[[Home|🏠]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> [[Interviews]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> June 6 2024 **Insider**: [[Peter Beck]] **Source**: [Event Horizon Podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kmsct6MHMDI) **Date**: June 6 2024  🔗 Backup Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kmsct6MHMDI ## 🎙️ Transcript >[!hint] Transcript may contain errors or inaccuracies. **John Michael Godier:** Joining John today all the way from New Zealand is Sir Peter Beck. Sir Peter Beck is the founder, president, and chief executive officer of Rocket Lab. Since founding the company in 2006, Sir Peter has grown it into a global organization that develops and launches advanced rockets, satellites, and spacecraft. He has served on Rocket Lab's board of directors and as its president and chief executive officer since July 2013. He was appointed chairman of the board in May 2021. An award-winning engineer, in 2024 he was made Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to the aerospace industry, business, and education. Sir Peter Beck, welcome to the program. **Sir Peter Beck:** Thanks very much, John. ### On Being Knighted **John:** Peter, I have to ask you before we get into rocketry, what's it like getting knighted? **Sir Peter:** Very odd, very odd indeed. They don't do such things with people with my accent, but interesting. It's interesting, that kind of recognition, unusual, and it had to be weird. **John:** Yeah. **Sir Peter:** I mean, the way I look at this is it's really for all of the team and the engineers in the space industry. So I see it as not a kind of a personal achievement, more of a kind of an industry and a team achievement really. ### Small Rocket Reusability **John:** And an industry it is. It's really growing, and you see it in multiple sectors. And in your case, you're dealing with small launches, but bigger launches later, but small launches that specialize in reusing a small rocket. How does that work? I mean, reusability versus a large rocket versus a small one? **Sir Peter:** It's extremely difficult. You know, it's extremely difficult on a large rocket, but the difference is in a large rocket, you have a little bit more mass margin to play with. So typically, a rocket is about 1 to 5% mass fraction of actual payload that you deliver to orbit. So with a little rocket, in order to be able to achieve reusability, you can't afford to carry massive propellant and all of those other things. So you really have to let the planet deal with all of the solutions. So you end up with re-entry forces and parachutes and all those kinds of things to make it work. **John:** Now, is that how you're doing it, with parachutes only? Or are you actually intending to land it like a bigger rocket would? **Sir Peter:** Yes, so for Electron rocket, we don't have any propulsive elements at all. So we use little rocket engines to orientate the vehicle, and it's a very, very narrow corridor that we have to meet to be able to orientate the vehicle and re-enter it and actually get it through the super high velocity and plasma environment of reentering the atmosphere. And then once we've done that—actually, that's the hardest part of the whole process—and then once we've able to successfully re-enter it without burning it up, we deploy a parachute and it splashes down in the ocean. We go and pick it back up. But with a larger rocket, it's a much more traditional, if there's such a thing, propulsive landing system. ### Electron and Neutron Rockets **John:** Now you have, of course, Electron, which is what, 47 launches to date, and I, I'm, last I heard, one today in a few hours. And that's up and running. Neutron, however, has a very interesting feature in that one of the things that, that for some reason, and you can shed more light on this, has been a problem is recovering fairings with larger rockets, but you got that solved by keeping the fairing intact and stuck to the, keeping the fairing intact and stuck to the spacecraft. So, what, tell me about that. **Sir Peter:** Well, we had a very unique opportunity. As you mentioned, Electron is the second most frequently launched rocket in the US right now behind the Falcon 9. And so we had a very unique opportunity to sit down with a blank sheet of paper and go, "Okay, we're going to build a big rocket, but how do we build a big reusable rocket knowing what we know, knowing what the industry has learned as well, and how can we really optimize it?" And of course, one of the things is that currently occurs is the fairings have to be shed and fall back down to earth, and you go and fish them out of the ocean and reconstitute them and refurbish them and put them back on the rocket. And to us, it's like, well, that surely would be better if you didn't do that. So we created what we affectionately call the "Hungry Hippo," which is that basically the fairings separate, the second stage which is suspended inside the rocket is then ejected out with the payload, and that ignites and carries on in the mission. And then what lands back on earth looks exactly like the rocket that took off, and that's what it should look like if you're taking the reusability seriously. **John:** As it should. It should be like an airplane. **Sir Peter:** Yeah, you know, once the airplane lands, you can move on. You're not wasting, you know, shedding your cargo doors, refitting cargo doors when you land your aircraft. ### Cost Efficiency and Launch Economics **John:** Now, how much does that save you? In other words, by not, by minimizing what you waste, in other words, what you jettison, by minimizing that, how does this factor into dropping launch costs? **Sir Peter:** Yeah, so about 70% of the total cost of a launch is kind of born in that first stage. So if you can get the first stage back in as complete a condition as possible with the minimum amount of refurbishment, then that's the vast majority of the cost of a launch. So that's what we're really, really focused on. So that continues to drive launch cost down even further. The interesting thing, and I would say the kind of what started off as a disadvantage that has turned into a real advantage for us is, you know, flying a small rocket and doing it commercially is way harder than flying a big rocket and doing it commercially, simply because all of the teams that you have, whether it's a big rocket or a small rocket, are the same. So a flight safety team, for example, or a reliability team, they don't care if the rocket is 40 feet tall or 400 feet tall. It makes no difference to their job. And what we've had to do is we've had to find ways to kind of amortize or automate all those teams across a way, way smaller sticker price. For example, the Electron rocket has a sticker price of 7.5 million, Neutron has a sticker price of 55 million, and you can imagine if you've only got a sticker price of 7.5 million, you can't have a 50-person flight safety team and a 50-person reliability team and a 50-person manufacturing team, engineering team, and so on and so forth. So we've had to come up with ways to do the same thing but vastly more efficiently so that when we moved now on to a larger rocket, Neutron, all of the efficiency that we've created from Electron just ports directly across. And to your point of reducing launch costs, that has a huge, huge effect on launch cost. **John:** And effectively you're just scaling up your technology that you've developed, right? So going bigger from where you started is simply the natural way to go in order to get more market share, right? **Sir Peter:** Correct. So between Electron and Neutron, we'll launch somewhere between 80 and 90% of everything that's available to launch, what can fly on those two rockets. So there are some larger payloads that we can't launch, but pretty much everything that can be launched will put on those rockets. Pretty much. ### Interplanetary Missions **John:** But what you can do is launch something to Venus. Now, a friend of mine, Dr. Kotsky, is involved in a project, a private project, to send a life finder mission to Venus, and that's going to happen through Rocket Lab. So what is the limit on what you can do as far as launching to other worlds? In other words, can you get to Mars with your rockets? **Sir Peter:** Yes. So actually, about two years ago, we launched a mission called Capstone for NASA, and it was a small satellite to the moon. So we created a capability with a little rocket, Electron, and an upper stage called Explorer that enables us to get enough C3 to go to the moon and to Mars and even, as you pointed out, to Venus. So the idea of that was, typically, these interplanetary missions are measured in the billions of dollars and occur every decade or two. And our view is that, look, if you can produce and fly a number of smaller missions at much, much lower cost, then your ability to increment the science and do more missions is vastly improved. So yeah, we had the Capstone Mission to the Moon, we have the Venus Mission as you point out, which is a private mission. And if you get me started talking about Venus, I think we'll consume this entire interview on that. And then we also have two spacecraft that we're building for NASA right now called Escapade that will go to Mars later this year. **John:** But you've got a rocket, and I believe you said 7.5 million, that can get you to Venus. That's going to open up a whole lot of private science exploration of the solar system, wouldn't you think? Do you anticipate that? **Sir Peter:** We certainly hope that. I mean, the Venus life finding mission is kind of the bastion of that. I mean, it's a purely private philanthropic mission. We're providing the launch vehicle, the spacecraft, the probe, and all of the mission. And the science team have developed an instrument specifically designed just to see if we can detect life in the clouds of Venus. And I really hope that more of these private missions can occur because they're just, as you point out, at a cost point now where relatively modest philanthropists can have a meaningful impact to planetary science. ### Democratization of Space **John:** Now with this lower launch cost, in addition to science, is the question of an expansion of what we do with low Earth orbit satellites. In other words, it's been a kind of an expensive thing, but Communications companies can afford it and this and that. But now that you have a cheaper way to do it, what does that open up for other industries to use low Earth orbit for other things than gigantic GPS systems and things like that, or smaller ones, apparently? **Sir Peter:** I feel very fortunate. I used to wake up in the morning as a kid wishing that I was born in the era of the Apollo missions to the Moon because I thought that was the prime time to be in the space industry. But I've since been well proven wrong there. I think right now is the most exciting time. And I've been doing this for nearly 20 years now, and at the start of that, it was very much right at the beginning of what I would call the democratization of space. And there was a few little private companies, we were one of them, and then over the years, we've seen it completely shift. We've seen it shift away from only governments build rockets, only governments launch rockets, to now everybody just relies on the commercial sector to get to orbit. And the same thing in low Earth orbit. So as you point out, typically low Earth orbit was the place of large government-sponsored or military projects. Now we have a plethora of small little startup companies that can raise several millions and actually put a satellite on orbit and build a business and actually provide services from orbit. So I think it's a super exciting time, and we are by no means at the end of it. I would say we're right at the very beginning of what I think in time will come to look a little bit like the internet era. **John:** It's glorious, and you're right in the middle of it, but it's glorious because I was born in the mid-1970s. Apollo was done, as you mentioned, and man, the '80s, not that great as far as space exploration. But now it has dramatically changed, and I think it's, as you say, the democratization of it. That seems to me to be a really good way to usher in a new era that maybe you can't even predict what's going to come of it. ### Future of Human Presence in Space **John:** So let me let me ask you this: do you see a path forward for someday people living and working in space? You know, O'Neill cylinders or something along those lines, space stations? And do you see a path towards that, or do you see it as a more nuanced thing where you only are going to do it if it's useful, but actually living up there, other than maybe tourism, there's probably not much of a reason to do that? What's your view on that? Are we, will we end up living in space? **Sir Peter:** Well, I think, look, I'm infinitely commercial, so there has to be a valid, as you point out, a valid commercial reason to do anything at all. And I think I'm fairly confident that that vision will occur because you are already seeing the likes of NASA moving away from the International Space Station, and now that's been opened up to commercial enterprise to build and operate a space station. And the government will procure that as a service. And as launch costs continue to come down and more infrastructure, more commercial infrastructure comes into orbit, then there's a lot, lot more innovation and impetus to develop new business models. So I think that's a fair estimation. Will a large portion of the population migrate to orbit? I don't think so. I mean, Earth's pretty good, and it's pretty limiting in space. So I don't think there's going to be a mass migration into orbit. But I think there'll be business opportunities and commercial ventures that we've never even thought of that will be very successful in orbit. And the one thing that always tempers me with these kind of visions is, actually, fundamentally, it's still super hard to get to orbit. As I mentioned before, like 1 to 5% of the total mass of a rocket is actually the thing that goes to orbit, and the rest is like 92% fuel. So we are slapped around the face by physics every time we go and do anything in orbit, and it is just so difficult and marginal to be able to achieve. So I don't think it'll ever be like an airline ticket. I think at the end of the day, physics brings you back to Earth in the respect that you have to sit on 95 or 92% volume of fuel to get there, and that's just fundamentally a lot of energy to sit on top of. But I certainly think it'll look vastly different from what we see today. **John:** You know, that's actually a sort of an amazing thought because if you think about it, had Earth been a little bit more massive, we wouldn't be doing this. **Sir Peter:** We just got lucky. It's crazy. We got lucky because if you look at like the stoichiometric combustion efficiency of a rocket engine, it's sort of around that 98% or slightly more in some cases. And you just run out of chemical equilibrium and run out of physics to actually get into orbit. So you're right—if it was a little bit more massive or atmosphere is a little bit thicker, then we would be Earthbound. ### Rocket Turnaround Time **John:** Now, what's your turnaround time on both rockets? I mean, how, ideally, how fast can you relaunch a pre-launched rocket? What's the turnaround time for an individual vehicle? **Sir Peter:** It really, really depends. So for Neutron, I set the team the task of: we should be able to turn that rocket around in 24 hours. Now, that is an pretty absurd thing to say, especially at the beginning of a program. But at least what that did was it defined a set of requirements that drove a whole bunch of interesting engineering decisions. For example, the propellant choice of that vehicle was born out of that requirement because a liquid oxygen kerosene kind of propellant combination creates a lot of soot in the engine, and there's a lot of cleaning of the engine that's required before you can fly again. Now with a methane engine, basically, it's still shiny at the end of a combustion cycle. So really, that drove a whole lot of requirements that push that timeline. So will we ever get to 24 hours? Who knows, but that was certainly the engineering constraint that we put on the vehicle. Every bit of the launch infrastructure and the major engineering decisions were driven around that. ### Rocket Fuel Choices **John:** So it's sort of just the fuel plays a large part in this. And so future plans on the possible fuels, which there are quite a few of them, what is the ideal rocket fuel for anybody? What is the right mix that you really would want to get to? **Sir Peter:** Well, I mean, look, the ideal fuel is liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen, and maybe throw a bit of boron in there or some nastiness, fluorine. And like, chemically, your choices are fairly limited. Just call it liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen for the best example. And this is my point before—there is nothing more, there's no room really to move. Every fuel has its, every propellant choice has its own advantages and disadvantages. With methane, yeah, it's a lovely clean burning fuel. It is slightly higher performance, but it's slightly lower density, so you almost cancel the performance increase you get by added tank mass. And then it's cryogenic, so now you're dealing with two cryogenic fills rather than just one. So there's no perfect example here. And the way I like to describe building a rocket or even building a spacecraft is that everything is one giant engineering compromise. And if you've got all your engineers in the room and they're all unhappy, then you know you've come up with a perfect design because there's no free lunch on any side of the equation. **John:** I love that. When all the engineers are equally unhappy, you know you've got it. ### The Archimedes Engine **John:** Now let me ask you this. So you're developing a new engine, the Archimedes engine. What's that oxygen-rich staged combustion cycle part? What's interesting about this engine? **Sir Peter:** So it's an ox-rich closed combustion cycle, and once again, the drive for a quick turnaround and reusability drove the engineering design. Generally, that cycle is associated with super high-performance engines that run really, really high combustion chamber pressures. And if you're trying to build the highest performance rocket engine, that is a cycle you choose. But the crazy thing for us is that we're not trying to build the most, the highest performing rocket engine. We're actually trying to build the most reliable and also the most reusable. As I mentioned before, everything is a giant engineering trade. So if you start off with the highest performing cycle and then you dial it back to kind of a moderate performance, what you end up with is an engine that is very, very benign. You end up with an engine that is very low stressed because you trade some of the advantage that you have with the cycle giving you high performance and just dialing it back. Then you end up with something that is very reliable and extremely reusable. Now, the challenge with that cycle is it's a very, very difficult cycle to master. You're dealing with extremely hot oxygen, and it's a difficult cycle to master. But as opposed to other cycles, to get the same performance, you would have to have them sitting right on the limit. What we have now with that engine is an engine that is moderately, moderately high performing on the scale of rocket engines, but extraordinarily reliable and robust. ### Carbon Fiber vs. Steel in Rocket Construction **John:** Now, the idea of using carbon fiber and saving weight, that would be obviously very important for an aircraft. But a rocket saving weight seems like it needs to do that as well. But some people are opting for stainless steel, and that seems counterintuitive to me, whereas Rocket Lab is using carbon fiber. What are the advantages to carbon fiber? **Sir Peter:** Well, once again, giant engineering compromise. The advantages of carbon is, you're exactly right, for the same unit strength, it's four times lighter than say something like stainless steel. So if you had a certain load you had to resist, it would be four times less weight than it would be if it was in steels or standard steels. So that on the outset is a great advantage. Now, the disadvantage with carbon fiber is it's not as temperature resistant as steel. It's certainly not as easy to work with. So when you build a carbon fiber rocket, you have to have the whole rocket designed because everything is made in tooling, everything is molded in tooling. So you can't just go and weld a bit on the side or iterate quickly. You really have to have your design set from day one, which is a big compromise. And everyone wants to see their product develop quickly, and with metallics, you can weld stuff together and make something that looks like a rocket very quickly. With carbon fiber, you have to have the whole thing designed and all of the giant tooling made before you can even have your first part off. It can be often years down the track before you even have your first part off, and there's not much room for major iteration. So that's the downside. Now, as I've mentioned before, somewhere between 1 and 5% of the total rocket's mass is the payload, 92% of the rocket's mass is propellant, and then that just leaves you a small fraction of percentage left for structures. And once again, in engineering trade, if you can make super lightweight structures, then the trade-off is that your engines don't need to be as high performing. So as we mentioned before, if the engines don't need to be as high performing, then they can be much more robust and reliable. So for us, it was very much a trickle-down effect. If you can make the lightest structures possible, then you can make an engine that doesn't need to be so high performing. That means it's reliable, and all of these things are required for a rapid and reusable rocket. **John:** And that makes a ton of sense because when you're not, when you don't have to subject it to the forces and pressures that a high-performance rocket engine is going to have to go through, you're going to have a lot less failure, and you're going to have a lot more reliability, especially in the context of reusing it. And so, how many times do you think you can get, how many launches do you think you can get out of an engine? **Sir Peter:** Well, I mean, the design point is 20. And look, it's too early to say what really it is. And of that 20, how many of those components are going to need to be reused and just changed, like much like an aircraft where you have calendar times? What I can say from experience with the Electron rocket, the Rutherford engine that's on there, we have an old Rutherford engine that's just kind of the engine that we hack around with and try new things. And that engine's been running for over a decade. And yeah, it's had the odd new pump and bits and pieces to it, but literally, that engine just goes up in the engine test stand every time we want to try something new and just runs and runs and runs and runs. So it's totally feasible to build something with many, many hours of service life or even longer. But it just does take a while to get that confidence in the time on those components. ### Rocket Lab's Future Plans **John:** Now, what are your long-term plans? So you've got one rocket, and you're getting ready to build another, and so on, and getting bigger. What is the long-term plan of Rocket Lab, and are you going to keep going larger? **Sir Peter:** No, I mean, we think the Neutron rocket is about the right size. The ironic thing here is, and this is kind of, perhaps my fault is, you know, naming the company Rocket Lab, but two-thirds of the work that we do are actually in our Space Systems—so building satellites, building spacecraft, and providing solutions and components for a huge amount of the industry's other projects in that same thing. So like I said, two-thirds of the business is actually building spacecraft and supplying components to other spacecraft and satellites. So our vision here is to build an end-to-end space company, so focused a lot on launch, but what we're finding now is customers coming to us just wanting a service or a capability on orbit. And we are, to my knowledge, one of the very few, if not the only company that a customer can come to. We can design the spacecraft, we can build the spacecraft using all of our own components, then we can launch the spacecraft on our own rocket and operate it for the customer. And probably the best example of that is a mission that we just recently won from the US government called Victor's Hay. And the government is basically just procuring a capability, and that mission requires us to design the spacecraft, use all of our components to build a spacecraft, and then we have to launch the spacecraft within 24 hours of a given notice. And then once it's on orbit, we operate the spacecraft, we do a rendezvous with another spacecraft. And what we're providing to the government is that capability and the data, which, when you think about it, that kind of mission historically would have been spread across probably five or six different contractors, and certainly nobody would be talking about launching it within 24 hours. So what we're really trying to build here is this large end-to-end space company. **John:** That is actually titanic because the model up until now has been to launch, and once it's there, then it's somebody else's problem once the spacecraft is separated. But you're not doing that. You're actually going to operate the spacecraft, or at least offer the services to do so, but also building it. And that's a very broad vision. ### Off-the-Shelf Space Components **John:** Now, what do you think the future is for—because everything starts out custom, right? So if we were in 1930 and we were building crystal radios, we'd be making our own crystals. But now, then it became off-the-shelf. Do you see Rocket Lab eventually being able to do that? In other words, have off-the-shelf components for somebody that wants to launch a cubesat, to actually build one, design it, and then pay you to launch it? **Sir Peter:** Yeah, I mean, we largely do that already. I mean, we have a merchant line of, I don't know how many products, but probably over 100 products in total between solar cells, panels, star trackers, radios, reaction wheels, and you name it, batteries. So we have a repertoire of components now that even when we go and build our own spacecraft, we just sort of pick parts off the shelf and combine them together to build whatever we need to build. The challenge with the ultimate kind of spacecraft where it's literally a commodity item is a little bit challenging because, as I mentioned, you're always at war with physics. And even when you select those components off the shelf and you start to build a spacecraft, the reality is that you're in an environment that's incredibly difficult. And you have, just for example, like on a satellite, you'll have the satellite producing heat, so you have to dump that heat. And then it goes into shade and into sun every 90 minutes in some cases. So the thermal environment is extremely difficult. So it's not a benign environment to operate in, so there's always some level of trickery and customization. But if I think about where we are today versus where we were even like a decade ago, it's vastly different. I mean, high school students and universities are building small satellites now. So that kind of goes to show how much more accessible the stuff has become. ### Space Traffic Management and Kessler Syndrome **John:** What do you think with the increased accessibility to space, which is a wonderful thing, the democratization of launching things into space, but Kessler Syndrome? Do you think that as these launch costs continue to drop and it becomes easier for even students to get an experiment launched, are we going to really have to manage that? In other words, make sure that the stuff gets de-orbited before we fill up Earth orbit and ruin entire orbital levels with Kessler Syndrome? **Sir Peter:** Absolutely. I mean, we've always been a strong proponent of this, and I think Space Traffic Management is absolutely going to be required. I mean, space is big, but also the objects are moving at very high velocities. And as you point out, there's certain orbits where if you had a debris field, it becomes extremely challenging to do anything useful. And we've been a strong proponent of trying to use space sustainably and responsibly. The challenge is that it requires everybody in the entire world, every nation, to agree on a set of rules and then follow them. And if you look back through human history, there's not that many examples where we've all come together as a civilization before something disastrous has happened and said, "Right, we see this coming, let's all work together, agree on a set of rules, and we'll all follow them and everything will be fine." Generally, it takes some level of proving through disaster for that to happen. I'm sounding very, very pessimistic here, but generally, that's the case, especially when space is a domain of national defense for every country that has assets in orbit. So I live in hope that we can all agree a set of rules and manage the traffic up there accordingly, because I think, to your point, in a very short amount of time, that is going to become critical. **John:** I'm hopeful of it too, that we can all just rationally sit down and say, "Look, this is the problem, here's how we solve it." And it's essentially an order of agreement on how we manage it. ### The Experience of Launch Day **John:** So I'm dying to ask this, Peter. You are the head of a rocket company. What is it like, and you've got a launch here in just a few hours—what is it like? What is launch day like for you? **Sir Peter:** Well, I would have thought that nearly 50 launches, launch day would be a relatively normal day, but it's just not. At the end of the day, every mission counts, and the mission that we're launching today is VANESSA. It's a very important climate change mission. It requires two spacecraft in orbit. We've launched, obviously, the first one a year or so ago. So every launch is just extremely important, requires everybody's focus and concentration. And I wish that it would become very ordinary, but for me personally, every launch is a very high-tense, high-intensity moment. That's for sure. I suspect it'll never change, and even after 600 launches, it'll still be like that because, look, it's rockets. How can you not grow up as a space guy and not find every single one absolutely cool? **John:** No, I agree. ### Peter Beck's Origins in Aerospace **John:** Now, what got you into this, Peter? How did you start? What compelled you originally to say, "Hm, I want to go into science, and I want to develop rockets and invent things?" **Sir Peter:** My kind of growth in the industry is a little bit different to most. You can probably tell from my accent that I'm not from the US. And I was born in a little town at the very bottom of the South Island of New Zealand, and probably about the furthest away from space as you could imagine. But I had two interests: one was engineering, and one was space. And I just started to build rocket engines at school, very elementary ones, and just built larger and larger. And then sort of navigated my career in a way that I thought, well, one day, my dream was to go and work for NASA in the space industry. And it's still very challenging as a foreign national to turn up in the US, and especially with no degree in the field. There was no university degrees available in the field. So at some point, I decided, "Well, actually, if I'm going to work in the space industry, I'm just going to have to do it myself." So I hung a little sign on my workshop door and my shed garage door. It said "Rocket Lab" and quit my job and just started. And for the first number of years, we did little projects building kind of credibility and capability. And it got to the point where we had a number of small contracts for various space companies. And then I went to Silicon Valley, and this was the days where asking for $5 million in Silicon Valley for your space startup was a big ask. And I was fortunate enough to come across a capital firm called Khosla Ventures, who had invested very early on in the original Skybox satellite constellation, which Google later purchased. So they had a deep knowledge of just the pains of launch. I mean, they had to go to Russia and negotiate old ICBMs to launch their satellites. So when we came along with this concept of a little rocket, they understood very well the pain of launch and put their money where their mouths were. And then we did a number of investment rounds and ultimately went public, and here we are today. ### Launch Site Advantages **John:** Now, is there an advantage, and I know you're launching from here in the Northern Hemisphere, but is there an advantage to launching from, say, New Zealand? In other words, is there some advantage that you get, or does that not actually matter where you're launching from, North or South? I know the equator matters, but otherwise, is there an advantage to, say, a launch facility in New Zealand, Australia? **Sir Peter:** There's no geographical advantage for the kind of orbits that we're achieving, but there is an operational advantage. As you point out, we have an operational launch site in Wallops Island, Virginia, and a private orbital launch site down in New Zealand. And I would say that operating your own private orbital launch site is a huge operational advantage because we decide when we fly. Like, we literally poke a head out the window in the morning and go, "Well, not sure of the weather today, maybe we're not going to fly." Whereas if we're at a launch range, it's scheduled months in advance. You've got your little slot, and you have to hit that slot or not. And if you miss that slot, then you have to wait a whole bunch of time to get the next one. And especially in busy launch ranges like the Cape, it's really, really difficult to move around scheduling. So having your own private orbital launch site and range is operationally and from a business standpoint a huge advantage because we control everything. And that gives us a lot of leverage. **John:** Now, you said you were from the southern tip of the South Island. So how far is that from your launch facility in New Zealand? **Sir Peter:** Well, it's not—you know, New Zealand's a small country. So it's about a 2-and-a-half, two-hour plane flight. So, not like the continental US where vast distances exist. A relatively short distance. ### Conclusion **John:** All right, Peter. Thank you for joining us today. I know you're busy and you've got a launch coming, so I won't keep you much longer. Thank you for joining us, and I wish you great luck and much success to Rocket Lab and onward and upward. **Sir Peter:** Thanks, John. Much appreciated.