[[Home|🏠]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> [[Interviews]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> May 19 2020 **Insider**: [[Peter Beck]] **Source**: [Launch Canada Lecture Series](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGEWn3c04oU) **Date**: May 19 2020  🔗 Backup Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGEWn3c04oU ## 🎙️ Transcript >[!hint] Transcript may contain errors or inaccuracies. **Adam Trumper:** For anyone who doesn't know me, my name's Adam Trumper and I'd like to welcome everybody to this kickoff for our Launch Canada lecture series. With the pretty massive surge of interest in rocketry here in Canada, Launch Canada is all about helping students harness that enthusiasm and really run with it as far as they can go. While the COVID-19 situation has meant that rocket competitions and a lot of the hands-on activities are on hold, we're starting this virtual lecture series to make sure that students can continue learning how to be successful at advanced rocket development, how to approach these activities safely, and hopefully find some inspiration along the way. I think it's hard to imagine a more inspiring speaker than Peter Beck, the founder and CEO of Rocket Lab. Not only because he managed to do what few people have ever done and build a successful launch vehicle company, but he did that starting as, for lack of a better term, an amateur—and not in Southern California but in New Zealand, which was not known for its space launch expertise. For all of us here in Canada, I think that's a struggle that we can definitely relate to, and we are incredibly honored to have Peter as the first speaker in this series. This is going to be a fireside chat. I've got some pre-prepared questions that I've put together to frame some of the discussion, and we will be taking as many questions from the students as we can. So, Peter, I think that we've got several hundred students here from all across Canada who are definitely all yours to hear what you have to say. Would you like to maybe give the students just a very quick introduction to Rocket Lab? I think everybody generally knows who you guys are, but tell us what you're up to. ### About Rocket Lab **Peter Beck:** Sure, and thanks for the warm welcome. That was the weirdest resume meeting I think I've ever started! For those who might not know, we have Rocket Lab. We started off as a small launch company, but more recently I'm reassessing whether we should have called it Rocket Lab because we do much more than rockets these days. Obviously, most people will be familiar with the Electron launch vehicle. We're also building satellites, the Photon satellite platform—which we can talk about later in more detail, but it's basically a multifunctional bus. Then we also do ground operations and integration services where customers come to us and say, "Hey, we want to do this," and we go, "OK, we'll build the spacecraft, we'll put it on orbit, and we'll manage it for them." The company started in New Zealand in 2007, but now it's headquartered in Long Beach, California. We have large operations in New Zealand—the majority of R&D is still done in New Zealand, and the majority of the workforce is in New Zealand. We have operations in Long Beach where we do all propulsion and avionics, and then we have LC2, which is a launch pad in Virginia as well as a processing facility. In Australia we have some people, and we just recently acquired Sinclair Interplanetary, which is a Canadian company. So, we officially have RocketLab.ca now! We're all over the place a little bit like the coronavirus—we're everywhere! But generally, all of our activities boil down to one fundamental thing. If you ever come to any of our factories, you'll walk in the door and the first thing you'll read is that "We go to space to improve life on Earth." Most space companies have a clear mandate about what they want to do—someone wants to go to Mars, someone wants to mine asteroids, someone wants to develop things. My view has always been that if we can build really powerful infrastructure in orbit, we can have massive influence in a positive way on everybody's life on Earth. So that's what wakes me up in the morning, that's what gets me motivated. I love building infrastructure in space and seeing the consequences of doing that in a positive way. Everything that we do basically boils down to that main objective. ### Building Rocket Lab as an Amateur in New Zealand **Adam Trumper:** One of the really impressive things about what you did in building Rocket Lab is you were able to do it, or at least a lot of it, in New Zealand as you mentioned, and you didn't start as a veteran of that industry but as more of an amateur grassroots rocketeer. Can you tell us a bit more about just how you managed to do that, and whether maybe there are any lessons from your own experience that you could share with those of us here who would aspire to do something similar? **Peter Beck:** Yes—don't do it! No, seriously, there are really only two things that have ever been of interest in my life, and that has been engineering and space. I started building rockets when I was at school—rocket engines actually. That's where I started. I quickly found the internal combustion engine insufficient for the things that I wanted to do—the energy density was way too low. So, I started building rockets, and everything has always been about the rocket. Even though I started as an apprentice toolmaker, I would run the day shift doing my job, and in the night shift I'd be working on rocket bikes and rocket packs and rocket scooters and all those kinds of things. Generally, the way it would go is I would build an engine and then I'd figure out what I could put it on. I think it's true testament to your engineering confidence to put a leg either side of your rocket—that's when you know you've got to get it right! For me, a lot of shortcuts get taken especially in the early stages of rocketry, but I think one of the key successes was that I never built anything unless I had a really good understanding of the physics and engineering behind it and the hazards and the dangers. I remember the very first rocket I built was a hydrogen peroxide monopropellant, and I could only source the hydrogen peroxide at 50 percent concentration. So I had to build a bubble reactor column to get it up to 92% for it to be useful. I got a garden shed at the back of my property, dressed myself in fireproof suits and rubbish bags and welding gloves, and set out to build a bubble reactor column. It sounds kind of dodgy and mischievous, but it was well researched, and I never felt like I took any great risks. However, I did have one incident with it—I brewed a really, really good batch, and I actually got a little bit of a chemical burn on my finger. In the haste of it all, I tipped it down the sink with running water and melted all of the piping in my house! So there was water spraying everywhere out of every relief trap. Apparently, PVC cement is soluble with high concentrations of hydrogen peroxide! But all of that was where I started, and throughout my career, even though I went through my apprenticeship and moved into the design office where I was doing design and analysis, it was always the same approach: day job was really fueling my information and engineering experience to do my night job. That went right throughout my career until finally I ended up at a government research laboratory, mainly researching advanced composites and materials and superconductors. But all the time I was leveraging the government's assets at night to build my rockets, and things just got bigger and bigger and more and more complicated. Finally, I felt like I'd reached the point that I could do something with it, and went on somewhat of a rocket pilgrimage. I went to the US for a month and visited all of the places that I could—some that I couldn't. I visited Mojave Desert, spent time out there and saw what all the guys in the little shops were doing. I got chased out of Edwards Air Force Base, which was a little bit embarrassing, but ironically I was invited back by the base commander a number of years ago, and I enjoyed driving through that same gate that I got hustled away from by a man with a gun! It was really important to make that trip because I learned a couple of things. One thing I learned was that what I was doing at home was not far away—in fact, was pretty much identical to what all the little companies in the Mojave Desert were doing. They were having the same issues with injectors and combustion, and using the same National Instruments equipment that I was using. So there was not a massive leap from where I was operating, which came as quite a big surprise. And then the other thing I learned was that with respect to small launch, nobody was doing anything that was super exciting at the time. Everybody I spoke to just said, "Well, maybe that will happen one day," or "Until the government tells us that's what they want us to do, we'll just leave it there." So I returned home, and on the flight home was when I decided I was going to start Rocket Lab and go after it myself. So it's been kind of 13 years and a few minutes. ### Overcoming Obstacles in a Non-Space Nation **Adam Trumper:** I can definitely sympathize with some of your experiments at home, although I admit I haven't disintegrated my plumbing with hydrogen peroxide yet! That's a valuable cautionary tale for everybody. When you started out doing this in a country where launch vehicle development was very much outside the norm, what were some of the big obstacles that you faced? Were there any that really stand out, and if so, how did you overcome those? **Peter Beck:** The first thing to do is listen to nobody, because New Zealand had no space industry at all. When I started the company, I was trying to get some government grants. For me it was very sound engineering, a very sound business plan, and a very clearly laid out path about how we were going to do what we were going to do. The government agencies at the time, just because I had the word "space" in it, thought it was the most insane thing. I remember escalating it right up to the chief executive of the grants department, and we had a meeting over lunch. He said, "The problem you're going to have, Pete, is that New Zealand will never do space." When those words came out of his mouth, that was probably the time I decided, "Well, I will die trying, because you're wrong." This has been consistent throughout my life. My career advisors at high school called my parents because I told them that I was going to build a rocket company and I was going to go to space. They said my aspirations were unrealistic and I needed to know I was good with my hands and should go down to the local factory and get an apprenticeship as a fitter or turner. The thing is, there are some things in life where you know it's just a wrong answer, and that was one of them. There's no singular struggle—it's just a continual slog, even to today. Once we started, there was always a lot of skepticism, and I was always perceived as this crazy guy who previously worked at a government lab, and clearly something had happened to him as a child! It wasn't really until I went over to Silicon Valley and raised the first chunk of capital out of a tier one firm where a few people looked sideways and said, "How did a tier one VC firm end up pouring money into a New Zealand enterprise, especially a rocket one? This doesn't make a whole lot of sense." As that grew, and as I understood how governments worked a little bit more, we were able to turn the tide. But I would say the majority of New Zealanders still think of us as a bit of a curiosity rather than the only small launch vehicle flying in the world. A lot of New Zealanders ask when my sponsorship is going to run out for launching these rockets—they have no concept that we're putting satellites into orbit or what the point of it is. They think it's just a couple of guys down in a paddock shooting off some rockets, not a billion-dollar corporation with 500 people working flat out. We have a lot of issues with just educating people. It's ironic really, because a small island nation in the middle of nowhere is completely reliant on space—absolutely completely reliant in everyday life—but yet very few people have an understanding of that. So we do a lot with schools, a lot of education programs to try and change that. Launching in New Zealand was no easy feat. In order to launch out of New Zealand, we had to attain a bilateral treaty between the United States and New Zealand because New Zealand didn't have a space launch capability, so it was in violation of all of the MTCR treaties. Once that bilateral treaty was signed, there were a whole lot of rules and regulations that had to accompany that treaty. We had to put them through Parliament, through Select Committee, and ultimately create a whole lot of new rules and regulations. Then those rules and regulations needed a regulator, so the New Zealand Space Agency was created. The Aussies got jealous and created their own Space Agency too! I would say that regulatory is a third of Rocket Lab's business, a third of the amount of stress, a third of the amount of work—it's just a huge amount. And then a third of it is infrastructure. I laugh hilariously loud whenever I see companies that propose to build launch sites as a business, because that's got to be the dumbest business on this planet. To think they can build a launch site for any old rocket and make it profitable is crazy. Nevertheless, we had to build launch sites. We had to upgrade 32 kilometers of road, we had to upgrade internet backhauls to entire townships, we put tracking dishes all around the planet. We've got 5.5-meter tracking dishes on Chatham Islands, Kerguelens, Southland, Australia. The infrastructure is just huge. So there's not one singular challenge—it's just waves of challenges. ### Working with Government **Adam Trumper:** The piece you mentioned about the government is something that's certainly very relatable here as well, because if you're in a country that doesn't have any previous infrastructure or regulatory framework for these things, it's no longer enough to just build a rocket or even build a rocket and a launch site. You also have to build the necessary treaties and regulatory regime to support it, and obviously, to be able to do that requires a certain amount of buy-in from the government. How did you approach that in New Zealand? How did you convince them that this was actually worth their while to get behind? **Peter Beck:** There are a number of things there. Firstly, having critical mass. The New Zealand government had to stand up and listen when the company was really well-backed by some of the best in the industry, and there was a lot of push from the US government as well. When the Ambassador has to turn up at the State Department for a meeting, that starts to get on people's radar a bit more. Like I say, sometimes "no" is the wrong answer. So never be afraid—if it's really important, "no" is just "yes" some different day with a different set of circumstances and leverage. That's not always the acceptable answer. We were also very lucky to have a government at the time who believed in what we were doing. They saw the opportunity for the country, and we were very lucky to have a minister, Steven Joyce, who was basically the minister of everything one down from the prime minister, who said, "Let's make this happen." Every government department below him gave 120 percent. I think it is an example of what a government in a country can do if they really want to, especially a small, nimble government. Rules and regulations were drafted through select committees and went into law in record time, and we had unanimous support right across all of the parties in the house for all of the laws. That comes with a little bit of work, but we were just very lucky to have built that critical mass—from a business perspective, from a community perspective, but also from a government perspective. Once you start that snowball down the hill, there comes a point where you're just not stopping it, and building that snowball was the critical point. ### Building an Effective Rocket Organization **Adam Trumper:** It's pretty remarkable what you were able to accomplish and what the New Zealand government was able to accomplish as well. The other aspect that people often don't appreciate until they've gone through it is that if you're trying to build a rocket or build a company to build rockets, it's not just about the technology—it's about building an organization that can take on that challenge effectively. Tell us how you did that with Rocket Lab, and what are maybe some of the features of an effective rocket-building organization that might be applicable for some of these students in how they run their own teams or just lessons for their future careers? **Peter Beck:** Gosh, there are so many directions to go with that question. Starting from a business perspective—and I know this might not be that relevant, but I'm hoping that a bunch of the guys and girls watching will go out and build their own companies—I see this more in the space industry than in any other industry, where people have a cool technology and then they find a potential market for their cool technology, but kind of blindly pursue the technology. As a result, especially unfortunately during this pandemic, you're going to see a lot of failure in this industry because a lot of the business fundamentals are precisely not that—they're not fundamentals. They're something that someone's really passionate about, which is great, but remove a really buoyant funding environment and the thing just dies because nobody wants to buy it. So I think that's super important for a space company—as emotional and passionate as you are about what you're building, at the end of the day the business fundamentals need to stand on their own two feet. There's a lot of stuff out there that you look at and think, "Well, this is great, but how can that possibly work from a business endpoint?" The other one is a little bit tricky. I think tenacity and energy are really the secrets in this business. Beyond good engineering, tenacity and energy are really the things that matter. With the bilateral treaty, I just went and stayed in a Holiday Inn across the road from the State Department for two months and told everybody at the State Department, "I'm not going home. I'll just turn up at eight o'clock every morning, and I'm just not going home until we start to move." The first couple of weeks people think you're bluffing, but by the time you get to the end of the month, they know you're still there. So you just cannot give up in this industry. Being very positive is important as well, because you'll have plenty of setbacks along the way. I can think of a good example that really defines Rocket Lab. Before we started the Electron program, we were developing a new propulsion system. We had a whole team of guys turning up from America from a very large aerospace company that I'm sure you would know. We had to test this engine on a Friday night. They had just gotten on the plane, and we were testing the engine one last time—they were arriving on Saturday. We tested the engine and we had some bleed past a valve and someone bled propellant into the chamber. We had a hard start that not only blew the engine out, but we literally blew everything off the walls. The test cell was the biggest explosion in Rocket Lab history—everything was just gone. I remember there were only about five of us in the team at that time, and we walked after the engine test cell. Not a single person was like, "Are we screwed?" or anything. Everybody just said, "Oh, I've got some titanium here, and we'll get some stuff here," and we just started working. Come Saturday morning, the team from America rang me up and said, "Hey, we've arrived, feeling good, let's start this engine testing!" I was like, "Oh no, you might have some jet lag, so come in on Monday." Meanwhile, we'd worked all through the weekend, and come Monday morning, we'd built a new engine and got the new engine test cell up and running again. But we did something that you probably wouldn't think was a good idea—while we were rebuilding the engine, we changed the design. Sometimes it's good to take some bold risks. The first time we lit that engine was in front of a whole team of aerospace experts from a large US propulsion company, and I'm glad we did because the new engine we built performed better than our old engine by about fifteen percent. The lesson on that story is that the easy thing to do would have been to go, "Ah, we're hosed," but instead we focused on what needed to be done. The safe thing would have been to build an engine exactly the same, but sometimes you can't be safe, and you just can never, ever give up. ### Iterative Design and Making the Right Choices **Adam Trumper:** That gets at something I'm also curious about—one of the fundamental paradoxes in aerospace engineering is that design is a very iterative process, and it's always really important to make the right choices up front. In the preliminary design phase, conventional wisdom is that usually about 80% of the cost and performance of a system are ultimately locked in coming out of that preliminary design. But the paradox is that that's the stage in a project where you also know the least—you haven't had the benefit of all the detailed design and analysis and testing that you'll have by the end of it. Once you're actually producing hardware, suddenly changes are a lot harder and more costly to make and have all kinds of system impacts. In a lot of traditional companies, part of how they tend to deal with that is by relying on very experienced, knowledgeable people who have been there, done that, and have built up the intuition to make those smart choices up front. But what do you do if you're doing something that's outside of what you've done before, if you're a new team or you're doing something that's completely new? What can you do to try to help make those right choices up front to ensure that you're likely to have a viable product at the end of all of this, or at least avoid costly redesigns? **Peter Beck:** That's the secret! That's the secret right there. The challenge here is that there are kind of two approaches: you can go one way, which is really experimental and just blow stuff up all the time, or you go to the other end of the spectrum, which is very analytical and you can spend forever in analysis. The secret is there's an optimal point at the top of the curve where you're doing both, and I think this is probably the biggest success of Rocket Lab—staying on that optimal point. Doing experiments to understand fundamentals is super important. Doing the analysis well enough, but only well enough to understand the results of the experiments, is super important. If you go either side of that, it gets really dodgy. We have a philosophy at Rocket Lab called "fail fast, but only fail fast early—never fail fast late," because that's not failing fast anymore, that's just a giant pain in the ass. Generally, what we try to do is get all of the fundamental understanding down at this end of the spectrum so that when it comes to actually building the pieces of hardware, you don't fail, because as you say, that's really expensive. I think running a rocket company is like running through a maze at night, and at the end there's a guy with a shotgun. You have to run through the maze sufficiently fast enough that you get to the end before you run out of energy, but also when you come around a corner, you have to be careful and slow down that little bit and poke your head around and see if there's a guy there with a shotgun. Because basically, if you run into a dead end at such speed and you can't turn around, you're dead. A rocket company has like a million failure modes, and any one of them will kill the company at any point, because if you make the wrong engineering decision very early on, you can't iterate a vehicle or an engine late in the piece. So it's knowing when to poke your head around the corner to see a guy with a shotgun and back out. It's like going down an engineering path and realizing "this is the wrong path" and backing out, but not always going down a different path because it looks greener. Not going, "Oh, we should go with this injector design," then backing out and into another path, and you never get to demonstrate anything. That's the secret—being able to hold the course when you really think it's time to hold the course, but also when things are starting to violate the laws of physics or getting incrementally harder and harder and harder, knowing the point to just stop and back out. This is the hardest thing—determining where all of that lies and making those decisions quickly. **Adam Trumper:** I think for the students, this is one of the big advantages of a student rocket team, because if you want to give yourself every opportunity to fail when the cost of failing is low, there's probably no easier way to do that than when you're a student. Your labor is free, you've got the resources of the university that you can take advantage of, you can get sponsorships—this is a great way to learn some of the things that will help you to be successful when you get into industry, so you don't have to make those mistakes on a much more costly project. I think that also ties into one of the things we're really trying to focus on here with Launch Canada, which is to put a big focus on technology development and encouraging students not just to launch rockets but to think more about creative solutions to some of the real core challenges of rocket engineering. What do you think some of those core technical challenges are that students looking for interesting and useful rocket-related projects might want to tackle? ### Core Technical Challenges for Student Projects **Peter Beck:** I think propulsion is not that hard. GNC (Guidance, Navigation, and Control) actually is a pretty big element. GNC is often overlooked—if you guys are flying stabilized, passively stable rockets, that's one thing. But GNC was one of the areas that Rocket Lab invested in really early. We actually collaborated with Canterbury University and created a PhD course in advanced guidance, navigation, and control for rocketry. We've had about six PhDs go through that course now and continue to support it, some of whom work for us and developed the core GNC algorithms for Electron and Photon. GNC is a very tricky area and one that's often overlooked. **Adam Trumper:** What about some of the turbo machinery and propellant delivery aspects? Obviously, with your electric pumps, that's one of the major core technologies of Rutherford. How appropriate are things like pump projects for really ambitious student groups? **Peter Beck:** Pumps are hard, but even though from the outside, electric pumps look easy—and a low-performance electric pump is easy—a high-performance electric pump is hard. The Rutherford pumps, the actual motors, are smaller than a Coke can and produce around 60 horsepower. But I would encourage anybody to do pump projects. I think they teach an awful lot, and I would encourage universities especially to look at electric pumps, because a low-performance electric pump is relatively simple but much more superior than any gas generator or other cycles. For the scale of rockets students work with, it works perfectly. ### Hiring Junior Engineers **Adam Trumper:** Getting on to some subjects that might also be of interest to students looking ahead to their careers—what would you say is the most important thing when it comes to hiring junior engineers? Do you look more at students' grades or degrees, or do you look more at their hands-on experience? **Peter Beck:** Hands-on experience, hands down. We look for two things: what they've done, how busy they've been, how passionate they are in their personal life, and really who they are as a person. We look for highly motivated people with lots of energy, and there are lots of things other than the university degree. At the end of the day, there's a whole bunch of people around the world who get turned out of universities with the same degrees—there's almost nothing to distinguish them apart from stuff that they build or stuff they do outside university. The kind of people we look for are people that use university to fuel their passion, rather than just going to university to get a degree and then figuring out where they're going to go in the industry afterward. We really look for hugely passionate people that have many projects outside of university. **Adam Trumper:** When you were initially setting up Rocket Lab and looking to find your initial employees, what were the traits that you were looking for in them, particularly at that very early stage when really the whole company was riding on a relatively small number of people? **Peter Beck:** Disciplines in areas that we needed, but once again, attitude is everything over aptitude, definitely. I will employ someone with half the grades but twice the attitude over the contrary. We look for people who are super smart, can think outside the box, and just aren't afraid to work really hard. I think that was critical. In a startup, you can't carry any dead people—especially in an early startup, there's just no ability to do this. All the founding team of Rocket Lab is still with us, and they are really the soul of the company. ### Future Space Markets **Adam Trumper:** With the cost of space access dropping, what do you think the new markets are going to be in the next 20 years that will increasingly become legitimate business opportunities? **Peter Beck:** I think there's a huge amount of opportunity in areas like weather. I'm biased toward weather—I think it's an area that governments underinvest in, and it has a disproportionate outcome to all of us down here on Earth. I think weather is going to be really interesting, especially as climate change starts to accelerate. Having a pretty good slate of sensors and monitoring the Earth in real time on a macro scale is probably a good thing to do. So I think that's an area I'm really excited about. I'm a bit inclined against the mega constellations. I think it's an interesting business—there are definitely some use cases that make sense, like onboard internet. But I'm less enthused about some of the other mega installations that are being proposed. I guess I'm more in favor of having a smaller number of spacecraft that are highly capable, fused in with terrestrial-based systems as probably a better way to go. We'll see who's right or wrong there in the long term. But I think there's tremendous opportunity for new systems and new approaches, leveraging the reduction in launch cost. **Adam Trumper:** With the moon increasingly being a major focus around the world, and here in Canada in particular there's a new focus on lunar exploration and lunar technologies, what do you see as the commercial prospects for that whole aspect of space exploration? **Peter Beck:** It's going to take a bit longer to grow. I think the commercial opportunity is really government-based. Until there's a commercial reason other than a government to go to the moon because we need some resource or something that the moon has, it's going to take a bit longer to develop. So I think it's really a government-led initiative, but the good news is that governments are increasingly leveraging and relying upon commercial activity to meet their needs. Look at us—we have the CAPSTONE mission from NASA, a spacecraft to cislunar orbit. Not long ago, the whole program would have been an internal program, but now the spacecraft is being built by commercial entities—multiple commercial entities. So I think there's a lot of opportunity there. ### ITAR and International Opportunities **Adam Trumper:** I know this is upfront for a lot of students—being in Canada with the United States right next door to us, ITAR kind of looms large over a lot of things that we do. This is why Canadians generally don't have an easy time if they want to go and get their dream job at SpaceX. Rocket Lab has been really interesting because you're probably the first of the major launch vehicle companies that does fairly regularly employ Canadians out of New Zealand. What do you think the future is going to look like for ITAR in particular? You've been able to work through it—do you imagine that there is likely to be some relaxation of that as the commercial space industry continues to expand internationally, or is this probably going to be there locking things down for the foreseeable future? **Peter Beck:** I'm generally an optimistic guy, but I think ITAR is not going anywhere anytime soon. But you can navigate it. We have a number of Canadian employees, as you mentioned, both in New Zealand and in the US. Half of the Photon satellite team is actually Canadian, excluding the Sinclair Interplanetary guys. As an aside, we really enjoy employing Canadians—they integrate incredibly well in New Zealand. I'm not just saying that—it's true! I think the Canadian culture and the New Zealand culture are really similar in that they're quite humble and respectful, and that's very much the New Zealand culture. So we have tons of Canadians down in New Zealand, and they come in and integrate just seamlessly. It's a great path for students because we've had fantastic results. But ITAR is not going anywhere soon, in my opinion. It's a masterful piece of regulatory engineering—I'd love to write a book about it one day. It's perfect in the fact that they create sufficiently gray rules and put massively punitive penalties in place. It saves them from writing a description about every little possibility because they just make it gray and then really nasty, so everybody just never, ever—everyone just always says no. As far as achieving what it needed to achieve, I think it was masterful, but it certainly doesn't help commerce and has been very damaging to commerce. That said, the State Department, we've found, doesn't want to say no—they're there to try and say yes and try and promote commerce. It's not painless, but provided you go through the process and you clearly articulate what you will do and what you won't do, we've found the guys to be really reasonable. It's just a bit of a drag. ### Expansion in Canada **Adam Trumper:** Speaking about your increasing involvement with Canadians based on your recent acquisition of Sinclair Interplanetary, does Rocket Lab have any further ambitions of expanding in Canada that you can talk about? **Peter Beck:** The Sinclair team—we really love the team, we love Canada, and will continue to increase the size of that team. Talent is really scarce all around the world—really great talent is really scarce. So we see Canada as almost an untapped market in some respects, and like I said, we've had wonderful results down in New Zealand. So if we can continue to build the Sinclair team locally, then that's what we'll do. ### Upcoming Plans and Photon Platform **Adam Trumper:** Is there anything you can tell us about some of the upcoming plans for Rocket Lab? I know some of the students are asking about Hyper Curie as well as some of your interplanetary missions. **Peter Beck:** I'll talk about Photon in general. If anybody looked at the kick stage when we first announced it, I would have thought it was going to be incredibly obvious that it was a spacecraft—it has a comm system, GPS, gyros, propulsion, everything. So it came as a surprise to me that it came as a surprise when we announced the Photon satellite platform based on the kick stage. The plan was always to get into satellites. I think we see launch as relatively a solved problem—the next problem is that it's too costly and too time-consuming to build a spacecraft. That's the evolution. It always annoyed me that most of the spacecraft I was flying had all the same gear six inches away from the stuff that I had in my rocket doing the same thing. It always seemed crazy that there was this duplication. So that was the point of the Photon platform. Don't think of Photon as a piece of hardware—think of it as a concept. The concept is a rocket and a satellite as a rocket: electrons emit photons, so it's logical. We have a bunch of configurations to basically build any Photon you want. We have the kick stage base Photon, which is a very good LEO platform, and then we have the Photon Lunar, which is a very high-energy stage for doing lunar and interplanetary missions. The high-energy lunar capability came about because I hired a guy called Richard Hunter to do a PhD on what you could theoretically do with Electron as an upper stage, with basically no constraints. He did some really great work, did some orbital mechanics optimization, and came up with some really cool orbits and really cool ways that you can phase orbits to go and do these things. The CAPSTONE mission to the moon that we're flying has a series of eight separate burns on orbit. We go into a very highly elliptical transfer orbit to start with and have a period of a couple of weeks. We raise the orbit through this series of burns into these highly elliptical orbits to the point that when we get right out to the TLI burn way out there, it takes very little energy to put us on the TLI trajectory. It's a negative C3 injection trajectory. At that point, we separate off the spacecraft, they coast and they get captured into the moon's gravitational field, they do a series of maneuvers, and our mission is officially over at that point. But we're going to carry on and try to get a photo of the moon. Let's do a moon flyby! So we're going to go out to about 3.2 million kilometers, then do a maneuver, look back toward Earth, and then zoom past the moon in a lower flyby and try to get a picture. But the whole point of the PhD project wasn't to go to the moon—I wanted to go to Venus. That was the whole point of the project. Everybody's focused on Mars, and Mars is great, but the reason why Mars has had so much love is because it's the obvious planet for a human to go and put a footprint on. You can land on Mars, you can put a footprint on it, you can walk around the surface—it makes sense. Nobody's ever standing on Venus—it's just not going to happen. So it doesn't have that same capture of imagination for human spaceflight. Venus, though, is an incredibly interesting place. I think it's a great analog for potential climate change effects on Earth. But the real attraction for Venus for me is that there are three places in the solar system that have a reasonable probability that life could exist, and one of those is in a sweet spot in the Venusian atmosphere. Around one to two atmospheres of pressure in the atmosphere, there's a relatively benign environment apart from the acid and the nasty stuff. But there's hydrogen, oxygen, all sorts of stuff in there in a narrow band, and it's relatively agreeable—some extremophiles here on Earth could potentially live in that environment. I look at it as humanity's greatest question to answer, and that's a huge motivator for why I want to go to Venus. **Adam Trumper:** I guess you don't quite share Elon's ambition to terraform the entire planet quite yet? **Peter Beck:** If you can terraform Mars, then Earth's gotta be really messed up! If you've got to the point where the best option is to terraform Mars, and you have the capability to terraform Mars—it's like, fix Earth! You have the ability to manipulate planets—do it to the one you're on. I think that's a fair point. ### Southern Hemisphere Rocket Experience **Adam Trumper:** One other really good student question: You guys, as some people might not realize, launched the first private rocket to pass the Karman line in the southern hemisphere. What carried over from your experience with that project to your development of Electron? **Peter Beck:** Almost nothing from an engineering perspective, but a lot of lessons from a regulatory perspective. When we did that, there was a whole lot of things—we had to get waivers from the Director of Civil Aviation, and then everybody was like, "Holy crap, there's a whole lot of treaty stuff that just got messed up!" A day before the launch, we had New Zealand Customs ring up saying, "Hey, we're not sure you can launch because space is not a customs destination, and technically you're going out of the atmosphere, which is out of New Zealand as a country, and then re-entering the atmosphere again back into New Zealand. We're trying to figure out what customs is going to do because we may need to inspect your rocket once it's returned." I'm like, "Dude, it's not coming back!" So there was a huge amount learned about regulations and dealing with government bodies. I really learned a lot about running programs, and just more about myself and more about other people than probably anything else. ### Additive Manufacturing Technology **Adam Trumper:** With your Electron, one of your major focuses has been on additive manufacturing technology and some of the interesting things that that's allowed you to do. Can you talk about just how important that has been in the development of Electron and Rutherford? **Peter Beck:** Absolutely. I mean, if you think about injectors and pumps, if you had to investment cast pump impellers, you just couldn't—you would have had to use platelets to get the kind of performance that we get out of Rutherford. There's no subtractive manufacturing approach that would get the injector density that we have in Rutherford, so it was absolutely critical. When we went down the development path, we would print ten different impellers and, you know, liquid oxygen pumping is quite well documented to a point, but then you just need to try. Having the ability to go out there and in one day run ten different impellers, get the data up, and then a couple days later go out with a genesis impeller that has all your learnings in it was absolutely critical. I think additive manufacturing was one of the biggest enablers for the program. If we hadn't had that ability to just print engines, print injectors, print pumps, I don't think we could have done it. **Adam Trumper:** I think that's definitely something that is making a lot of more advanced projects more accessible to students because all of a sudden it does open up the possibility of things that would've been way cost-prohibitive otherwise. The other major technology that Electron features obviously is your all-composite propellant tanks. Can you tell us anything about how that development came about? Was that something that you'd envisioned as one of the core technologies from the very beginning of the program? **Peter Beck:** No, but I have to say that my background is in composites. I was working for the government lab on advanced composite materials and structures, mainly supporting the America's Cup boats and some of the really finely tuned and structured mast structures there, so I have a very deep background in composites. The original Electron, you'd be amazed to know, was made out of stainless steel. I resisted the urge to go to composites because nobody was building composite launch vehicles—a composite cryogenic oxygen tank was still seen as very research-papery, and there were no examples out there that had flown, certainly in that scale. Nevertheless, we started off in stainless steel, and it really came down to mass fraction. We just couldn't get the mass properties and performance to close. In a small launch vehicle, it's just so tough—it's just unforgiving physics. Things that represent a negligible mass fraction on a big vehicle are significant on a small vehicle. Just a thing like a pressure transducer all of a sudden is an appreciable mass on a small launch vehicle versus a large one. You still need a bunch of pressure transducers—they don't scale with the size of the rocket. Once you build one thing out of composite, the best thing to do is make everything composite. Composite-metallic interfaces suck because you've got something with no thermal expansion against something with high thermal expansion. Once you invest in the infrastructure to produce anything in composite, then everything else becomes easier. As a result, the Electron launch vehicle is 100% carbon composite. ### Reusability Efforts **Adam Trumper:** Between the composites and the additive manufacturing, you've definitely given yourself a remarkably flexible and adaptable design. I know that you've started looking into reusability—can you tell us a little bit more about that and what sort of changes you think you might need to make to enable that? **Peter Beck:** Reusability is one that kind of snuck up and smacked me on the back of the head. From a purely engineering perspective, if you look at the available or demonstrated solutions, they don't work for a small launch vehicle. There was never going to be a propulsive landing on a small launch vehicle because then you build a giant fuel tank and everything that goes with it, so it wasn't super obvious that that was a feasible thing to do. It wasn't until we started getting some data back that we got a good understanding of the thermal environment and aerodynamic environment. The tipping point was when I was standing in the factory—we were producing one rocket every thirty days at that stage, now we're producing one rocket every few days—and I thought, "How can I double or quadruple production?" The first stage represents 80% of all the parts of a rocket, so if you get it back, we wouldn't have to build much larger factories. We started looking at different approaches. We had some crazy ideas—giant bouncy castles in the middle of the sea, drones—nothing was off the table. But ultimately, we've ended up in a regime we think is really quite doable. ### Small vs. Large Launch Vehicles **Adam Trumper:** With launch vehicles, one of the big challenges for reusability has always been that the larger the vehicle is, typically the lower the cost per kilogram of payload is going to end up being. There are often two schools of thought: one is that the way to go is ever-larger rockets if you're trying to reduce costs, but obviously there's a big advantage with dedicated launches as well. Can you comment on how competitive something like the Electron is with, say, rideshare on a Falcon 9, and how you stack up? **Peter Beck:** We're not competitive at all! What we say to people is: if you want to take a bus, and you don't really care when you go or where you end up—you end up at a bus stop probably sitting beside someone who stinks—take the bus. If you really care about when you want to go, when you want to get picked up, when you want to get dropped off, and you don't want to stand beside someone else—take an Uber. We never aspire to provide rideshare prices because we simply can't—it's a completely different service. Whether you're launching a Falcon 9 or an Electron, a lot of the costs are the same. Flight safety doesn't change no matter what you fly—it takes the same size flight safety team. Range costs are the same. Obviously, there are larger pieces of infrastructure, but the people required to operate that infrastructure are the same. So there's a fixed level of cost no matter what rocket you build, which puts a threshold on the price. People who come flying with Rocket Lab need to be at a specific time and in a specific point in orbit. We see a lot of customers who have bought rideshare missions come to us, and you might think, "That makes no sense because you can get a cheap ride on a Falcon 9 or on a Soyuz or something else—why would they come to you?" They come to us because they've been waiting twice now, sometimes a year and a half, and the cost of being delayed if you're still burning cash and that satellite's not making any revenue...or you can come to us, and we give you real certainty over when you get launched, and it's pretty quick. Most customers that come to us, we've launched them inside twelve months. It's schedule certainty that that spacecraft is going to be up there. Depending on the spacecraft, if you count that lost revenue sitting there waiting, delayed, or even if you're a startup company just chewing cash while the lights are on and the satellite sits on the shelf, that's not sustainable either. So it really is the case where it's cheaper to get up in orbit faster on a more expensive rocket than it is to wait around for a ride. Then the other group of customers are those who absolutely need to go to a particular place. Things like LTAN and inclination are hugely important for a business satellite—you can't just put a satellite up anywhere. That might be great for an experiment, but actually, you need a spacecraft to be over a particular piece of land at a particular time. It might need to be in sunlight or in shadow. So there are real requirements for companies to have those specific parameters. Generally, rideshare customers come to us for two reasons: either the mission has been delayed to the point where they just can no longer tolerate it, or they don't fly rideshare anymore—they just buy dedicated launches because they get schedule certainty. Or they've been sold a ride on a developing rocket company that continues to miss their milestones—selling the dream but never actually getting there. ### Composite Cryogenic Tanks **Adam Trumper:** I've got a couple slightly technical questions from the students. A lot of people are really interested in your composites work, especially since many students will get into that when they're building rocket body tubes and things. Obviously, something like an all-composite cryogenic pressure vessel is sort of the ultimate challenge. What were some of the challenges that you faced when trying to develop all-composite liquid oxygen tanks? **Peter Beck:** There are two things you need to worry about. The first one is micro-cracking in the laminate and micro-cracking because you'll be pressurizing with helium, so you can have a gas permeation issue. That's the first one, and cryogenic temperatures really promote micro-cracking, so there's a challenge there. The second one is oxygen compatibility. This is where you have to be really careful because you think about a composite pressure vessel under pressure—you've got a resin system with laminate in it. The laminate, especially in your initial pressurization phase, you'll hear tuning and ticking of the laminate as it breaks free of the matrix. There can be a lot of energy stored in one of the carbon filaments, and as it goes through a thermal relation and goes "crack," there's a lot of energy that gets pushed into the resin around that filament. Now that resin is in a pure oxygen environment—that's fuel and an energy source, so they're having a good feed off each other. Having a really good understanding of resin systems to control that micro-cracking and the thermal expansion, but also resin systems that aren't hugely flammable, was key. Where we ended up after a big research program was with tanks that are pretty much the same compatibility through Boeing and NASA testing as that of aluminum. **Adam Trumper:** So you developed an entirely new resin system in-house for this? **Peter Beck:** Yes. ### Guidance, Navigation, and Control Challenges **Adam Trumper:** I noticed that some of the students seem to have gotten really interested in your comments about GNC and some of the challenges associated with that. Can you elaborate on some of the biggest problems that you encountered with GNC and how you went about solving them? **Peter Beck:** GNC is really complex because you're flying a rocket that's going through a continuously changing aerodynamic regime. The propellants are decreasing, the natural resonant frequency of the vehicle is changing, and then as you go through the atmosphere, you go through shear layers and the vehicle gets a big whack. It's just continually changing. GNC for something that's very well-defined and bounded is not a big deal, but GNC for something where, by definition, throughout the entire flight regime nothing is ever constant—that's where the challenges become significant. You might build a good filter to filter out bending modes for the first half of the propellant drain, but the next half is completely different because you're going way faster, going through different parts of the atmosphere, and the vehicle has lost some stiffness and damping. Then if you've got liquid propellant, you've got sloshing around in there, and you've got to reject that and understand the difference between slosh and bending modes. Then you've got your engines and the engine TVC and you've got coupling—all that sort of stuff. I have tremendous respect for the GNC team at Rocket Lab because there's just so much going on. And at the end of the day, it's not just about getting it there—it's getting it there really accurately. The GNC team's current record is plus or minus 400 meters in insertion accuracy. That might not sound super accurate, but you have to remember that you're traveling at 27 times the speed of sound at that point, and that's final insertion accuracy of 400 meters. It's mind-blowing when you think of all the regimes, stage separations, closed-loop guidance, and all the uncertainties. It's not just about getting it there—it's about getting it there exactly in the right place. ### Internship Opportunities **Adam Trumper:** Because I know that you need to go and you've been incredibly generous with your time, one final question from the students that I think might be on a few people's minds: What opportunities are available at Rocket Lab for student internships, and do you have any advice to students who are interested in pursuing that? **Peter Beck:** We always look for internships, generally within the local areas. In New Zealand, we generally look for New Zealand interns. Now that we have Sinclair Interplanetary, there are more opportunities in Canada. That said, there are a couple of interns we had very early on from Canada who are now quite major figures within the teams. So it's not impossible to do that either. Obviously, the US is much more difficult for foreign national interns. But I would just say, if you're really passionate about it, remember what I said—sometimes "no" is not the right answer. The HR team is going to hate me saying this, but if you're really good and you're really passionate, sometimes "no" isn't right! **Adam Trumper:** I think that's pretty good advice to wrap things up on. Peter, thank you so much for very generously doing this for us. I think that was fantastic. I'm just going to unmute all the students—can we get a final big round of applause for Peter? **Peter Beck:** Thank you so much, everybody. Keep going with rockets—it's the best thing you can do. Just do it, just keep building stuff. [Applause] **Adam Trumper:** Thanks again, and all the best to you. Take care, everyone.