[[Home|🏠]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> [[Interviews]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> March 28 2025 **Insider**: [[Peter Beck]] **Source**: [CNBC](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5TqSHWsL3s) **Date**: March 28 2025  🔗 Backup Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5TqSHWsL3s ## 🎙️ Transcript >[!hint] Transcript may contain errors or inaccuracies. **News Anchor:** TikTok headlines as we do approach that deadline next week. Meantime shares of Rocket Lab bucking the downtrend today finishing up 1% up 350% over the past 12 months. Now this after the US Space Force tapped the company to join the National Security Space Launch Program, part of NSSL phase three Lane one category. What this means? Well, Rocket Lab, as well as startup Stokes Space, are allowed to compete for launch contracts worth billions of dollars over the next four years. Launch one Programs as a whole are appropriated $5.6 billion, and Rocket Lab's CEO and founder, Sir Peter Beck, tells me that this award is, quote, "actually really significant." **Peter Beck:** There's a very, very small number of providers that can compete for the various contracts over the next few years to deliver the spacecraft. So it's kind of like, you know, riding an elevator to the very top floor to an exclusive club. You have to earn your way up there. But now, you know, you can compete for those projects. **News Anchor:** Now, that so-called exclusive club also includes SpaceX, Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance, all greenlit by the Pentagon to potentially transport the most sensitive national security payloads through the rest of this decade through this NSSL program. Now for Rocket Lab, it represents a big opportunity for its new medium lift neutron rocket that's currently under development and exponentially more powerful than the company's current workhorse, electron. **Peter Beck:** There is a, you know, a slightly unintended monopoly within medium class launch right now. So there are really no other viable alternatives. So neutron looks to, you know, squarely kind of address that. And then for our own purposes as well. I mean everybody knows Rocket Lab very well as a launch provider. But two thirds of our business is in fact building spacecraft. So what we're trying to build as a company is really this end to end space company where customers can come to us, we can very easily build this spacecraft, we can launch it for them, and we can even operate it for them. So neutron is kind of the final leg of the stool that enables us to build that end to end company. **News Anchor:** Well, Beck says neutron is still on track to make its first flight later this year. Rocket Lab needs one successful launch to be certified for these future national security missions. For the full discussion, check out Manifest Space. You can scan that QR