[[Home|🏠]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> [[Interviews]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> November 17 2020 **Insider**: [[Peter Beck]] **Source**: [Milford](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu73MEAIVLo) **Date**: November 17 2020 <div class="responsive-video"> <iframe width="1099" height="618" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eu73MEAIVLo" title="Up Close with Peter Beck" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div> ## 🎙️ Transcript >[!hint] Transcript may contain errors or inaccuracies. **Interviewer:** What sparked your interest in rockets and space? **Rocket Lab Founder:** I've always been interested in space and rockets for as long as I can remember. Space first, and then engineering has always been a passion as well. If you mix space and engineering, you kind of naturally get to a rocket. I mean, that's the logical point. Most people don't realize how much satellites do for everybody in their everyday life. Space is one of those things where it's hidden infrastructure - you can't see it, so you don't see the direct impact from it. Certainly, if you're using any GPS or if you're in an Uber, it's all space-enabled from GPS. You might call somebody up in America, and it's a comms link through space. There's so many things that are enabled by space infrastructure that because you don't see it, you don't recognize how all that is occurring. ### COVID-19 Impact on Rocket Lab **Interviewer:** How has COVID-19 affected Rocket Lab? **Rocket Lab Founder:** COVID-19 for Rocket Lab has been a little bit painful, just like every other business. The difference for us, I guess, is although we launch rockets, basically we sell launch slots. We try and launch every month, so if you can't get people and componentry and things into the country, it makes it very difficult to withhold those, keep those launch slots running. Ultimately, at the end of the day, we make money by launching rockets. **Interviewer:** How did you prepare for the pandemic? **Rocket Lab Founder:** I don't think any business kind of expected a global pandemic. We did make sure we had large amounts of capital reserves. As a rocket company, you always want that because there's always a bad day coming, whether it's blowing something up on the pad or losing a rocket in flight. There's a bunch of different things that can cause you to be grounded for six months or longer. So a good rocket company always has a very healthy cash reserve on its balance sheet. **Interviewer:** How did you react to the pandemic? **Rocket Lab Founder:** As COVID started to show itself, I was on the Prime Minister's business advisory council, so we could see stuff coming pretty quickly. As we shared with all the other business leaders what we're all seeing, it became pretty evident to us that this was going to be pretty disruptive. ### Adapting to New Market Conditions Rocket Lab is well known as an innovator, so adapting to new market conditions was not really a challenge for us in that respect. We build businesses around innovating and taking on really difficult challenges. So everybody grabbed their screens and went home, and in some areas, productivity increased. Social distance is always difficult when you have a highly integrated team of engineers that work very closely together. So when you've got to put a big wedge of distance between people, then productivity in that respect will go down. ### Opportunities from the Pandemic **Interviewer:** Did the pandemic create any opportunities for Rocket Lab? **Rocket Lab Founder:** The pandemic certainly opened up plenty of opportunities. I've always said never waste a good crisis. We were, and still are in many cases, one of the few companies that are still launching rockets. In Europe, most of them are grounded; in India, they're still grounded, dealing with the pandemic. So being able to be liberated from that and get back to launching puts us in a really strong position against our competitors. I think Rocket Lab is about 30% of the way from where we want to be. This is not a company that's been around for 20 years and we're worried about whether we're going to be relevant. We are the leaders in the sector. We've just moved into our spacecraft division, we're going to the moon, we're going to Venus. So I think that's well under control. We've got multiple Plan B's if a vaccine is slow to arrive. We can continue at the kind of rate that we are - it's very painful, but we can continue. And we kind of assume that this is going to occur, but if things degrade even worse, we do own a launch site in America as well. So we can push more over there and get more launch out of America if we need to. ### Exciting Projects **Interviewer:** What projects are you most excited about currently? **Rocket Lab Founder:** The two projects that I lead that excite me the most - one is recovery, so actually recovering the first stage of the launch vehicle, which is an incredibly challenging task. And then the second one would be our interplanetary missions and aspirations. We're going to go to the moon for NASA early next year. We have a private mission to Venus in 2023. These are very exciting things, and I think very important things to do. One business that I really admire for their innovation that really jumps to mind is Halter. Craig Piggett and the team there and what they're developing is phenomenal. It's an agricultural business, so that becomes very difficult in a pandemic. ### Innovation in New Zealand **Interviewer:** What are your thoughts on innovation in New Zealand? **Rocket Lab Founder:** I think New Zealand as an innovative nation is phenomenal, and I can say that New Zealand engineers are among the best for innovation. But what we're really crap at is commercializing. We make wonderful inventions and wonderful ideas, but we're just really rubbish at bringing them to the world. In my opinion, the best way to deal with a setback is to never even acknowledge that there is one, because the setback is really just an opportunity to learn, isn't it? Sometimes, especially in this industry, bad stuff happens all the time. When bad stuff happens in a launch vehicle or in this particular industry, it's expensive, and the lessons are hard. But as long as you learn from those lessons, then it's not really a setback. This is a small piece of one of my early rockets, and I keep this on my desk because it reminds me that this is an exploded piece of equipment. It exploded because I put the decimal point in the wrong place - incredibly stupid calculation, incredibly stupid error in the calculation, didn't check it, and it resulted in this. This is one small piece of a much larger thing; this is the only piece I could find left. So I just always keep that on my desk to remind me that there are real consequences in getting stuff wrong. ### Teaching and Education **Interviewer:** Can you tell us about your role at Auckland University? **Rocket Lab Founder:** Being recognized as an adjunct professor at Auckland University was a huge honor. The plan was always to go to university, but we just sort of ran out of time. Maybe I'll get there one day. For young school leavers, there's really two things I would advise them. Firstly, follow your passion. Make sure that you're doing what you want to do because a human life scale is cruel in its duration. It's just way too short to get everything done you want to get done. And make sure you think big. Don't settle. How can you use that really short period of time you've got, which is your life, to have a big influence on the rest of the planet and its people? **Interviewer:** What high school did you attend? **Rocket Lab Founder:** I'm not sure I should say that because I don't want to get anybody in trouble, but I had a wonderful education in Invercargill. The only kind of negative point was there was less aspiration for doing really, really big things. I was advised that I should not pursue a career in the space industry and, in fact, it was somewhat unrealistic.