mission to the moon with NASA. Although it's a high-energy upper stage, it's actually our Photon satellite platform, because we stay in orbit for a very long time and do lots of maneuvers. We're building satellites flat out. We just acquired a satellite components company, Sinclair Interplanetary. We have contracts with governments to manage their satellites on orbit. We really try to provide an end-to-end solution. If you have a sensor or a capability that you're trying to create, just come to us and we can build a spacecraft platform, we can launch it, we can operate it. We have a unique agreement with KSat for ground stations to provide a global network. Ultimately, what we're trying to do here is just make it easier to get innovation and ideas on orbit. The rocket piece is one important piece, but it's just one piece of that. If you look at our kick stage, I'm surprised that more people didn't pick it up sooner, because if you look at a kick stage, it's just a satellite. Put a solar panel on it—it's another satellite. It was very purposeful that we did that. The increment from a kick stage to a satellite is very small. Really, we've been operating our own satellite in orbit on all but one of our last 10 missions. The lunar mission is really just a high-energy Photon. We take all the components in a Photon and we've upgraded the Curie engine to what's called Hyper Curie now—a much higher-performance engine for these types of missions. That gives us a platform to do things like take 37 kilograms to the moon, and similar masses to Venus and even to Mars. If you look at the Photon satellite platform across the spectrum, you've got the kick stage, which is a very basic satellite, through to the other end of the spectrum where you have a super high-energy, mega-complex interplanetary probe. We really try to cover the full gamut. ### Venus Mission Ambitions **Ashley Vance:** I saw you jumping on to some of the Twitter questions about Venus. What given that with the big rockets, the massive rockets, we've got guys wanting to colonize Mars and take tens of thousands of tons of equipment and build habitats. With a smaller rocket, if you get to Venus, what kind of things would you be able to do? **Peter Beck:** You have about 25 kilograms of science instrument mass. You have to remember that the Photon platform provides power supply, thermal control, comms—all that. The pure scientific mass is 25 kilograms. That might not sound like much, but actually you can do a lot. The best spectrometers, multispectral imagers—there's a tremendous amount of instruments you can put on there. I guess the most exciting and liberating thing about this is that if you wanted to go to Venus, be prepared to write a $300 million check minimum. With an Electron or a Photon platform, we reckon we can get to Venus for $20 million or less. As far as opening the door for planetary science, it's just enormous. You can do half a dozen missions or more for the same price as one mission, and do them quickly. Venus is close in 2023, so if you want to do missions to Venus, it needs to be 2023. That's quick. ### Rocket Lab's Mission and Vision **Ashley Vance:** I've asked you this question before, and I'm not sure I always believe your answer, so I'm going to ask you again in public and put you on the spot. You've always said from the beginning of Rocket Lab that part of your dream was to get the prices down, get the frequency up, make it where we can just do a lot more stuff in space and create a proper economy. I totally get that you're heading in that direction. Obviously, you have other people like Elon and maybe Jeff Bezos who have said they dream of colonies and taking the human species off Earth. So I've always been curious, when you channel deep into your childhood or sci-fi fantasies, does it end with this burst of economic and scientific activity, or what is your ultimate dream? What are you trying to achieve with Rocket Lab? **Peter Beck:** It's a great question. A space vehicle company gives you an ability to do wonderful things for humanity, like going to other planets and humans stepping foot on the moon and other planets. It's awesome—I'm in the front row cheering. But I guess I take a slightly more clinical and engineering view: space is a place to build infrastructure. The infrastructure we currently have in space is absolutely critical and life-changing for so many industries. Take GPS—it covers everything from maps through to national security through to Uber and Tinder. It covers a huge spectrum of things. I just believe that if you can make it easy and affordable to build lots of infrastructure in space, then lots of wonderful things are going to happen down on Earth. When you open the main door to our factory, the first thing you read is, "We go to space to improve life on Earth." Space is one of those things where there are no borders. When you put up a spacecraft, you provide services to all of the countries around the planet every 90 minutes. As far as infrastructure that has the ability to touch the entire population of the planet, that is space. That's my prime driver—I think we can improve a lot on Earth through leveraging what space has to offer. That said, it's not like I don't have my own little side interests. Venus is clearly one of them, but I think as a company, the mark that we can leave in history and on humanity will be building infrastructure for everybody else. **Ashley Vance:** So everybody else is talking Mars, and you're claiming Venus? **Peter Beck:** It's not claiming a planet! I've always been interested in Venus. The original work was done by Richard Hunter, who was a PhD student that we hired. Richard's job was to see how far you can get with an Electron doing some crazy orbital mechanics. Mars has received a lot of press because it captures the public's imagination—you can step foot on Mars and put a footprint on Mars, and that's awesome. Venus—nobody is going to step foot on Venus. The atmosphere is 400-something degrees Celsius, 90 atmospheres of pressure. You're not standing on the surface. However, if you look out into the solar system, there are three universally understood places in our solar system where life may exist, and one of them is Venus. For me, this is humanity's greatest treasure hunt—the biggest question: are we alone? And when I say that, I mean any life. There's a really interesting position in Venus's atmosphere where it's in a sweet zone—one atmospheric pressure equivalent to Earth. It's not a particularly nice place, it's very acidic and horrible, but moderately temperate. There's some weird stuff going on there with UV-absorbing things that nobody really quite understands. In principle, some extremophiles from Earth should be able to live there. You've got this weird cloud that whizzes around, absorbs UV radiation, and you've also got an environment which in theory could support some kind of microbial or bacterial life. We need to sort that out. We need to go there. I just want to have a crack at sending a couple of atmospheric entry probes to see what we can find. **Ashley Vance:** I haven't heard you riff on that before. Are you like a secret Singularitarian trying to spread humankind's intelligence through the universe, or anything way off in the sci-fi realm? **Peter Beck:** No, I just quite like to know if we're unique or not. If we can find life on Venus, then you have to assume that's pretty prevalent. ### Rocket Launch Viewing Areas **Ashley Vance:** I'm peeking at some of the questions. We've got some hardcore space ones I'm going to save for a little bit. There are people in New Zealand who want to watch the launches and have some kind of viewing platform. I know Māhia is a tough place to get to, but what are you guys thinking moving forward around how people can watch the launches? **Peter Beck:** At LC-2 in Virginia, there's a really great viewing area, so that will be the best view on launch day by far. The challenge with the Māhia Peninsula is it's such a remote piece of land. It's sticking out, and there's not really any good places to build viewing areas, and it's all private land. We obviously lease the bit of land that we're on, but we don't have the rights to go and build grandstands and such. **Ashley Vance:** It's a sheep farm, right? **Peter Beck:** Yeah, it's a working sheep farm. Great for us—keeps all the grass down! But nevertheless, we haven't done anything there. We're kind of hoping that some entrepreneurial spirit will come along and do that off their own back. The night launches are great to watch. You can see those from the beach and from the towns, but it's just a really challenging place to build a viewing area. It's still the only private orbital launch site in the world. Normally these are government lands, and government has the ability to do whatever they want on them, but this is all private. ### Rocket Reusability **Ashley Vance:** At first, you guys were not really publicly looking at reusing rockets. I think you were actually not into that idea, but lately you've started running tests where—tell me if I describe it poorly—you would catch the rocket with a helicopter as it re-enters after delivering a payload into orbit. People want to know where you're at, when the first one will be, and what changed your mind? **Peter Beck:** I was not very excited about trying to reuse Electron. The way we designed it was to be disposable, for the pure fact that in order to reuse a first stage in the more traditional way—which is propulsive landing—you take a small launch vehicle and make it very big. There wasn't really the point. I dismissed the concept because whatever concept we came up with, the mass penalty had to be a maximum of 10-15% of the total stage or payload reduction. That's very hard to do—propulsive landing is 30% or more of the payload capacity. I'd written it off, but once we started flying and looking at the data, reviewing how the stage was heating—or not heating in this case—it became more obvious. What cooked it for me was standing here, looking out into the factory, and thinking: if I want to double production, that's a really hard thing to do. An easier way to double production would be to just get one back. So we started digging into it and broke the program up into three main milestones: 1. Can we re-enter a stage? This is by far the hardest piece—getting it through the atmosphere in one piece. 2. Can we slow it down and get it under parachutes? 3. If we get it under parachutes, can we scoop it out of the sky before it lands in the sea? We've successfully demonstrated two of the three elements. We've re-entered two stages successfully—a huge milestone. We did nothing to slow them down, just poured them into the atmosphere, and they both survived. We had strong telemetry links and a relatively healthy stage until they impacted the sea at just under 900 kilometers an hour. That was super good. The second piece we've just demonstrated is collecting it out of the sky, because we don't want it to splash down in the water—that's not a good place. We recently successfully demonstrated that as well. The last piece is: can we get it under a parachute? That's scheduled for flight 17, which is the one we're shooting for. That vehicle is behind me coming down the production line. **Ashley Vance:** You've actually been learning to fly a helicopter. Are you allowed to try and catch this thing? **Peter Beck:** I'm not good enough for that! I can fly to the launch site and back, but that is next-level skill I do not possess. **Ashley Vance:** I thought this was part of the master plan. **Peter Beck:** It does help justify owning a helicopter! ### Electron's Capabilities in the Solar System **Ashley Vance:** How far out can Electron put a payload in the solar system? **Peter Beck:** We did do some trajectories we called the Grand Tour, which was like a giant billion-year heliocentric tour of the solar system. To get out to somewhere like Jupiter requires a lot more energy. I would say we're limited to the near cousins—any asteroid that's cruising by, the Moon, Mars, Venus. I think we can get something to Mercury as well. ### Electron's Size and Market Position **Ashley Vance:** I've been hanging out with just about every rocket startup you can imagine, and I think Electron is seen as just about the perfectly engineered rocket for what you guys were trying to do. I know you put a lot of effort and smarts into it. Somebody's asking: is that the perfect rocket for the company? Are there ever plans to do something different, to go bigger? **Peter Beck:** When we looked at Electron and where we thought the market opportunity was, I think we're right in the sweet spot. Anything much larger than Electron, you can no longer really affordably offer a dedicated service because the cost becomes too high. You end up becoming a rideshare vehicle competing with SpaceX, PSLV, Falcon, and all those vehicles. It becomes a very cluttered and challenging market. Any smaller than Electron, you're not able to lift useful masses and don't have enough energy. As I look at Electron, I think it's in the right place to be. I worry when I see one-ton class launch vehicles because you're just going head-to-head with SpaceX on a Falcon 9 rideshare, and that's a tough place to be. You're also competing with PSLV and a lot of other really low-cost rideshare options. Our goal is to provide dedicated service. We're not the bus—if you don't care where you're picked up, don't care where you're dropped off, and you're on someone else's timetable, take the bus. If you really care about where you want to go and when you want to go, you take the Uber—and we are the Uber. You wouldn't expect to pay the same for an Uber as you do a bus ticket. If you go larger than that, you're just in this neither region of super-rideshare. The rideshare market is crazy because you've got the PSLV vehicle, which is subsidized by the Indian government, so you're trying to compete as a commercial company against a government-subsidized vehicle. It's not a great place to be, in my opinion. ### Rideshare Competition with SpaceX **Ashley Vance:** I do have a rideshare question. For people who aren't space nerds or enthusiasts, on these very large rockets which might carry one or two bus-sized satellites, there are all these little pockets of space where you can fit smaller satellites, so you hitch a ride. Whereas you guys take a satellite exactly where it wants to go, and the rocket is built for that mission. SpaceX—I noticed Elon used to be fairly dismissive or nonchalant about the small rocket market for a long time. Then one day last year, SpaceX dramatically cut the prices for their rideshare program, which seemed targeted since you guys are the only small rocket launch company. What do you make of SpaceX's moves there, and does that disrupt your business or strategy? **Peter Beck:** I love a bit of competition—punch-ups are great! Ironically, the customers we see the most coming to us are customers that have been promised a ride on a rideshare vehicle that doesn't fly when it said it would. The first SpaceX rideshare was going to fly in March. The thing with rideshares is that you have to wait until everybody's on the bus until the bus leaves. The customers coming to us are those where there's a cost to sitting on the shelf. If you have a satellite company and need to generate revenue, and you sit on the shelf for a year, it's far cheaper to just buy a dedicated Electron launch vehicle where you are in charge of the entire mission and you get to go exactly where you need to go, when you need to go. We see a lot of customers punching out of rideshare and buying dedicated launchers. Sure, we're more expensive—that's a fact. But I think rideshare has a really important part in the market and industry because there are a lot of spacecraft that just need tech demos or just need to get out there. It's been a real enabler for the small satellite industry to grow. I don't want to be down on rideshare because I think it's been instrumental in growing the industry. We do our own rideshares as well—we ride-share a bunch of small CubeSats along with microsats. I think it's a really important part of the ecosystem. **Ashley Vance:** Competing with Elon is always interesting. Have you been following his Twitter feed the last couple weeks? **Peter Beck:** No, I'm not big on social media. I tweet the odd thing that I think is interesting, but I'm certainly not sitting there following what a bunch of other people are doing. We've got a mission to the moon—that is all-consuming! ### Factory Tour **Ashley Vance:** I think you have wireless headphones on. If it's not too weird, can you swivel out maybe, because your factory is amazing. It's like you can perform surgery in there. What can you tell us about those rocket bodies down there? Give us a little play-by-play on the factory. **Peter Beck:** In the very end of the factory behind the flags is Rosie the Robot. Raw material comes in as a raw tube, goes into Rosie, and every piece of machining, marking, trimming—it's all done in that machine. It sticks out of the machine, and you can see just past Rosie, there's that first tube. That tube steps across into these various booths. The first booth is a coating booth, the second booth is a soundproof booth where we do all the noisy operations. Having a clean factory is critically important, and clean is not just spotlessly clean—it's also quiet. You can't concentrate building rocket engines in noise. It goes along and shoots into these soundproof rooms where any noisy operations are completed. Then it steps across the factory, and this line here is the final production line. There's one in front of that you probably can't see. There's a bunch of rockets here as well. This is where they get shipped out to the launch site. **Ashley Vance:** How has the speed changed in how long it takes you to make a rocket from 2016 to today? **Peter Beck:** Every 30 days, one rolls off the production line now. Some parts like composite sections are down to one rocket every 18 days. For the rest of this year, the team is striving for one rocket every 18 days. We continue to push hard to increase production. ### Challenges of Rocket Development **Ashley Vance:** There's a bunch of questions that play into that. It's a difficult question to answer, but as part of knowing you and getting into rockets, I've been reading a lot of rocket history. If you go back almost exactly a hundred years, you had Robert Goddard in the United States and folks in Russia and Germany trying to build roughly the kind of stuff that you're trying to build. Over that span of a hundred years, hardly anyone has been successful at doing it. SpaceX made the Falcon 1, and we've got some other similar things, but it's incredibly hard to do. Why is it so hard, and to the extent that you guys did figure this out, how did you figure it out? **Peter Beck:** The way I think about building a rocket company is: imagine yourself running through a maze at night, and at every dead end, there's a guy with a shotgun who will shoot you. You have to run quickly with very little eyesight or information, but not run too quickly because you need to poke your head around the corner carefully to make sure you don't make the wrong decisions. Within a rocket company, one wrong decision can end it—blow up a launch pad, blow up an engine test. Especially early on, there's just no recovery. Going down a wrong technology path also means no recovery—there's no time to back out and say, "Screw that engine design, we'd better go back and start again." You just can't make mistakes. So knowing when to poke your head around the corner and say, "No, there's a guy there with a shotgun, we need to turn around," and also having the courage to continue down a path that looks like a dead end—because it always looks greener elsewhere. You'll get halfway into an engineering problem and think maybe it would have been easier to do it another way, and then you forever bounce around and never actually draw to a conclusion. There's also a curve where there's interest analysis that you can do—you can sit there and just analyze, analyze, analyze, and not build anything. On the other end of the spectrum, you can just build something and keep blowing it up. There's a sweet spot of efficiency, and right at the top of that curve is where, if you can get the experimental bit right and the analysis bit right, you don't end up churning on either end of that scale, and you can move quickly. I think that's what we've been able to do well—do good experimental work, understand physics and fundamentals, know where the real grenades lie, and always be in a very hardware-rich environment where we test a lot. But we also do the analysis and research up front to make sure we're not running down a path that's fundamentally flawed. It's a real balance. **Ashley Vance:** Were you a rocket historian? Just so people know, you are a self-taught rocket engineer—you didn't go to university and do a PhD in this. You're this world-class engineer who, as a kid, was building propellants and fuels. So obviously you've been at this from a very young age and had hands-on experience. But how much were you into rocketry history, and how much did that past inform your decision-making to find that right spot to turn the corner? **Peter Beck:** Engineering is engineering at the end of the day. It doesn't really matter if you're building a rocket or a washing machine or whatever—engineering is engineering, and logic is logic. I don't think there's anything unique about building a rocket, it's just that you can't make mistakes. That's pretty much it. **Ashley Vance:** You were this very passionate, driven, self-taught guy, and then you start Rocket Lab in a country that has really no aerospace industry. I've met a ton of people on your team—these very young Kiwis and Australians, people who never had a chance to work on a rocket before because you were the only game in town. What's your feeling now on hands-on versus university-trained people? If you had to talk to young people who are watching this and want to get into this industry, what would you advise regarding being an apprentice and doing hands-on stuff versus going to get a masters or PhD in aerospace engineering or physics? **Peter Beck:** First, be passionate about the thing you want to do. Only do the thing that you really want to do. My job is not a job—I'm just having fun. If you can get to that point, you're likely to be successful. Following your passion is the first thing. Then just do lots of stuff. When we see CVs and we're trying to fill a position, we can get 100 CVs—they've all gone to great universities, they've all got great grades. But the person we will hire is the person who, on the weekend, has built a lot of really cool stuff and has demonstrated that they have a passion beyond school. They will win out over someone with better grades every time. Someone who is passionate, energetic, and just wants to get stuff done will always win out. You can make up knowledge in a lot of cases, but not motivation. ### Technical Questions about Rocket Design **Ashley Vance:** Let's go rapid-fire to make people happy and feel like I got their questions answered. Why in this business do we pick kerosene and liquid oxygen instead of other fuels? **Peter Beck:** For us, it's just a good, well-understood, easy-to-handle propellant combination. Choose what you want to innovate in—propellants just weren't the place we wanted to innovate. **Ashley Vance:** You guys are pretty famous for 3D printing a lot of stuff, including your engines, and being the first to do that. Are the engines 3D printed in one fell swoop, or components that are put together? **Peter Beck:** There are large components that are generally still put together—about three main components that are assembled. Then all the turbopump and transfer lines are all still 3D printed. **Ashley Vance:** You guys have some pretty classic mission names, like "It's a Test" and some Flight of the Conchords love. People are enjoying your names. Is there any chance the public may be able to name a mission? **Peter Beck:** Yeah, generally what we do is if it's a dedicated ride, we work with the customer to come up with the name. If it's got a few folks on it, we just open it up to the staff, and we have a rolling list of names. But sure, we can open it up to the public. **Ashley Vance:** We're getting super rocket nerdy now. The electric turbopump—why did you guys do that, and why hadn't it really been done before? And one very technical question: is there a vibration reduction by using an electric turbopump versus a normal one? **Peter Beck:** We went down that road because if you distill apart a rocket engine, the most complex, complicated element is the turbo machinery. If you can turn turbo machinery into essentially software and have one moving part and no mess of thermal gradients or turbine pre-burners and all that jazz, it just makes it so much simpler. That was the motivation, and there are lots of wonderful things you get through the system like propellant utilization, infinitely variable throttle, infinitely variable mixture ratios, and things like that. It's super good. From a vibration standpoint, you don't have the combustion instability of a pre-burner, so you could argue that it's quieter in some respects. But at the end of the day, the majority of vibration is caused by the combustion device and any acoustic modes you have going on there, so it's a little bit removed from the pumping modules. ### Launch Sites and Future Expansion **Ashley Vance:** Are there any plans for European, specifically Scotland, launch sites? Obviously, you guys have your hands full with New Zealand and the US, but any future ambitions there? **Peter Beck:** We took a good look at the Scotland range, and when we did all the flight safety analysis for that range, we really only came up with two trajectories we could fly from a safety perspective. Those two trajectory corridors weren't commercial corridors—they were some weird inclination that we couldn't sell. So it really didn't make commercial sense for us. We're keeping an eye on the European market. The good thing is it doesn't take us long to build a launch pad—it was nine months to build one in Virginia. At a later date, if there's an opportunity we think is worth it, the team is pretty good at building launch pads. ### NASA's Role in the Future of Space **Ashley Vance:** In a couple weeks, SpaceX might be flying two humans to the International Space Station—the first time the US has been able to do that in a long time. It raises a lot of questions about NASA's role. Even though this was very much done in partnership with NASA (not only NASA money but people and technology), NASA is building its own large rocket to do this kind of thing that's been heavily delayed and cost a lot of money. What do you think the role of NASA should be over the next 10 years? Should it evolve from spots where they're competing with a pretty vibrant industry right now? What would you like to see NASA do over the next 10-20 years? **Peter Beck:** I think NASA, and Jim Bridenstine, well understands this: let private industry do what private industry does well. That's exactly why we've got this super exciting commercial crew launch. It was the best thing they could do. We have this really exciting commercial mission to the moon. I think they're doing it exactly right right now—engaging commercial industry, getting them to do the things that, rightly so, commercial industry should be doing in this day and age. Flying humans to the space station is a completely reasonable and doable thing. NASA can focus on the things that don't make commercial sense yet. This is the role of governments—things that are important either for the nation or for humanity. This is where governments can provide huge value. Things that you can turn it back on and actually make profitable, private industry should absolutely do. I think this is where they've got it just right right now. **Ashley Vance:** Is there anything philosophical that can be said about a private space company getting to this point, especially in the middle of this pretty grim time globally? These are always seen as inspirational events. Does it touch or pull on your heartstrings at all? What does it say to you, assuming everything goes fine with the SpaceX mission? **Peter Beck:** I just think it's awesome. I think it's incredible. Elon and the team at SpaceX have done a wonderful job. It's a beautiful-looking capsule. I'm always in the front row cheering anybody, especially a team that's built a beautiful thing and done something really hard. I think this really cements a new era in human spaceflight. There's no going back from here—it's just awesome. ### Iranian and North Korean Rocket Programs **Ashley Vance:** I'm only doing this to you because there are three questions about it: Have you studied the Iranian and North Korean rockets, and what do you make of their orbital ambitions? **Peter Beck:** I'm familiar with the vehicles, and they've leveraged heavily off things like Scud missiles, so there's a lot of scale-up going on there. Look, I think one of the responsibilities when you create an orbital capability is making sure you use it for good. Like everybody else, I believe there's a huge responsibility that goes along with developing this technology. Having the wrong technology in the wrong hands is not a wonderful thing. ### Advice for Aspiring Engineers and Entrepreneurs **Ashley Vance:** We're about to wrap up. I've known you for a while and done a lot of research about Rocket Lab and your background. Especially for younger people who are watching this—you were a bit of a lone wolf growing up and have ended up managing a very large company. What's been the hardest lesson you've learned, and what advice would you impart to people who want to go from becoming an engineer to becoming a CEO of a real company? **Peter Beck:** It's passionately going after something that you believe in. I'm a firm believer in going after really big problems, because the delta between solving a small problem and a big problem is not huge, especially in a business sense. So go after the really big problems. And just work hard. There's no magic here—it's just passion for what you want to do and working hard. It's probably not very inspirational, but that's the fact of it all. There's no magic recipe or something I've done that nobody else has done, or some mentor or anything. I just think it's critically important that we build infrastructure in orbit and go to Venus—and just work hard and get stuff done. **Ashley Vance:** That's a great lesson. Especially in rocketry, there are no cheat codes or anything like that. **Peter Beck:** No, the rocket gods rule supreme. The moment you take a shortcut, you know about it. **Ashley Vance:** Pete, thanks so much for doing this. Good luck on your next launch, and thanks for being so generous with your time. I appreciate it. **Peter Beck:** No problems, thanks Ashley. **Ashley Vance:** Cheers, mate. Good luck. **Peter Beck:** Cheers, thanks.