[[Home|🏠]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> [[Interviews]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> February 4 2022 **Insider**: [[Peter Beck]] **Source**: [Felix's Space Time Youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZR6APowqcg) **Date**: February 4 2022  🔗 Backup Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZR6APowqcg ## 🎙️ Transcript >[!hint] Transcript may contain errors or inaccuracies. **Host:** Hello world fixes space time. In today's video, we have an interview with Peter Beck, the CEO of Rocket Lab. If you enjoyed today's video, don't forget to like and subscribe. I hope you enjoy. Thank you so, so much for coming on here for an interview. It's an honor to be able to talk to you. And for those who do not know you, could you tell everyone a bit about yourself? **Peter Beck:** Sure. I'm Peter Beck. I'm the founder and CEO of a company called Rocket Lab, where we build and launch rockets, and we build and launch satellites and spacecraft. ### What Was the Ultimate Goal of Rocket Lab? **Host:** When you first started Rocket Lab, what was the ultimate goal? **Peter Beck:** Well, really the ultimate goal from 2006 to now hasn't really changed. Space has the ability to have such an enormous impact on everybody down here on Earth. So if you look at the goals and the things that we've been trying to do over those over the decade and a half, it really boils down to: we go to space to improve life on Earth and do wonderful things in space that really have impact. That's what it's really always been about. ### What Does Rocket Lab Look Like in 10 Years? **Host:** Keeping those goals in mind, what does Rocket Lab look like in 10 years in your head? **Peter Beck:** 10 years is a very, very long time to think forward within Rocket Lab. Like a year is almost like dog years—one year at Rocket Lab is like five years everywhere else in the world. I think back every year since the start of the company, we've doubled in size, and last year was no different. So in 10 years time, if you follow that equation, Rocket Lab should be even a larger company than it is today, and the projects continue to get more and more ambitious. The definition of success for me is building a generationally successful space company that, as I mentioned before, has really substantial impact. ### What is Neutron? **Host:** Talking about Neutron now, how many times can it be reused? **Peter Beck:** The baseline number is more than ten. There's really nothing in there that is life-governing at this point. Once we start flying and we actually learn the environments in more detail, then that will ultimately start lifeing certain articles. But you need to think of it a little bit more like an airplane than a rocket. An airplane is a pressure vessel with a bunch of engines hanging off it, just like a rocket is. Components throughout the lifetime of the aircraft reach their life, and then they're substituted out and changed. That's kind of the way we're looking at Neutron. Instead of targeting a specific number of landings, as components reach their life, we'll just replace those components. ### Where Did the Idea for Electron Recovery Come From? **Host:** Where did the idea of catching the Electron rocket booster out of midair with a helicopter come from? **Peter Beck:** It sounds crazier when you say it like that than what it actually is. It was standing in front of the production line one night and just thinking, "Well, how can we increase production dramatically?" The way to do that is not try to throw anything away in the first place. I'd always believed that reusing a small launch vehicle was impossible in the traditional sense where you land it, because propulsive landing in a small launch vehicle eats way too much of the propellant margins for it to be viable and actually close. So then the only other option is to let the atmosphere do the work, which is what we do, and parachute it down. But the trouble is that the moment that the rocket hits the sea, it's basically a write-off anyway. Flooding sea water through all your avionics and electronics and propulsion systems is just a non-starter. So we needed to avoid it from contacting the sea, and looked at a whole bunch of different crazy methods, from giant floating bouncy castles through all sorts of things. We'd done quite a lot of work with parachutes and recovery systems in our sounding rocket days, so we had a very good understanding of those. Then the question was really asked, "Well, why can't we just nab it out of the sky like the old Corona missions where they used to catch falling reconnaissance satellite containers from the sky?" The more and more we looked into it, the more and more feasible we really discovered it was, until we ultimately did some tests and proved that this isn't actually that bad at all. ### Personal Plans for the Future **Host:** What's your personal plans for the future with yourself and with Rocket Lab? **Peter Beck:** I'm having a ball right now. So as far as any personal plans, I'm just continuing to build the company and do the incredibly exciting projects we have, whether it be going to the Moon or going to Venus, building Neutron. It's just a huge amount of fun. For the company, we're a publicly traded company now, which is awesome. One of the rationales for doing that was to ensure that the company would well outlive me. So the company as an entity will be a multi-generation company into the future. ### What Could Happen with Neutron? **Host:** Do you think what could happen with Neutron could drastically change what happens with Rocket Lab over the next couple of years? **Peter Beck:** I would say that there's a bunch of needle-moving projects, of which Neutron is just one of them. Neutron on the launch side is certainly a disruptive launch vehicle, but on our Space Systems side, where we're building satellites and spacecraft and doing lots of acquisitions of companies doing cool components and elements of vehicles, that also is equally needle-moving. As a company, we've always said we're going to build an end-to-end space company. So that is launch, satellites, ground systems, and then ultimately there's data. If you think about the company's future, our ultimate endpoint is actually to be a provider from space, as well as a service provider to get there and use space. ### Throttle Capability **Host:** Sounds like Rocket Lab has a very bright future ahead of them. These questions are from people who have entered questions. This first one is from an unofficial Twitter account, Everything Rocket Lab: "What kind of throttle capability are you hoping for with Archimedes, and will that allow for some kind of hovering at landing instead of a hover slam burn with little throttle margin?" **Peter Beck:** That's a great question because it's always a giant trade. You can't have everything, especially in a GG or a gas generator cycle. There's a limit to how much you throttle, and maintaining that pressure drop across your injector to keep nice stable combustion is just a tremendous amount of trade there. Also with respect to landing, the object of the exercise here is to use the least amount of propellant possible. So kind of hanging out there hovering is pretty hard going on propellant utilization. Our approach here is get it on the ground as quickly as we can. I guess you would probably say it's a hover slam. But it's just not efficient to sit there in the sky hovering, because all that propellant you have to carry all the way into first stage burn and then all the way back again. The object of the exercise, as I mentioned, is to get that stage on the ground as quickly as you can with the least amount of burn time on the engine as possible. ### Helicopter **Host:** Another question from the same Twitter account: "Since the first catch attempt is coming up, when will the helicopter arrive in New Zealand, and will there be another helicopter for LC2 at Wallops, or do you intend to only fly expendable missions from that launch pad?" **Peter Beck:** That's a great question. The helicopter is on the way, and it'll be here, well, depending on shipping, I guess it'll be here early March somewhere around there. It's undergoing a lot of modifications at the moment to meet our requirements. So that's imminent. As for LC2, it really depends on the kinds of missions that you have as to how viable the recovery system is. So I would say that, depending on the missions, we would always aim to recover as much as possible. We have to really evaluate that in the future. Right now, it's really all about getting the final nail in the coffin—catching some and really streamlining that whole process. ### Neutron Development **Host:** Good luck with all the catching attempts. This question is from Cargo Dragon: "What are you looking forward to the most with Neutron?" **Peter Beck:** I think the funnest part is the early development of any of these things because that moves really, really quickly. It's like you get 80 percent of the early development done, and then it's the last 20 that take 80 percent of the time—it's the old 80/20 rule. So at this point in time of the program is the most fun, because you're building stuff, breaking stuff, and everything's exciting. Kind of the dredge of getting everything qualified and solving hard problems comes a little bit later. So I would say this is probably the funnest time of the program right now, where we're coming up with new ideas, testing them, and there's just bits of hardware flying around. It's just fun. ### First Prototype **Host:** Do you have a certain time in mind for when you have the first ever Neutron prototype or pathfinder? **Peter Beck:** We're trying to get something on the pad in 2024. The way we develop our development programs compared to others, I guess, is that we like to fail fast, but we like to fail fast on component and sub-assembly level. We don't like to fail fast with whole launch vehicles. So the first Neutron that goes on the pad will be a test flight vehicle. We won't be trying out new stuff in a full-scale approach. We found that worked very, very well for us when we were developing Electron, and we have the same kind of design ethos with Neutron. ### Naming Process **Host:** Questions from Boca Bingo: "Why did you name the engine Archimedes, and what was the naming process like?" **Peter Beck:** Firstly, I'll comment on the naming process. If everybody thinks it's some kind of committee that gets called and there's a great amount of thought that goes into it and it's a big process, it's just not. It's, "Hey, does this sound cool? Yep. Right, let's do that." So it's a very short, fun process. With respect to the naming of the engine Archimedes, if you look at all of our propulsion systems, they're all named after physicists. Archimedes, I thought, was a good fit because, unlike some physicists, Archimedes was also a wonderful engineer. If you look at the engineering solutions he came up with, they were elegantly simple, beautifully simple, like Archimedes' screw for a pump—just incredibly simple and elegant engineering, which is really what the Archimedes engine is trying to embody. So that's kind of why it all fit together. ### NASA Contract **Host:** This question—a lot of people have been wondering the answer to this question. Before Christmas, NASA announced that they were looking for transportation services to the International Space Station. You said that Neutron was capable of human spaceflight, so is there any chance Rocket Lab would design a capsule and take a contract like that with Neutron? **Peter Beck:** My view on human spaceflight is that I think there needs to be more than one customer. At the moment, there's really one customer for human spaceflight, and that of course is NASA, and it's pretty well served by a couple of companies. So you have to really ask yourself, do you want to spend a tremendous amount of capital developing a capsule for just one customer? And then you're competing for one customer with two other folks that also have that capability. My view here is that I'd like to see more customers than just one government customer. I think that's when human spaceflight is really going to get interesting, when there's more destinations and more customers. With respect to Neutron, we are making sure that vehicle is capable of human spaceflight, but do we have a capsule on the drawing board right now? No, we don't. We see that as something that we'll look a little bit down the track on. ### Flying Astronauts **Host:** Another question related to flying astronauts. Gabriel C. Brown asks, "Does Rocket Lab have plans on flying commercial astronauts ever at all?" **Peter Beck:** I think absolutely, once that market really proves itself. I don't think—and it comes back to my previous answer—I think there needs to be more than one customer and there needs to be more than one destination, and I think when those things start to occur, that's when the market is going to get interesting. So I actually think that there'll be a pretty strong commercial demand, rather than a government demand, if you will, for human spaceflight in the future. ### Launch Site **Host:** This question is from Future Astronaut on Twitter: "Has a launch site been chosen for Neutron yet? If not, when will it be chosen and what options are there?" **Peter Beck:** I have to be a little bit careful here. Let's just say that we're running a competitive process to determine the ultimate launch site of Neutron, and there'll be an announcement about that shortly. So that won't get me in trouble. ### Cost **Host:** Scott asks, "How much will Neutron cost to build, and how much is expected to be charged for each launch?" **Peter Beck:** I'm not sure if Scott works for SpaceX or not, but we keep that kind of information fairly close to our chest. But all I will say is that developing a launch vehicle is an incredibly complex and capital-intensive process. It literally—you can measure it by taking years off your life. So none of us would go to all of that trouble if we didn't think that we could bring a vehicle to market that is competitive with anything that's here today and anything that's been proposed in the future. ### Main Capabilities **Host:** Red Ninja asks, "What would the main capabilities of Neutron be? Like, what orbit is it suited for?" **Peter Beck:** It's not really limited to orbits. We can lift eight tons to a low Earth orbit—sort of 500 kilometer, typical mid-inclination low Earth orbit—that's in a return to launch site mode. If you want to do a downrange landing, you can, or a barge landing, or even expendable, you can do over 15 tonnes. So it starts to get up there. We're working with customers on GEO missions, so multiple tons to GEO, and we can do one and a half tons to Venus. So really, it's suitable for any mission. You've got a defined amount of energy, and it's up to your customer as to how we want to use any energy and what destinations we want to go to. But if you look at Electron and the Photon interplanetary—that's a very small vehicle and spacecraft, but we can still get to the Moon with it. In fact, we can even get to Venus with it. ### Government Payload **Host:** You're talking about taking payload to Venus. If a government agency reached out to you about sending maybe some equipment there to put into orbit, would you take up that offer? **Peter Beck:** Oh, as quick as I could. I mean, that would be super exciting. We have a mission with NASA where we're building two satellites to orbit Mars. We have our private mission to Venus, the NASA mission to the Moon this year. So I think that would be tremendously exciting. ### Landing Precision **Host:** Lego Flight Cams asks, "What precision does Neutron have to have on landing to connect to the ground support equipment when there's no strongback?" **Peter Beck:** The strongback is really about the vehicle erection and also, obviously, services. The way that Neutron launches, all that is umbilicaled in at the bottom. When we land, we need a level of precision to ensure that we land obviously on the landing zone, but we're not landing back on the umbilical connection. So we don't need crazy accuracy. We'll just get it on the pad, and then once it's on the pad, we can move it around standing up very, very simply. ### Recovery of Last Booster **Host:** In what condition did you get the last booster back, and what about the engines, etc.? **Peter Beck:** We had wonderful telemetry on the last flight. The power pack environment, which is really the bit that we're most concerned or interested about—we call the power pack basically the engines, the engine clusters at the bottom, and then above the engines are all the high voltage batteries, and that whole system forms really the propulsion module. The environment we saw inside the propulsion module, it never got above ambient, so sort of 20 degrees C, and never really saw any of the extreme thermal load that's occurring on the outside of the vehicle. And all the systems were super healthy, structures are super healthy. So we were very, very happy with the condition. Now, the condition after splashdown is a whole different scenario because this thing is obviously designed to be captured with a helicopter. The last mission we rendezvoused but we didn't catch, and of course, once the stage impacts the ocean, it's falling at a reasonable rate, so that makes a bit of a mess after that. So we're very, very happy with the condition of the stage, extremely happy, which really gave us confidence to just put the pedal down and move in there with helicopters now. ### Will Rocket Lab Share Neutron Prototypes? **Host:** Will Rocket Lab share any Neutron prototypes with the public when they start appearing? **Peter Beck:** I think depending on the various test sites, some will be more publicly accessible than others, but a vehicle of that size, it's pretty hard to hide it away. So I think people will soon be able to follow some pretty fun progress for sure. ### Will Rocket Lab Develop Constellation Services? **Host:** Will Rocket Lab develop its own constellation services? **Peter Beck:** We've always been pretty clear that we want to be an end-to-end space company. If you look at the value in space, launch is about a 10 billion industry, satellites and satellite manufacturing is about a 20 billion industry, and then all the services that come from space is a 320 billion dollar industry. So you can see where the value lies in space, and we've always believed that if you have your own rocket, you have your own satellites, and you can build whatever you need to build, then your ability to play in that space is very robust. We have no active programs or plans at the moment—we're focusing on executing for all of our customers—but certainly as a company in the future, we see that providing services from space is certainly something we'll look at doing in the future. So whether that's a singular satellite for a particular task or a constellation, it's really too early days to say. ### Could Rocket Lab Reach the Moon? **Host:** Could Neutron reach the Moon, and does Rocket Lab have any plans for it to go there or any other planets or anything planned for that kind of thing? **Peter Beck:** It's an ideal vehicle to get mass to the Moon and mass to other planets. Absolutely that would be—I mean, you'll kind of see a theme within the company: we love interplanetary stuff. So whether it be the Moon program we have this year and other programs, we really love to explore our solar system. So any opportunity to do that, the team will rush to do it for sure. ### Conclusion **Host:** Thank you so, so much for coming on here. That's all the questions I've got for you. It's really been an honor to be able to speak to you, and you had some brilliant answers to my questions and to questions that other people had. **Peter Beck:** It's my absolute pleasure. Thanks very much for having me. **Host:** Thank you so, so much, and I hope you have a great rest of your day and good luck with everything with Rocket Lab and with Neutron and catching Electron. **Peter Beck:** Cool, thanks very much. **Host:** Thank you. Bye! **Peter Beck:** Cheers, bye! **Host:** Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed today's video, don't forget to like and subscribe. Bye!