[[Home|🏠]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> [[Interviews]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> July 19 2022 **Insider**: [[Peter Beck]] **Source**: [Future of Space Podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltHzcxYKFMw) **Date**: July 19 2022 ![](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltHzcxYKFMw) 🔗 Backup Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltHzcxYKFMw ## 🎙️ Transcript >[!hint] Transcript may contain errors or inaccuracies. **Daniel Fox:** Hello everyone and welcome to The Future Space. I'm your host Daniel Fox. Our guest today is Peter Beck. Peter is the founder and CEO of Rocket Lab. Peter, it is a pleasure to have you on The Future Space. **Peter Beck:** My pleasure to be here. **Daniel:** By the way, congratulations on the recent CAPSTONE launch. I know we'll come back to that, but before we go into your journey to where you are today and Rocket Lab, could you share with us three words to describe space? ### Three Words That Describe Space **Peter Beck:** Oh, there's a good question. I think the first one in order of priority would have to be inspiring. I think it's very difficult to not be inspired by space and your place in the universe. And then the other word would be unfinished. I think there is a lot of work that we have to do as a company, but also humanity has to do to really seek and realize the value that space can offer us. And then I think the final word is infinite. Not just infinite as in infinite size, but infinite as in infinite possibilities and infinite resources and infinite thinking. It's hard to get your head around something so infinite. **Daniel:** Even more so now with James Webb. We just capture these images and we just get this like... there's no end to it. Even if we think, even when we get to the borders of our own galaxy, we still have billions and billions of galaxies. We can push the boundaries for a really long time before I think we get tired. ### The Human Story of Going to Space **Daniel:** Peter, there's obviously a science story of going to space, there's obviously a technology story of going to space, but beyond that, what would you say is the human story of this journey? **Peter Beck:** I think humans are hardcoded to explore. You can go back through the beginnings of time or human evolution and see that humans didn't just stop at their one little spot in a cave. They ventured out and then continued to venture out, and then as technology kind of iterated along with it, as technology improves, the first thing that humans tend to use that technology for is to go explore. And I think the same is obviously the case with space. A lot of people always ask me, "Well, why are we going to the Moon?" or "Why would we go to Mars?" I'm sure exactly the same questions were asked when explorers set off across the oceans. It's like, "Well, why are you leaving this continent? Why do you think there's another continent?" But I just think it is fundamentally hardcoded in the human DNA that we need to go out and explore and discover. I think that's what has been one of the successes of the human species. **Daniel:** It's almost like one of those inherent drives to constantly go to places, right? I mean, how many times have I walked on a field of lava and then out of nowhere – I mean, you have no idea – but this sprout just comes out of what you think would not be hospitable. I've always, for me as a solo wilderness explorer, someone who spent a lot of time in the wilderness and natural world, life has this inherent drive to go to places. If it can't, it's not because it doesn't want to, it's just because it hasn't figured it out yet. It will find its way, and humans have definitely taken that drive and engineered on top of it, giving us the tools to always keep pushing the boundaries. To your point, no one today in North America or anywhere around the world would exist if it was not for previous people who had decided to go beyond the mountain, to go beyond the river, to go beyond these lands. Usually, you're born in one location, but most people don't stay there. ### Lessons Learned from Parents **Daniel:** Peter, I was reading your biography, and it's really interesting – you're an engineer and you're the CEO of a really important, one of the top rocket companies, but your father was a museum art gallery director, gemologist, and your mother was a teacher. What would you say was their contribution to your career as an engineer and as a CEO and the founder of a rocket company? **Peter Beck:** There was certainly no limits in the house that I grew up with. If any of us wanted to do anything, it was never "Oh, you can't do that." It was like, "Okay, go for it." So I think I was super lucky to grow up in a household where there were no predetermined conclusions or limits placed on us as children. They were just super supportive to go out and do the things that we thought were important. **Daniel:** Would you say your father gave you the understanding of the importance of art also, beyond the mechanics and the engineering and the physics and the math? Was that something that stays with you as you continued in your career? **Peter Beck:** Definitely. Look, we were always a very strong engineering family. Although my father was a gemologist and all the rest of it, he was still very much an engineer, and his father before him. Then on my mother's side there were the Smiths that you can trace their origins back to being blacksmiths. So there was always a huge engineering theme. But I'd say the one thing that was really important, the lesson that I took, is that design can be functional but can also be beautiful. If you look at anything that Rocket Lab does, you know, at least I would hope that it's functional, but we also strive to make everything beautiful as well. Whether you look at our launch vehicles or our satellites or our logos or our facilities, it's all very beautiful. So I guess in that respect, I was certainly brought up with an eye for what looks nice and what doesn't look nice. This turned out to be a really important part of the company's culture because, generally, if someone takes the time to make something beautiful, they have pride in that. And if someone has pride in their work, then generally it actually does work from a functional standpoint. **Daniel:** I think that is definitely a universal need – that your work is valued. From all my traveling and eating at different tables around the world, we might disagree on a lot of things, but these needs that we have as individuals to be valued in our work – if we find value, then we go beyond the ask. We push ourselves more because we have a sense of connection and commitment to this work. ### Your Journey to Space **Daniel:** Was it your love of stars that came first and was supported by your talent as an engineer, or were you an engineer and then magically it led to your career in the rocket world? **Peter Beck:** My youngest memories are just being fascinated with space and science and engineering. I would say that they were definitely symbiotic all the way through. The reason why I went to do a tool and die making trade versus going to university out of school was just that need to actually engineer and create things. I always felt that having those hand skills were super important, and quite often they're hard to learn later on in life. So that was kind of the rationale for really running off in that direction first. But I would say one fed the other for sure – one enabled the other. **Daniel:** Did you spend a lot of time as a kid watching, looking up to the stars and taking long camping trips in the backyard and just staring at the stars and wondering what was beyond? **Peter Beck:** For me, it's one of my actually youngest childhood memories – standing outside with my father, looking up at the skies, and him pointing out that those were stars and they could have planets around them, and there could be somebody looking back at you. That concept I grasped really early, and it was very powerful. I know for some people, that's not the case, and in others, it's instant. For me, it was very early on in my life that I realized that either way, I was going to have to have something to do with space. That was going to be a foregone conclusion. ### The Physicality of Experiencing a Night Sky **Daniel:** There's something to be said about the power of those physical experiences, because we're getting more and more into this simulated world with VR and these tools that give us the capacity to not physically be there but have a similar experience. But there's a physicality to these experiences. We often talk about the overview effect when you get to space, looking back down and experiencing this shift of awareness, seeing the Earth in context with space. A lot of people are trying to replicate or at least give a certain taste, but you can have the best star show in the planetarium... **Peter Beck:** I'll give you a real-life example. A few years back, I finally went out and bought myself a really nice telescope. I built telescopes when I was younger, and when you build a telescope, there's always compromise, especially as a young kid – they're pretty rubbish. So I bought myself a really nice telescope, and when I bought the telescope, I bought a nice CCD imager that plugs into the side of my laptop. I thought, "This is going to be great." And I threw it all in the bin for the eyepiece. Because when you hold your laptop screen up and look at it, it could just look like an image you could Google off the internet. When you put your eye up to the eyepiece and see it, it's a completely different experience. And not just for me – all my kids and my family – it was absolutely universal that the visceral feeling of looking through an eyepiece and actually witnessing something in an analog sense was just wildly more impactful than looking at something digital on a laptop screen. So it had a total service life of about 15 minutes at the Beck household, that whole digital setup. **Daniel:** Has your family ever experienced a total solar eclipse? **Peter Beck:** I have, but our kids are probably too young for the last one that was down in New Zealand to remember it at least. **Daniel:** That was one of those events – I remember when I photographed the last one – it's one of those events that like between 98-99% of totality and 100% of totality, it's almost night and day. Because you truly can't get the feeling of why in the past they would go and try to sacrifice someone or something. You really feel like there's something wrong with the world, with the sun, and you see the nature around you kind of not working the way it's supposed to be working. That physicality again, the viscerality of life, you just can't replicate. ### Funny Mission Names **Daniel:** When I was browsing through the website, I noticed that except for the missions for NASA and DARPA, all the other names are super interesting and funny. Was that your idea? Is it your team that came up with it? What's the story behind all those names? **Peter Beck:** Originally, we had to name the very first mission. When you name a mission, if you call it like RL1001 as a name, then everybody that's watching that mission on a radar screen, it's tagged with that name. We just thought it would be funny that the very first mission should be exactly what it is, which is a test. So on everybody's radar screens and documentation that's flying across the FAA and every defense nation that's watching the launch, it's just what it is – it's a test. Then it just sort of seemed funny at the time. Rocket launches are just so incredibly all-consuming serious events that there needs to be just one thing there that's just a little bit funny. So we kind of make up the names and try to have a little bit of fun with that. **Daniel:** Do you have a favorite one or some favorites? **Peter Beck:** You're not allowed to choose a favorite. That's like choosing your favorite child – you can't do that! No, they're all fun in their own right. I think probably the one that we got a bit carried away with was "It's Business Time" because I think if you truly Google that, you'll see it means something significantly different. So I think that's when we probably pushed the boundaries a little bit too far. But it's always done in good spirit, and our customers generally really love to get on board with it as well and have a bit of fun. Although NASA you have to keep it serious, and DARPA you have to... **Daniel:** Well, I mean, there was even the CAPSTONE. There was NASA's CAPSTONE mission, but for us, we caught it a little bit further than usual. That was the internal mission name. ### Philanthropy: An Important Part of Innovation **Daniel:** I want to pick your brain a little bit. I wrote a piece about a year ago called "Mycelium and Rockets." The thought behind it was back at the beginning when there was a big uproar in the media about the size of the rocket with Jeff Bezos and this narrative of men and their rockets. After watching a movie about mushrooms, there was this moment of connection when I realized that when it comes to life seeding places – whether it's spores, mushrooms, or even in the sexual realm of reproduction in the animal kingdom – there always seems to be a shape that is consistent. It changes in various ways, but it's always similar. Even the mushroom. My point was that we humans with our rockets, we're not reinventing the wheel or doing anything different than nature has been doing for millions of years. It's just that now we're about to seed the universe with life, and we're continuing this design that's been going on for even before us. Would you care to comment on that? **Peter Beck:** I think it goes back to our exploration theme. There's always some controversy about billionaires spending their money developing launch vehicles and going into space. But if you look back through history, some of the greatest contributions to society and science have been exactly from that. The very first large telescopes were philanthropy projects by the billionaires of the day. I look at it the same way. I would much rather have high-net-worth individuals spending their capital on developing new technologies than governments taxing their citizens to develop those technologies. I think it's a very efficient way to create new technologies and move forward. **Daniel:** The billionaires have always been part of the equation of pushing those boundaries. Back in the days, they were named kings and queens who could fund those expeditions that didn't necessarily have an economic reason at the beginning, other than fulfilling their needs. I've always said that one of the biggest successes of the Renaissance in Italy is because you had billionaires who also had a vision and understood the necessity to get artists to create that vision. You had the Medicis hiring Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, and from that concentration of wealth in Italy, it spread all over the world and changed everything. So I totally agree with you that I would rather have the rich people investing in developing technologies. When people say, "Why do that when we have other issues on the planet?" one of the arguments that I always give them is that in the 1900s, the world had a lot of issues – diseases and health problems – but Edison, Tesla, and the Wright brothers were focused on trying to power the world and fly. There was plenty of news coverage and people back then saying it was a total waste of time to focus on trying to fly. There are newspaper clips where the army was saying it was ridiculous to even think that we could fly. But what they did, the world that they created, actually elevated the rest and offered solutions that no one could have seen. I think that's exactly what's going to happen with space. There are bigger incentives in space to be more efficient, and those technologies and innovations will elevate not only the awareness and consciousness but also help solve a lot of the problems that we have. Is that something you agree with? **Peter Beck:** 100%. All throughout history, there have always been problems. So do you just stop? No. All throughout history, you keep iterating and inventing and carrying on. It doesn't mean you need to not understand and do whatever you can, but you have to continue to push forward and innovate. ### CAPSTONE Mission - Going Back to the Moon **Daniel:** Rocket Lab – I believe you have 28 successful launches, over 400 satellites, and you recently had a big milestone with CAPSTONE with NASA, which is part of the Artemis program. If I remember correctly, it involved not only your Electron rocket but also your Photon vehicle, and this is going to orbit around the Moon. Can you share more about this breakthrough, this milestone, and what we can expect from this mission? **Peter Beck:** The mission for us was really broken up into two parts. One, getting into low Earth orbit with an Electron, and then our Lunar Photon spacecraft spent six or seven days going through a series of orbit-raising maneuvers where we raised the apogee higher and higher, ultimately achieving enough energy to do a TLI or translunar injection. At that point, we're sending a path onto the Moon, and we separate off NASA's spacecraft called CAPSTONE, and then it carries on and goes into its own lunar orbit. As you point out, it's the very first part of the Artemis program – returning to the Moon. It's to test out an important orbit around the Moon that is both stable but also remains in communication with the Earth, because orbit around the Moon is in fact not stable. It's a very lumpy gravitational field, so it's not an easy place to park up. It was a huge mission for us. Going to the Moon is no joke. The spacecraft that we had to build was incredibly complex and had to do everything flawlessly. Generally, when you put a spacecraft in orbit, you get a few days or hours or at least some minutes to commission the spacecraft. We didn't have that luxury. Literally, once we separated off the Lunar Photon, it had to do a burn pretty much straight away, and everything just had to turn on, light up, and work flawlessly the whole time – a very complicated three-axis stabilized spacecraft, a very hard mission. It represented about two and a half years of the team's life and dedication. But what excites me the most about it is not that it's probably about 800,000 kilometers from Earth right now – not that – but what we've actually managed to create is a very affordable platform for going to visit the Moon, asteroids, and in effect other planets. So that Lunar Photon spacecraft now is a platform that we can use to explore other worlds in our solar system. **Daniel:** Amazing. Well, congratulations on that. I believe you're the first company to go back to the Moon. SpaceX hasn't been, neither – you're the first one, correct? **Peter Beck:** I'm not sure. You'd have to check that. It could be. ### Would You Go to the Moon? **Daniel:** This is just super exciting. If you had the opportunity of going to the Moon, would you go? **Peter Beck:** No way! No. I mean, I'm an engineer, so I know every safety factor in every system, and I have tremendous respect for astronauts who have that knowledge and experience and have that courage to make that leap. It's not courage that I have. I would be the worst space participant in world history. **Daniel:** Not even the space station? The future space station? **Peter Beck:** I understand the vehicles too well, and I think I'm probably more useful down here on Earth than floating up there. ### Pushing the Engineering Limits Without the Human Cost **Daniel:** There's something that's been more evident with rockets and now with Perseverance and Ingenuity on Mars. If we compare to the age of exploration or the history of exploration before, where it was always a human cost of exploration – I mean, you read books about when people went to Antarctica just to collect weather data, the risks and the hardships they went through were absolutely crazy. But now, during the age of exploration, people would get on the boat not knowing exactly if they would survive the crossing. They didn't have all the necessary tools of navigation and mapping. But now we have the capacity to test in ways that don't cost human lives the vast majority of the time. The vehicle that is going around the Moon – a lot of work, a lot of tests – but at no point during that process were human lives at risk. Do you see how the fact that now we've been able to go beyond this human cost of exploration will accelerate our capacity to push those boundaries because we can risk a little bit more? **Peter Beck:** I think we understand the risk way better than we ever have, and we can mitigate the risk way better than we ever have. But I think it's a little bit dangerous to think that spaceflight is safe. Because at the end of the day, you can mitigate those risks as best you can and certainly test for them, but a rocket is two percent payload mass and the rest is structures and generally 90% fuel. A rocket is a giant compromise – everything is compromised against each other to reach a point where it works. The margins are incredibly slim, and those margins have not changed since the 50s when human spaceflight began. There's no magic change in physics that has enabled it. You can certainly say it's the safest it's ever been, but I'm always cautious to acknowledge that it's very difficult for that to be, quote-unquote, "safe." That's why I have such tremendous respect and admiration for astronauts, because they know that only too well but yet have the courage to go and do these things. ### Sending Astronauts to Space **Daniel:** Is it in the future of Rocket Lab to at one point decide to take astronauts to space? **Peter Beck:** The Neutron vehicle we're developing is human-spaceflight-ratable. It's not going to be rated for human spaceflight straight out of the chute, but in time, yeah, we intend to fully human-rate it. ### The NEUTRON Rocket **Daniel:** Can you tell us a little bit more about Neutron? If you're in a position to share a timeline or what's the technology and the capacity of the rocket – it's going to be your big cargo, your big rocket – what can you share with us about it? **Peter Beck:** Absolutely. The vehicle can lift 13 tons to a downrange landing or 8 tons return to launch site, and obviously that implies it's a reusable first stage. It looks a little bit different to your traditional launch vehicle. What lands looks identical to what took off, so we don't dispose of the fairings or the nosecone or any of those kinds of things. We've been running through a reusable program for our Electron launch vehicle, and boy, we learned a lot from that. Neutron really feels like a little bit of a luxury to me because generally, if you get to design one rocket in your lifetime, you're in the smallest club on the planet. But to get to do it twice is just a real treat, taking all of the lessons that we've learned from Electron and applying them to Neutron. As you look at Neutron as a vehicle, it looks quite different to a normal rocket simply because it has to go up just as well as it has to go down. Those drive completely different engineering constraints and design points. The vehicle itself – we're trying to get one out on the pad by 2024, so it's a very short timeline for development. We're making great progress. We announced Wallops Island, Virginia as the launch site, and the production factory is just outside the gate of the launch site. There are a whole bunch of things in a launch vehicle that, as I mentioned before, are a giant compromise. One of those compromises is the diameter. A lot of rockets' diameters get set by the lowest bridge between California and the Cape. That didn't seem like a good constraint to us, which is why we built the factory beside the launch site. Hence, the vehicle diameter is very large because we don't have those engineering constraints. We could spend a month just talking about every subtle design detail, but that's it at the highest possible level. **Daniel:** It's going to be – I did see the page on your website, and the design is definitely different. You start to get into now the realm of science fiction, where these are the visions of spaceships that we used to imagine, and they're becoming a reality. We're talking about this, and we're seeing rockets that are going up and coming back, and we're seeing people take it almost for granted that we can launch these rockets. It's daily or weekly now. By the way, when is the next launch for Rocket Lab? **Peter Beck:** It depends on our customer, but we just launched a few days ago. We launched 15 days after the Moon mission a few days ago, and then I think it'd be another week or so, and we'll get another one on the pad. What really drives our launch cadence is our customers' readiness rather than necessarily our rockets on the pad. That's the forcing function for our cadence. ### The Space Industry in New Zealand **Daniel:** I'm pretty sure that Rocket Lab has been a leader in New Zealand and in that area of the Pacific for the space industry. How is the community down there? How is the industry? Are you really kind of bringing a lot of people – your own little comet with your sense of gravity that's bringing people? Could you share with us what the community is like down there right now? **Peter Beck:** When I started Rocket Lab, there was zero space industry in New Zealand. My original plan was to go to the US and work for NASA or for one of the space primes. But opportunities and situations presented themselves where I really decided that actually, I was going to have a crack myself. We ended up back in New Zealand primarily because of the ability to build the launch pad in the Mahia Peninsula. That private orbital launch site was super critical and key. We've been a US company since 2013. We have about 500 people in New Zealand and about 700 people in the States. One of the things that's kind of personally gratifying is that there were just zero opportunities for a young engineer in New Zealand, or even in Australia really, to build rockets or work in the space industry. Now, as I mentioned, we've got about 500 people down here. There are always at least 100 open positions. We have a space agency now, and it's booming. It's great to see universities having space programs, none of which existed when I was growing up. We give back to the community – we do a lot of school visits and try to get young kids excited about science and the STEM subjects. Space is a wonderful tool for doing that. I think if you look at NASA, NASA is kind of 50% there to push the limits of engineering and science and 50% there just to inspire. There are very few things that inspire kids and people like space has the ability to do. ### Children and Being Hopeful for the Future **Daniel:** The stories are absolutely amazing. Speaking of children, do you have children? **Peter Beck:** I've got two young children. **Daniel:** Do you want them to have a future in the space industry? **Peter Beck:** I hope they carve their own path. That's for sure, yeah. They certainly have a lot of exposure to the space industry, but like any kids, what their parents do is just not nearly as cool as you might think. So I suspect they will have prosperous careers in completely adjacent fields for sure. **Daniel:** We look at the media nowadays, and it's really easy to be doomed and have a negative perspective of the future with everything that's going on. But we continue having our children, and I think there's hope in that process of creating a better future. When you talk to your children, are you hopeful that they will have the skills and the capacity to create a better world, a good world? **Peter Beck:** Within my own children, absolutely. I don't really subscribe to the doom and gloom of the world. I think humanity has an incredible way of sorting stuff out. Crap stuff happens all the time throughout history, so I guess I'm a little bit more optimistic than pessimistic. I think you have to be, quite frankly, to run a rocket company. If you were pessimistic, you wouldn't build anything. So no, I have a slightly more optimistic view of the world. Yes, we've got some challenges ahead of us, but humanity has proven time and time again that it finds a way. To your point in the beginning, life always finds a way. So I'm optimistic for a great future for my children and for everybody else. There are some really exciting times ahead, and my kids can't believe that I was born when there was no internet – that just seems like the dark ages to them. So in my children's lifetime, I'm sure there are going to be equally huge advancements, and the world will be a great place. ### Evolution is Messy. Learning is Messy. **Daniel:** I agree 100%, and that's been the foundation of my work, even with my book and my wilderness expeditions and writing about our journey with nature, and now telling the human story of going to space. I've never subscribed to that narrative of the human species being a bad species. Life is by design messy, and evolution is a messy process, whether it's working out your muscles – if they want to grow, they have to kind of almost destroy themselves so that they can rebuild. We often talk about the butterfly, but we forget the process of the caterpillar unbecoming what it was, totally turning into goo until it can fly. With the human species, the reason why we're about to be 8 billion on the planet is because every time we get to those limits, it forces us to reassess what worked and what didn't work, and it gives us the incentive to push the boundaries and to go beyond. There are a lot more people who do amazing things than people who do bad things. I think part of the failure of the environmental world has been to constantly push that button of "We're a cancer on the planet, we're bad people." When you keep telling people that they're bad, at some point, it doesn't make them inspired about moving forward. The goal should be to move forward with acquired wisdom rather than look backward trying to blame someone. ### Peter's Words of Wisdom? GO FOR IT! **Daniel:** For a lot of people, space is the realm of engineers, but all over the world, there are countries that weren't connected to space but now are connected. We're talking about New Zealand – now has a space agency. For anyone who wants to participate in this new future, what would be your words of wisdom for basically anyone? **Peter Beck:** Find out what you're passionate about and just go for it. That doesn't necessarily apply to just space – that's what I tell everyone. I work with quite a lot of entrepreneurs. Find out the things that you're really passionate about – really passionate meaning that you'll try just about anything to do it – and then just go and do it. Be wherever you need to be in the world to go and do it. I think the human potential is incredibly high. Life is like riding a roller coaster – there are good bits, there are bad bits, sometimes you're upside down and don't know where you are. But one thing is absolutely sure: that roller coaster comes to an end. That's the way I look at my lifetime – I'm going to make sure that I have the most amount of fun and I can achieve the most amount of things I want to achieve with my time on the roller coaster before that thing comes to an end. If you don't do those things, it's a life wasted. So that's always my encouragement to people: find what you're passionate about. As life finds a way, you will find a way to excel and do the things that you really want to do. ### The Importance of Teamwork **Daniel:** In a lot of my interviews and a lot of people I speak to, the understanding of teamwork is extremely important when it comes to space. Space cannot be achieved just by yourself – you cannot just take your backpack and go out and do your survival thing. It's a teamwork of many different skills. You have a big team – 500 in New Zealand, 700 in the US. What has been your biggest unexpected discovery of building a team and accomplishing the impossible on your end? **Peter Beck:** I'm always blown away by the team because you're exactly right – Rocket Lab is not one person, it's not a brand name. It is a collection of incredible individuals focused on achieving amazing things. If I look back as a company, what am I most proud of? I'm most proud of this team. Because it's the team that actually goes to the Moon. It's not one individual, it's not one anything else. So I think as a company, the thing that I'm most proud of is the team that we've built, and as a result, you can do great missions. But without the team... ### Coming Down is Always More Difficult Than Going Up **Daniel:** You've been building an amazing team, and I want to be mindful of your time. When you were talking about the challenges of coming back down, in my mind, when we were kids – I spent my teenage years in the woods climbing trees, and the challenge in climbing trees was never climbing up the tree. It was always trying to get down the tree without hurting yourself. **Peter Beck:** Yeah, that's been my experience. Exactly the same thing with mountains – climbing up the mountain is part of the challenge, but most of the accidents happen on the way down because you think that it's easier. The rockets are no different. ### Conclusion **Daniel:** Peter, thank you so much for taking the time. It's Monday for you, it's Sunday for me. You're in New Zealand, but you split your time between New Zealand and California. So hopefully our paths will cross in real life, and I'm looking forward to sharing a meal or a bottle of wine and continuing this conversation. **Peter Beck:** I'd love to do that. That'd be awesome. **Daniel:** Excellent. Thank you very much, Peter, and good luck to you and the team. **Peter Beck:** Thanks very much. Bye.