[[Home|🏠]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> [[Interviews]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> April 11 2020 **Insider**: [[Peter Beck]] **Source**: [Everyday Astronaut](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdtQfSkrVUU) **Date**: April 11 2020  🔗 Backup Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdtQfSkrVUU ## 🎙️ Transcript >[!hint] Transcript may contain errors or inaccuracies. **Tim Dodd:** Hi, it's me Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut. Rocket Lab, of course, that's one of my all-time favorite small rocket companies, is working on a lot of really exciting things right now. I just recently caught up with the CEO and founder Peter Beck. He's just back in December when they were opening up the new launch pad in Wallops, Virginia, but they're still working on a lot of really cool and exciting things between then and now, and they have a lot of cool things coming the rest of this year even though the world is kind of currently on pause. So I got a chance to catch up again with Peter Beck and ask him more about their crazy plans to catch a rocket with a helicopter. Now if you need to know more about this, how it's physically possible, or why it's never been done, I've already done a pretty in-depth video that you could watch before or after this interview. It's really fascinating stuff. Okay, on to the interview. ### Recent Developments at Rocket Lab **Tim Dodd:** Hey Peter, how's it going? **Peter Beck:** Good, thanks Tim. Yourself? **Tim Dodd:** Good to see you. It sounds like you guys are staying still pretty busy considering all the things going on. You've done quite a bit since the last time we spoke in... was that December or November? **Peter Beck:** November. We hadn't done a STEM video yet, I think. When you opened up LC-2. **Tim Dodd:** So what all's happened since then? It seems like you guys have done quite a few things behind the scenes. You had another launch. Give us a little rundown, a little update on what Rocket Lab's been up to. **Peter Beck:** It's been super busy. As you pointed out, we did another launch and it was good to get that one away for that particular customer. Big deal, customer, they won. And things don't slow down. Obviously, we won the NASA CAPSTONE mission to the Moon, so that's a very big project for us with the Lunar Photon stage. Massive project, massive engineering undertaking, super cool program. **Tim Dodd:** When's the first stuff for that actually slated as far as on the calendar? **Peter Beck:** First quarter 2021. Out of LC-2. That'll be a big deal, so it's gonna be fun. ### Progress on Rocket Recovery **Tim Dodd:** What else have you been working on? **Peter Beck:** Also plowed on with recovery. We've made some big strides in recovery. For recovery, there's really three main pillars of trickiness: 1. The first one is, could we get a stage through the atmosphere in one piece? We did that a couple of times in a row, which was great. 2. The second one is, can we reliably catch a stage out of midair with the helicopter? 3. And the third one is, can we get it under parachutes and slow it down? We've been beavering away on all three of those areas and had some success in some of them. **Tim Dodd:** I happen to catch this little video of you guys actually working on the parachute aspect and recovering it with the helicopter. How many times have you guys worked on that? Tell me how that's going. Has it been pretty exciting? Have you had any mishaps, or has it all been going pretty smooth? **Peter Beck:** It's gone very, very smooth. We did a test drop with a dummy Stage One, and it was quite the logistical feat actually. We had three helicopters and two giant boats and also a recovery vessel, so it was quite the flotilla of aircraft and boats to get this test done. We basically stood out into the middle of the Pacific and dropped the test article from one helicopter at around 6,000 feet. Then the other helicopter had our hook and capture mechanism, and it came in behind and lined up and picked it out of the middle of the sky first try. **Tim Dodd:** You guys made it look pretty easy. I was kind of shocked. I don't quite get the grabbing mechanism that grabs onto the actual drogue chute there. What is that, like some kind of hook or something? How does it end up? It looks like all you have to do is kind of touch it and it magically is grabbing onto the line. **Peter Beck:** It's an aerodynamically stable shape, so we can fly through the air full speed and the rope stays nice and controlled. Also, the hooking system retains its stability. It is pretty simple in the fact that you have your long Vectran tether trailing out behind the main chute, and then with the hook, the idea is to just touch those two lines. Once the two lines touch, you just sort of slide up and it snags in a wee mechanism. Then that mechanism pulls on the parachute and deflates the parachute, and you take the weight and away you go. But I have to say, Tim, the pilot made it look super easy. We're all sitting watching it from a boat, and it seemed like, "Jeez, that doesn't look too bad at all." And so when he landed, we spoke to him and said, "Jeez, that didn't look too bad at all," and he was like, "Oh no, I was working for that!" So he made it look very easy. **Tim Dodd:** I bet he was certainly working for it, and definitely anyone skilled in their profession makes really hard things look really easy. That pilot just absolutely knocked it out of the park because it just looked like, "Yeah, not a big deal." One of the things I was wondering about—you show the booster, how for now that just mock-up dummy will just kind of land down on what would be its engine bells. What is the process going to be like? Please tell me there's gonna be a giant robot with giant arms that's just gonna grab it out of the sky and lay it down gently. What's your plan to get it safely down somewhere? **Peter Beck:** Well, I mean it depends on how you define a robot, but no, basically it's a jig, a half-shell jig. The helicopter pilot, once you've snagged it, you have very good control of where it is, provided you don't have too many prevailing weather conditions. So you can come in and just grab it and make it nice and simple really. **Tim Dodd:** So it actually is going to be grabbed out of midair basically? **Peter Beck:** Well, there's the marine platform with a jig, and then you come along. There's a lot of tolerance in the vertical and translational planes, so you come on and just have it at that. **Tim Dodd:** Has that little process been practiced already? **Peter Beck:** No, but that's not one I'm worried about at all. It's no different to just long-lining with the helicopter. A really good pilot can do incredible things with accuracy on long lines. It's not a tricky one. ### Lessons from Reentry Tests **Tim Dodd:** That looks really exciting. It looks like you guys have made really good progress in that. Did anything change after the second time you guys have now made it through reentry? Did anything surprise you or change from the first reentry going through to the second? Is there any hardware that you've now added after the first two that you're preparing now for your third time? Just give me a rundown. **Peter Beck:** Flight 17 is where we're targeting, or build 17 is where we're targeting the parachute system to fly on. Build 17 is being produced right now, and we're qualifying a lot of the systems. Every time you reenter something like that, you learn a lot. But I guess we didn't learn enough between the two flights to warrant continually doing it, which was a discussion point amongst the team. Should we just continually refly these recovery systems until we get some parachutes under it and really get it back and see what we've got? It's not pointless, but it's extra data that's not valuable enough to warrant airplanes with aero systems out in the middle of the Pacific and all the logistics that go along with tracking a stage down. **Tim Dodd:** So in other words, just to reiterate because it's kind of hard to hear you sometimes, basically you're thinking now to stop trying to solve the full problem, and you're going to basically still try to recover one but not expecting it to be reflight-worthy and just kind of see what needs to be improved upon? **Peter Beck:** Yes. From this point, the next phase of the program is to splash one down in the ocean in any condition. We're working really hard on the parachute systems to do that. That's really the next big milestone—to get something splashed down in the ocean that we can go and fish out. There wasn't too much more to learn by just continually reentering stages without any parachute systems. **Tim Dodd:** That makes sense. And so after that, you'll kind of look at what needs to be beefed up in the heat shield, what needs to be beefed up in any other things, and you'll kind of have a good starting point to really move forward and not waste R&D on something that isn't going to work out? **Peter Beck:** Exactly. We've proven that we can reenter it. There's not a lot more we can prove by just keeping on reentering them at this point. What we need to do now is get one back, and that's the ultimate proof in the pudding. We'll get it back, and if it looks in great shape, that'll be a huge bonus. If it's just hanging together by a string and we were just lucky, then that's a different set of problems to solve. Obviously, the stages are well instrumented, and we're looking at heat flux and temperatures and things like that. The stage is making it back in one piece, but the post-investigation after recovery is really where we're gonna see where we are. ### Development Philosophy **Tim Dodd:** That's got to be really exciting, knowing that you're making progress on something that so few people have ever really done and accomplished. On top of your list of achievements already, it seems like you're plowing through this pretty quickly. It's just crazy to think that you're that close already to really be able to pluck one out of the ocean and see how it did. **Peter Beck:** There's a block upgrade for flight 17. Obviously, the parachute systems have quite a large interface, both structural and system-level, but the team's really kicking it. We're moving through super quickly. It's great to put the work in in the beginning, do lots of testing and analysis, and then come out the other side with positive results. I've been reflecting on this quite a bit recently in development programs. There's kind of two schools of thought with a lot of these systems: 1. Fly really early, take lots of risk, and have lots of failures 2. Or spend a bit more time, do the analysis, really understand what's going on, and use those flights as kind of final validation points rather than massive learnings along the way I think there's a really capable balance to be made there between just going forward and blowing crap up versus doing a good level of analysis and understanding. Versus going the other way, which is just analyzing to death and then building one thing at the end, which we don't subscribe to either. There's a middle point where I think there's an optimum curve in the kind of effort versus reward. If you're over either way of the curve, you can spend a lot of time with broken hardware if you're this side of the curve, or you spend too much time total that you don't get any results. **Tim Dodd:** That's really interesting you're talking about that because that's actually a topic I'm kind of comparing the development and iteration of a rocket like the SLS versus a rocket like Starship. You couldn't have two more different approaches to development than those two. It sounds like you guys are kind of finding that happy medium, where it's like you know when it's good enough and when it's still good enough to not be risky but still give you the next step. That is an art on its own—learning when to move on, when it's good enough. It looks like you're riding that line perfectly from what I can tell—like this is good enough to get us to the next step, but you're not spending years on the chalkboard either. It seems like you're kind of right in the middle there. **Peter Beck:** You're right, and there is a balance. I think that's part of the success of Rocket Lab—being able to find that mean in the curve where you're optimizing for time and efficiency and resources. **Tim Dodd:** Because that's not free. **Peter Beck:** No, nothing's free. Nothing is free in this game. Everything is very expensive. ### Economics of Recovery **Tim Dodd:** Do you think you'll actually save money by recovering boosters, or is it literally a matter of increasing production is more expensive than doubling the size of your factory? Like give me that balance. The economics of flying a helicopter again is not free, the boat, all that stuff is not free. What do you feel like that balance sheet is approximately going to be right now? **Peter Beck:** The key driver here is not economics, it's manufacturing. If we're able to do this really well, and let's take the utopian state where we can pluck it out of the sky, put it back on the pad, charge up the batteries, and fly again, then clearly there's a very strong economic advantage to that. But I'm more realistic that there's a middle point where we pluck it out of the sky, there's a chunk of refurb, and we need to refurbish a reasonable amount. At that point, even if you come in at economically neutral from a production standpoint, you don't have to carry all of that facility infrastructure and people to be able to meet the same production rate. It's a little bit of German in me coming out, it's just ultimately efficient. And Scottish—very thrifty. But it's a really nice point to be at if you can make it work, to ultimately reuse that hardware. ### Technical Challenges of Reuse **Tim Dodd:** As far as reusing and reflying, I'm curious about the engines. We've seen SpaceX do propulsive reentry and stuff like that. The actual nozzles themselves are typically cooled regeneratively with cold flowing fuel. How does that happen? Because there's no fuel flowing through them during the reentry process, how do they keep themselves from melting with that hot plasma? **Peter Beck:** They're Inconel to start with, and it's a blunt body, so you push the shockwave forward. It's unlikely that any shockwaves are attaching to an engine bell, so you've pushed the majority of the heat flux forward. That is kind of the art in what we're trying to do here. The analysis team have a goal of no greater heat flux during reentry than during ascent, which is a pretty hefty goal. But that's the methodology that we're employing to try and manage those heat loads, and why the corridor angle is so critical. If we can get to that point, then life is very good because you haven't exceeded any kind of thermal boundaries at all. **Tim Dodd:** I don't think I realized that your nozzles are actually made out of Inconel. That's one of the best materials—is that one of the highest melting materials basically known to humans at this point? **Peter Beck:** Niobium is much better, but any of those refractory metal alloys... Inconel has a high melting temperature, but more so it's stronger at elevated temperatures than high melting images. ### Photon Satellite Platform **Tim Dodd:** Tell me give me a real quick rundown on where we're at with Photon. It sounds like you guys acquired a new company that's going to help. Is that going to help produce Photons at a better rate? Photon seems to be something that I know you and the industry are excited about, but for us spaceflight fans, that's one of those things we don't get to see the direct benefit—we don't get to see the flaming end of it getting all exciting. Tell me why that is exciting and where it's at right now. **Peter Beck:** The mission of Rocket Lab is we're trying to make space open to improve life on Earth. That's the whole point. One of the things that always frustrated me is that I have a launch vehicle, and you take the kick stage—it has GPS, comms, IMUs, reaction control systems—it is a satellite in its own right. It would always frustrate me that literally six inches away from my satellite is another satellite with sometimes exactly the same equipment onboard. I deliver my customer's satellite, and then my satellite's in orbit, we play with it for a while, and then we turn it off. It just seems incredibly wasteful. The other element of this is that if you distill out what it takes to build a business in space, the launch is one piece, and launch we see as a solved problem. But the next problem to solve is how can I make it so that it doesn't take a team of 20 engineers to build a spacecraft, a huge amount of resources, cost, and time, and every spacecraft is different. The CubeSat is a wonderful example of kind of a standardization, but even within a CubeSat, there's a 3U, 6U, 12U, 3U XL, and so on. What we're trying to do here is provide a best-in-class small satellite bus platform. Really, the ethos is that no company should ever have to worry about whether or not their reaction wheels are saturating or any of those kinds of everyday on-orbit stuff. They should just be worrying about the sensor that generates them revenue. Likewise, the government should be worried about the capability they're trying to create rather than contractors building the spacecraft and then the rocket and the spacecraft doing the dance and the couple loads analysis and all the junk that goes along with it. How can we seamlessly make this experience, this integration, very easy? That's what Photon really is trying to address. Everything here should be a commodity—the radio should be a commodity, the bus should be a commodity, ground operation being a commodity. Just come with the sensor, all the science, or whatever you're trying to do or the business that you're trying to create, and let's just get it up there quickly. **Tim Dodd:** For some reason, I don't think I had ever thought of it too much, and it makes so much sense when you break it down like that. People are spending the same amount of time engineering something that's literally right there. This totally makes sense. How much cheaper can someone fly if they don't have to do half of the work? I don't know why that never hit me. ### Streamlining the Space Industry **Peter Beck:** We talked to customers, especially government customers, and 18 months is an extraordinarily short time to go from "hey, we're going to fly something" to having it on orbit. That's considered to be incredibly quick. 18 months for us is an eternity. In 18 months, that was half the development timeline of Electron. It may as well be half of someone's life. Why we set the goal internally is it should be three months—turn up with your sensor and you should be on orbit within three months. As we started to build our Photon, we found that the space supply chain is incredibly fragile. We knew that from Electron—that's why we build 90% of all the stuff that goes in Electron is Rocket Lab built. We knew that the supply chain is fragile, but I guess I underestimated just how fragile the supply chain for spacecraft and spacecraft components really was. It's all good and well saying, "Well, three months from bringing me your sensor to orbit," but if I've got to wait a year to get some critical components from suppliers, that's not going to work. We needed to make the supply chain much more robust. We had already SPECT Doug's Sinclair products in our spacecraft because they're beautiful pieces of jewelry, and we just love beautiful things. We were already baselines those, but it was really a wonderful opportunity because Doug had a great product, we have a great product, and we have the ability to scale products very easily. When you look at satellite components and compare them alongside rocket components, it's just a walk in the park. We had the ability to scale things like star trackers and reaction wheels and torque rods and all those kinds of things, and Doug's beautiful products, so it's really the perfect fit. We're not just doing it for our own Photon spacecraft. When we talk to other customers that are trying to build their own spacecraft, everybody acknowledges the supply chain is super brittle. This is about making sure that we don't just provide components to our own platforms—we can provide components to a bunch of other platforms as well. If they fly on Electron, great. If they don't, they don't. Doesn't matter either. This is all about trying to really move the space economy. **Tim Dodd:** I think that's again one of those things that some of us don't realize how hard it is to manufacture things and how big of a hurdle that can be—actually getting things produced that are great, that are sustainable, and economically beneficial. Because we don't see that on this end of things at all. I had no idea you guys were actually working on the option of people buying star trackers or any of that type of stuff. I knew those were really weird things that you can't just hop on Amazon and buy. That's really cool. I had no idea. That might be one of those small things in the background that makes a big ripple effect in the industry. **Peter Beck:** We hope so. At the end of the day, the more spacecraft that launch, the better the space economy is, and the easier we can make that, the better as well. It's a circular reference—if you make it easier and easier, it just spins up faster and faster. It's not just Doug's components that we sell. We've built a whole catalogue of our own spacecraft components. We built servers, ACS systems, power distribution modules—we have the full suite of satellite components. The purpose of that is that we can go to the shelf and pick off anything we want and build anything we want. There's no more obvious example of that than the CAPSTONE mission to the Moon. We take a HyperCurie engine off the shelf, we take star trackers off the shelf, reaction wheels off the shelf, all the power modules and power systems off the shelf, and put together that in the format of a mission that can deliver payload to the Moon. Likewise, we can assemble those building blocks, if you will, into a LEO platform, a GEO platform. We can even get 20-odd kilograms to Venus, and Venus is my personal favorite planet. I love Venus. Totally underrated planet. The Photon as a concept—Photon is not a piece of hardware. A photon is what an electron emits in a physics standpoint. So it's really a program, not a hardware platform. A Photon can be a very simple comm spacecraft in LEO, it can be an interplanetary mission as well with a different collection of hardware. ### Interplanetary Capabilities **Tim Dodd:** I had no idea you could go interplanetary with Photon. You mentioned when we were hanging out at your launch pad that you could basically keep stacking tanks on top of Photon and increase their Delta-V abilities. Obviously, there's a point where you're kind of maxing out the vehicle below it and the platform, but could you stick landing legs theoretically on Photon and actually have enough Delta-V to land a Photon on the Moon? **Peter Beck:** I think that's pushing it. That gets pretty tough. There's a company working on a lander that gets kicked out to TLI on Photon, and then it takes down from there. So it's probably a nice benefit there to stage at that point and not have to take all that mass to the surface of the Moon. Look, I've learned to never say anything's impossible because I just end up eating my words. So I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's another level of tricky with respect to these smaller platforms. There are certain things that don't trade well. **Tim Dodd:** But could someone buy a Photon from you, stick landing legs on it, and fly it on a little bit bigger rocket? Would that be an option? **Peter Beck:** Absolutely, of course. The Photon lunar stage that we've developed—we've already been reached out to by a number of large aerospace companies because it's a high-energy, super high-performance, high Delta-V stage. Whether it's taking a small payload to the Moon or you put 100 kgs on it or a couple hundred kgs on it and launch it on a bigger vehicle, at the end of the day, it's a spacecraft. Although it's optimized for Electron, the Photon's flight computer is the same flight computer that controls and launches an Electron. We don't have an Electron flight computer and a Photon flight computer. A Photon always shares parts of Electron with itself. When we're in launch mode, the flight computer's in launch mode, and it takes control of the range and it launches the vehicle and guides it all the way to Hohmann transfer. The moment we kick off the Photon, the flight computer goes, "Okay, now I'm a satellite" and flips into satellite mode. It's just a nice way of reusing all of the same hardware that's required on the launch vehicle as a spacecraft. **Tim Dodd:** So we're going to be able to fulfill someday my dream. I've always wanted to have some kind of satellite of the people or something—some everyday satellite. I don't know what it is, and maybe if our audience can come up with something cool, we'll crowdsource something awesome that people could upload their images to or something on the Photon system. That just sounds—for some reason the gears are turning. I mean, you can do anything when you have the whole thing kind of laid out for you like that. **Peter Beck:** Go to Venus, Tim. You need to go to Venus. That's where it's all happening. **Tim Dodd:** I'll do that. That sounds awesome. ### Future Plans **Tim Dodd:** Is there anything else you're really looking forward to? I know obviously things are kind of probably moving on pause at the moment, I'm sure, with everything happening right now. I think everyone's kind of a little bit half twiddling their thumbs, hoping we're gonna be okay. But in general, down there in New Zealand, what's next for you guys? What are you most looking forward to this year? **Peter Beck:** As you say, we need to get back to work. I think the whole world is in kind of a holding pattern right now, but presumably, everything gets back to work quickly. I guess there are a few key milestones for us. Launch is just turning it out, cranking the handle, and there are a lot of vehicles coming down the production line, so that's just done. The things that I'm most excited about, that I've talked about today, is getting that next step of recovery. That's really important—getting a stage subsonic and to a point where we can splash it down. That is really, really important. I think that is the day of reckoning—when we fish that thing out of the ocean and see what we've got. That is a defining moment where we will go, "Okay, this looks infinitely doable at this point," or "Man, this is not looking good." I think that is a key element, but we've got through two of the hardest things, in my opinion. The reentry is by far the hardest, and then capturing it is something we needed to prove that we could do reliably. So that was a big milestone. Then, it's a year of the satellite for Rocket Lab. That's what it's all about. Everyone thinks of Rocket Lab, because it's in the name, as a rocket company, but we're really a space company. Building satellites and components and there's a whole other stuff we do that probably people aren't aware of. We manage spacecraft constellations for governments. We do a whole lot of other stuff that is not directly associated with launch. That's the point—building the company to not just be a launch company. Because everyone loves launch, I love launch, but if we really want to deliver on our mission, we have to extend past launch and solve some of the other problems. **Tim Dodd:** I have just one favor to ask because I think it's gonna be pretty cool. Will you please provide the best footage—probably not live-stream because that gets really difficult when you're in the middle of the ocean, we all know how difficult live-streaming is—but will you provide an image of the recovered stage when you do splash one down and show us, give us a sense of how it did as soon as you can? Because we're all gonna be really excited to see that. **Peter Beck:** No problems at all. As long as it's not IP hanging out the side of it, we're happy to share that. ### "Electron Heavy" April Fools' Joke **Tim Dodd:** That's gonna be awesome. And one more thing—I do have to say, you had me so bad with your Electron Heavy! **Peter Beck:** It was good, wasn't it? I had you! **Tim Dodd:** The internet loved it. That was so great. That was so fun to see. And the worst thing is, you had posted that on April 2nd to me in U.S. time. **Peter Beck:** New Zealand time. New Zealand time. **Tim Dodd:** So Electron Heavy confirmed? **Peter Beck:** Electron Heavy confirmed. And it also has a full life support system up in the nose cone as well. **Tim Dodd:** You're ready to send me now. You're ready! **Peter Beck:** Yeah! **Tim Dodd:** I love it. Well, thank you so much for spending some time, and stay safe and healthy. We're still so excited to see what you guys are working on. **Peter Beck:** Thanks, Tim. Appreciate it. ### Closing **Tim Dodd:** Thanks for watching this interview. Don't worry, I've got a lot more content coming. I know I keep saying we're going to do a quick video and then I follow deep rabbit holes, and the video I'm working on currently is definitely not an exception to that rule. I'm working on a video at this moment about whether or not NASA should look at utilizing Starship for the Artemis program and kind of comparing it to SLS, weighing out the pros and cons of each system. 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