[[Home|🏠]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> [[Interviews]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> January 23 2021 **Insider**: [[Peter Beck]] **Source**: [NASA Spaceflight](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knk_RuV7mao) **Date**: January 23 2021 ![](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knk_RuV7mao) 🔗 Backup Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knk_RuV7mao ## 🎙️ Transcript >[!hint] Transcript may contain errors or inaccuracies. **Host:** Folks, you know the drill here. Let me know if you can hear me and let me know if you can see us. You're part of our remote production team here for NSF Live. We've got a very special show for you today. For the first time, a very special guest on the show, so I want to see some five by fives and welcomes in chat. We are going to be talking today with somebody you've probably seen before, Peter Beck of Rocket Lab. Peter, thank you so much for joining us here at NSF Live. **Peter Beck:** Oh, my pleasure. **Host:** And then also here on the show today we will have Thomas Berghardt, one of our normal hosts that you've seen around here. Thomas, how you doing today? **Thomas:** I'm doing great. Thanks to Peter for joining us, and let's learn a bit about Rocket Lab and some stuff. Should be exciting. **Host:** Good deal. So I see a ton of five by fives over here in chat, folks. I'm gonna do the little disclaimers and stuff like that as we get going, and then we have an hour and a half with Peter here talking about Rocket Lab, Electron, 3D printed nozzles, reusability, everything that they've been doing all the way out to Venus coming up here. ### Rocket Lab's Future Direction **Thomas:** I want to start sort of big picture. Rocket Lab - this is actually the three-year anniversary this week. Rocket Lab made it to orbit for the first time with Still Testing. You've now got 18 Electron missions under your belt as well as a couple Photon missions with their new satellite bus. So I want to look ahead - three years in the past, how about three years in the future? Where do you see Rocket Lab as a launch provider that sometimes builds satellites, or a satellite maker that offers their own launch service? Where do you see Rocket Lab in a few years time? **Peter Beck:** I think it's fair to say that I kind of feel like we're about 30% done with where I actually want to see the company go. So we've got a lot, a lot, a lot to go yet. And look, the space systems group has grown enormously this year, but really we created that to try and lower the barriers even further to get people's ideas and innovation. I think you'll see that combined launch and spacecraft offering becomes a lot more frequent in the future because there's just so many advantages with coupling those two things together. It always drove me nuts that we would be throwing away essentially the kick stage, which is really a satellite, and then deploying other customers' buses of spacecraft that there's been a tremendous amount of time and money spent on. So if you can combine all that into one offering, then it's a much more efficient and more affordable way of getting stuff up there really quickly. ### Photon Development **Thomas:** Let's talk about that because Photon did begin as this kick stage, which was effectively the third stage of Rocket Lab from the very beginning. The kick stage wasn't a new part - that was from the first Electron launch, right? **Peter Beck:** Correct. **Thomas:** So how dramatic were the changes as far as turning that into something that can stay on orbit even longer and support a sort of satellite mission? **Peter Beck:** Not at all. I mean, I was always surprised that when we announced the kick stage that everybody didn't say "Oh, he's building a satellite," because there's even the little flat cutout panels around the kick stage on the first flight where the solar panels go. It was always intended to be a satellite from day one from the very first beginnings of the launch vehicle design. That was powered by a Curie engine, which was the second of two engines. We also have the Rutherford engine, which of course powers the Rocket Lab vehicle or the Electron vehicle itself. You've now developed this thing called Hyper Curie, which we can actually see behind you as part of an interplanetary version of the Photon bus because you want to go not just to low-Earth orbit but beyond. What did you change to upgrade to another new engine to go to Hyper Curie? **Peter Beck:** So Curie has been a real workhorse for the kick stage. It's a lovely propellant. Hyper Curie is kind of the next evolution from that. We've made a few tweaks to the propellant combination such that it's hypergolic, so it makes it much more reliable. Also, it's electrically pumped, and that's the bit that's super exciting about this. An electrically pumped satellite propulsion system is like the perfect example of electrically pumping rocket engines because we use the sun to recharge the batteries when we're not doing the coarse burns, and it's kind of like free energy. So the amount of nitrogen you need to carry is very, very small. If that was a pressure-fed system, then the nitrogen you need to carry is really quite parasitically expensive, but with the electric pump, you need a tiny little tank of nitrogen and it saves a lot of mass. **Thomas:** And is that new for Hyper Curie, or did the original Curie engine also feature electric pumps? **Peter Beck:** No, the original Curie engine is just pressure fed, so super simple, lovely little engine. But this is quite a step up. We gain about another 10 seconds of ISP, and also the electric pump is a lot more efficient. ### Kick Stage Capabilities **Thomas:** So this Curie-powered kick stage which has been operating for a while - Hyper Curie's going interplanetary, but you're still using that Curie-powered kick stage on your everyday missions. In fact, just earlier this week we had another one leave the crust - 18th mission. Are you discovering any new things about what you can do with this Curie kick stage? Are you getting creative? Any extra cool stuff you can talk about? **Peter Beck:** Yeah, I'll probably get a little bit of trouble here, but this last mission was super cool. We were going to a high altitude, sort of 1200 kilometer altitude, and there's a really nasty radiation anomaly over South America. So we do what's called the Buchanan Maneuver, named after one of our GNC guys, where we actually fly under that radiation anomaly and then come out the other side and use Curie to raise our perigee and trim the orbit and get it where we need to be. So we completely avoid flying through that horrible piece of radiation. On this particular mission, we added a bunch more tanks. The tanks for Curie are about the size of something between a basketball and a baseball, made of carbon composite, and we added a bunch more of those because we needed more total impulse. We did that maneuver and raised the orbit and deployed the spacecraft, and then we did another big long burn and lowered the perigee really low so that the kick stage burns up in a relatively short time frame. We've done missions where we've gone up to 500 kilometers, dropped off spacecraft, then lowered the perigee and apogee and dropped them off at 450. We've done a plane change - about a half-degree plane change - where we deployed some spacecraft and then wanted to demonstrate that capability for our own purposes for another mission that's coming up. So that upper stage capability with multiple relights really enables us to do some cool stuff. ### Photon Interplanetary **Host:** Peter, tell me if I got the right thing here. You said the tanks were about the size of basketballs. Did I get that right? Is that the same picture you have in your background there? **Peter Beck:** No, there's two versions of Photon. There's the Photon LEO which uses basically repurposes the upper stage of the vehicle, the kick stage, and then there's this one - it's called Photon Interplanetary, which is considerably larger. Those tanks you see there are much bigger. This spacecraft builds the fairing of Electron completely. This interplanetary version is basically a flying fuel tank. **Thomas:** And that stage is so much bigger. Are we going to see some sort of weird fairing to hold that in, or does that fit in the normal Electron fairing we're used to? Will you be able to tell the difference just watching the launch webcast? **Peter Beck:** No, it's designed to fit in the standard Electron fairing. But I think we might have to change some of the paint stripes on the vehicle. When we do a recovery vehicle, we put some red stripes on it, so maybe with interplanetary missions we need to change up the color of our stripes. **Thomas:** Venus-colored perhaps? **Peter Beck:** There you go! ### Venus Mission **Thomas:** Well, let's talk about that because I can think of two big interplanetary Photon missions. Since I mentioned Venus first, I'll go there first. You have mentioned a personal interest in sending a science mission to Venus, different than most interplanetary science missions. You're talking about Rocket Lab sort of frontiering this instead of launching a NASA probe, for example. What are the goals of that kind of mission? When might we see it? Will there be a live camera view? **Peter Beck:** Well, I mean, maybe a little bit of context here because you don't wake up one morning and decide you're going to Venus. I guess it all stems back to when I was a child. My father - the earliest memory I have of being interested in space was my father taking me outside and showing me the stars and pointing out that those were all suns and they had planets around them, and there could be somebody on that planet looking back at you. That sealed the deal for me - space was going to be a passion for my career. Following that, I always promised myself that if I could conclusively or even have the most remote chance of conclusively answering the question "Are we the only life in the universe?" that I would try. I've just been blessed that we've reached a point in the company and with the resources we have that it's reasonable to try. I'm not naive enough to expect to look over to Venus and dip a probe in the atmosphere and find life, but certainly I think if you have the resources, it's just totally unacceptable to not even try. So I went to our board and said, "Hey, can I grab a rocket and a spacecraft and see if we can find some life on Venus?" I think at first they thought I'd lost my mind, but after the discovery of phosphine, it looks a little less crazy now. The mission to Venus is really trying to accomplish two goals. One is we're going to send an instrument - and we're working with an incredible science team - to Venus, and we will put a probe into the atmosphere. We get about 280 seconds of time in the atmosphere to make the measurement. At the moment, the instrument is looking like a laser-tunable mass spectrometer, especially focused around the phosphine region, and we'll see what can be found there or validated or proven. I think that will be a great step forward if successful. The other part of the program, and the reason to do it, is typically these interplanetary missions are measured in decades and cost a large amount of money. That's not the way we do science in a laboratory. If you're doing science in a laboratory, you'll do a bunch of small experiments and iterate on those experiments and learn quickly. You're not going to do one experiment every 10 years and then spend another 10 years studying it. I think we can really move planetary science forward if we can go and visit these places frequently. We might not have quite the same exquisite instruments, but we can learn and iterate very quickly. Ultimately, that's what we'd love to see, and the best way I could figure of demonstrating the utility is just to go and create that platform. Hopefully others will, in the wake, see the same thing. It's a high-risk mission, and it's trying to accomplish some big goals, but I think even just getting off the pad will move things forward - first private mission to another planet - and just trying to demonstrate the utility of high frequency and small price. **Thomas:** You mentioned a spectrometer on your side. Have you gathered any interest from other groups who have maybe some experience in interplanetary science in perhaps offering to tag their own instruments along for the ride as well? **Peter Beck:** This is intended to be a great partnership, and we already have a partnership with NASA on this, and we're working with the science team that made the phosphine discovery in the first place and a bunch of other organizations. It's very much a global effort - researchers from all around the world are participating. I tell everybody, "We'll get you there, but past that, we're not really much use." So there's a much larger science team and instrument team behind us that can really do the work. **Thomas:** Once Photon gets there, you of course have mentioned an entry probe into the Venusian atmosphere. Will the Photon satellite actually perform any sort of orbital insertion and stay at Venus for a while, or is it going to be a flyby? **Peter Beck:** We launch in May 2023 - that's the minimum energy window between the planets - and we use the same technique as we're using on the CAPSTONE mission to the Moon later this year, where we do a bunch of orbit raises, anywhere between 8 and 12 burns, and then we move out on our final trajectory and make a couple of course corrections on the way. As we approach the planet, we separate off the re-entry probe with a small course correction maneuver. The Photon is not an orbiter, it's really a flyby. During that time, we're trying to time it just right so we have enough relay time for the probe to enter the atmosphere and descend to the surface. We use the interplanetary Photon spacecraft as a communications relay back to Earth, but it's not an orbiter - it just continues on its trajectory. ### CAPSTONE Mission **Thomas:** That contrasts with the other interplanetary Photon mission. You mentioned CAPSTONE, which will enter a lunar orbit for NASA - in fact, the Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit which NASA is investigating for the Lunar Gateway station for their Artemis program. What can you tell us about that mission coming up later this year? **Peter Beck:** When we won that mission, we said, "If we're going to do this mission, let's make sure that we build the spacecraft that can go to the Moon the same spacecraft that can go to Venus." So fundamentally, that spacecraft that you saw before is basically the same spacecraft that will go to Venus. Now, our job for NASA actually ends at trans-lunar injection. In this case, NASA's spacecraft is on board, and we launch into a really low perigee and do a bunch of orbit raising maneuvers, and then finally do one TLI burn. After that TLI burn is complete, we separate off the satellite and that continues on its own path with its own propulsion system to put it into NRHO. That's officially the end of the mission, but as I said to the team, if you're going to put yourself in a TLI burn, it would be a little bit rude to just end it there. So we have an internal stretch mission goal where we're going to try and do a low-altitude flyby and get some nice images along the way. That will help us prepare for the Venus mission as well and operating in deep space. ### Launch Complex 2 at Wallops **Thomas:** That mission is launching from one of your new launch sites coming up - Launch Complex 2 at Wallops Flight Facility, Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Virginia. How's that coming along? We know we've got another mission before CAPSTONE - the debut mission for the U.S. Space Force, I believe? **Peter Beck:** That's right, it's for the Space Force as well. I believe we're waiting on Rocket Lab working with NASA for the Automated Flight Termination System certification, something that Rocket Lab is fairly unique in having. **Thomas:** How's that coming along? When might we expect a Wallops debut? **Peter Beck:** That's the million-dollar question, quite literally. The vehicle's there, the pad's complete, we've dressed it, we're ready to fly, but we have an autonomous flight termination system that we work with NASA on. We've been using it since flight one - even on flight one we were shadowing this AFTS unit, so we've been working a very long time with NASA. The range in New Zealand, the LC-1 range, is certified to fly this AFTS system, but at US federal ranges, the process is a much longer process to get certification. Where we're at right now is NASA has written the core software for the flight termination system, and the NASA Wallops range team needs to certify that software in order for us to be able to launch from a federal range using it. It might sound easy - AFTS software by nature is generally pretty basic because you don't want it too tricky - but you need to think about it in the context of the larger goals here, which is to create an off-the-shelf flight termination system for anybody to use, for launch vehicles to use on all ranges. While it might be relatively simple to create a bespoke system just for Electron, the bigger industry role is to make it available for everybody. That's what NASA is focusing on - making sure this is a product that everybody can use in the future. If you're just writing lines of code for Electron and certifying them, that's one thing, but if you're writing lines of code for just about every vehicle you can imagine, that takes a little bit more time. We're obviously very eager to get that complete and get that vehicle flying, but that is the gating factor right now - waiting for NASA to finish that certification. ### Future Launch Sites **Host:** A question from chat: "Do you see any additional launch sites in the future other than LC-1 in New Zealand and LC-2 at Wallops?" **Peter Beck:** Building launch sites, contrary to popular belief, really is not fun. It blows, to be honest. It's incredibly expensive and not especially fun for an Electron site because we try to leave as much complexity on the ground. But the team's got pretty good at it - LC-1B was done in a really compressed time frame. Launch sites don't make money - they're just a massive cost center. So there's got to be a really good commercial reason why you want to build another launch site. Between LC-1, LC-1B, and LC-2, we have 132 launch slots a year and inclinations from sun-synchronous to 37 degrees. The only bit of inclination that we're missing is from 37 to equatorial, and we have more launch slots and availability out of our private range in New Zealand than just about all the launch ranges in America combined. So we're not shy of launch slots, we're not shy of inclinations. The only reason to really build another launch site would be if we need somewhere between 37 and zero degree inclination, and for small satellites, there's not a lot of demand for that. It's not like a GEO bird where you really need that extra energy. I think we've had maybe two customers and quite a few customer inquiries around that inclination. **Host:** With the two main launch sites - New Zealand and Wallops - how do you determine which mission goes from each? **Peter Beck:** The New Zealand launch site is high volume, low cost, because we own all of the facilities there and can control the costs really closely. We have all our own range safety, our own met guys, our own tracking - absolutely everything is in-house. So we have unlimited volume essentially and complete control. Launching at a federal range, obviously there are many organizations involved that aren't Rocket Lab, so naturally it's more expensive. But the LC-2 range is very unique in another way. When we built that range, we didn't just build another launch pad - that wasn't the point. The point was to build a range that we could turn super quickly. Most people are familiar with the pad that's sitting at that range, but there's also a building about five miles away from the pad that can hold up to four Electrons, with multiple clean rooms and the whole control center. The purpose of that is to be on 24/7 readiness - if you need responsive access to space and you need to get an asset to orbit quickly, LC-2 is the place to do it. That range, although we can fly commercial out of it, was really purpose-built for our government customers. **Host:** Can you reach those high inclination orbits from Wallops as well? There have been talks of trying to go to things like sun-synchronous orbit from Wallops. **Peter Beck:** It's a little bit tricky to get to those kinds of inclinations. I can't say it's something that we've spent a lot of time looking to do. There are fairly well-defined corridors there - I think it would take something pretty special to get to sun-synchronous out of Wallops. It would be a pretty big dog leg, which would be very expensive from an energy perspective. ### Launch Complex 1B **Thomas:** Going forward, you have these two ranges. You're bringing Launch Complex 1B in Mahia online to have two launch sites out of New Zealand. How far away is that debut? We've seen recent images of that pad looking pretty much ready to go. **Peter Beck:** We hope to have that pad ready soon. We've got a mission coming up, and we would love to have two vehicles on each pad and launch them in close succession. The justification for that second pad was obviously more launch capability, but it also gives us the ability to do preventative maintenance and make sure that we're not tied to one particular asset. What's super cool is that in theory, we can launch simultaneously from either hemisphere - southern and northern - one out of LC-2, one out of LC-1 simultaneously. And what would be even cooler is if we could launch two at a time at Mahia, but I'm told I'm getting ahead of myself on that one. **Thomas:** If we're going to do a race of two Electrons to orbit, it's going to have to be one from Virginia and one from Mahia? **Peter Beck:** I think we could settle for that. It's a Thing One and Thing Two sort of deal. **Thomas:** How many missions might you split between these two different launch sites? Are you seeing Mahia do most of the heavy lifting while you leave Wallops for the specialized, maybe government customers? Or do you see a more even split? **Peter Beck:** It's completely program-specific. LC-1 is designed as a high-throughput pad, whereas LC-2 is more bespoke. We've got 12 launch slots a year available to us out of Wallops, and in New Zealand we have 120. But certain programs, whether they're government programs or civil programs, will require larger numbers of launches. I guess a high-level, broad-brush approach is that LC-1 is set up as our high-volume pad. ### Reusability and Recovery **Thomas:** You've got the pad bottleneck kind of opened up with soon-to-have three launch sites online. Now you just need enough rockets to launch from those pads. Your very innovative solution for that is not to just build rockets faster, but to build fewer rockets and fly the same rockets over and over again. Let's talk about Rocket Lab's approach to recovery and reusability. We already had "Return to Sender" with a splashdown of a first stage. How does that stage look, and how's the team's progress on data review and getting ready for the upgrades for the next attempt? **Peter Beck:** That was obviously a great result to get that stage back. That stage is completely cut up now into lots of different pieces. We cut all the tank up - there are different heating regimes around the tank that we're trying to understand and test all the material properties. It's really a carbon composite vehicle, so it's different from aluminum or stainless steel. Carbon composites have their own unique properties when they've been thermally cycled to an elevated temperature. We're really making sure we understand all that and all the flight dynamics. We've already stripped components off, and those components will be reflown shortly. We made basically no upgrades to the base heat shield, and we knew the base heat shield was going to fail because until we had the data, it's hard to know what you should do with that. On this first one, the bottom end was pretty toasty. For the next one, we've got a new version of the heat shield, so we hope to keep that bottom end in good shape. That'll be coming up in a few flights. I was down in the factory the other day, and that vehicle was just hitting paint, so it was coming along pretty quickly. The next flight is basically a repeat of the last flight, where we've got an upgraded heat shield and we'll do another splashdown. The flight following that is actually a block upgrade and has some new technology on there. The ultimate goal here for us is to try and get one back in the factory by the end of the year that at least in theory we could refly. That's the goal that's been set to the team, so that's the trajectory we're following on reusability. **Thomas:** And that will require not a splashdown but a mid-air recovery, correct? Or do you think there's a chance to re-fly a splashdown booster? **Peter Beck:** We're going to splashdown for a little bit more time, just because there's a lot we need to understand - not just from a vehicle standpoint, but from a safety standpoint and an operational standpoint. We need to get a little bit more experience with that, and then we'll start introducing the mid-air capture. But at this point, that's not the hardest thing to do. The hardest thing to do is to get it back in a condition that we want to refly it, and whether you splash it down or capture it with a helicopter, that's kind of irrelevant. **Host:** Will you attempt to recover the boosters as standard procedure, or only on certain flight profiles or missions? **Peter Beck:** Ultimately as many as we can. There is a payload hit to doing a recovery system, and with a small vehicle, that becomes a much bigger deal. On a large vehicle, you might have a 10% lift margin, which equates to a ton of extra payload. Apply a 10% lift margin on a small launch vehicle, and you've got 10 kg or 20 kg of payload left, depending on where you're at. The margins here just don't scale very helpfully. There will be a bunch of missions where we'll have to fly in expendable mode, and that's fine. But wherever possible, we'll try and fly in recovery mode because that just helps everything out enormously. **Host:** When you price those missions, is there a price difference for "we can recover this mission" versus "this mission we have to go expendable"? **Peter Beck:** It's early days to really understand what economics we can pass on to customers in that respect. If we can achieve the ultimate goal where we scoop it out of the sky, fly it back, stick it back on the pad, charge up the batteries, and go again, then that has a pretty dramatic effect on economics. But we don't really need to look past SpaceX to see the time it's taken them to get to the point where they are now, which still requires a reasonable amount of refurbishment. Obviously, it's getting better and better, but there's still going to be a learning curve. The number one priority is to do this around launch rate. If we can just use a booster one more time, we've effectively doubled our manufacturing ability or doubled the volume of launch vehicles that we can launch per year. That's the primary goal. The secondary goal is obviously to affect the launch economics. I'm really excited with what we've got to date. We brought that vehicle in in kind of the rudest way possible, and it had a tough ride, but we stripped a bunch of stuff off it that we'll be flying again on another vehicle shortly. If we bring it in with white gloves, then I think things are going to get really interesting in the small launch industry for sure. **Host:** Were you talking about "Return to Sender" there - the splashdown version? **Peter Beck:** Yes, we didn't even upgrade the heat shield. We just rode that thing in, and it's a tough old vehicle for sure. **Thomas:** Going forward, once you get to the dream of mid-air recovery, bringing it right back to the launch facility with a lot less wear and tear, and that upgraded heat shield does its job, how long could the turnaround be before that vehicle is charged back up, refueled, got another second stage and payload on top, and ready to fly again? **Peter Beck:** To be honest, we haven't looked that far ahead. The reality is that a launch vehicle arrives at the launch site a few weeks before we fly it currently, in the form of a first stage, a second stage, and a payload module. The time for integration - the team down there have got it down pretty short. So if at least in theory you've got a first stage back and you had a second stage sitting down at the launch site, do all your ISP and mate, the vehicle rolls out a few hours before we go and we launch. So in theory, it could be very quick, but reality is always much harder. **Thomas:** On a similar note, when you get those stages back, you said if you fly it one more time, that's already doubled your manufacturing rate. Is that what you're expecting, or could you foresee a time where a first stage booster from Electron flies 10 missions or even more? **Peter Beck:** In any part, flying it once is a great bonus. Recovering first stage boosters from orbital velocities is no joke - this is not a walk in the park. Just getting it back once and reusing it once is a very admirable goal. If we get it in great condition once, then there's no reason why it can't be done again. But we haven't set a focus on "we want to use this X number of times" - it's just "let's just get her back once and take one step at a time." **Thomas:** And all that data from "Return to Sender" and the next ones will feed into those decisions and potentially influence future tweaks to the first stage booster to allow it to be reused either easier or more often? **Peter Beck:** Recovering something gives you multiple orders of magnitude more intelligence than you can get from telemetry. Electron is a very highly telemetered vehicle - on our first flight we had 30,000 channels, I think we're down to like 50,000 channels of data now. But it's just laughable when you actually put one back in the factory and start cutting sections out of it and pulling it to bits. What we've learned from the "Return to Sender" flight was like a factor of 100 of what we knew before we actually recovered one. ### Parachute Design **Host:** There's a question about the parachute designs. We've seen some changes to the parachute design. What prompted the engineering factors that changed the shape of the parachute? **Peter Beck:** There's a couple of things. Firstly, the most important thing for us in the first instance is to recover the stage - getting that data and intelligence is the most important thing to do. With the parafoil, although that's probably more optimal for a helicopter scoop, there are a lot of unknowns in deploying at the velocities that we needed to deploy it. The most important thing was to get one back, so we went to a more traditional ring-style design that has a lot more tolerance. As it turns out, our ability to predict the stage's entry location was way better than we thought. We were able to both predict and, as it's coming in, update those positions really accurately. So it's an open trade right now whether or not we actually need to even go back to a parafoil. As long as we can repeat what we did last time, the accuracy with which we know its ultimate position and where it's coming in means it doesn't necessarily need to have the course correction that the parafoil gives us. We may not even return to the parafoil after we fly again coming up shortly. **Host:** You talked about using some components from "Return to Sender" - you got it back via splashdown. What sort of things did you pull off of that stage that you may reuse on a future mission? **Peter Beck:** The kinds of things we're looking for are things that in production slow us down - things that generally take a lot of labor and have a lot of value attached to them. Things like pressurant systems, for example. Pressurant systems go through a lot of acceptance and testing, and they run at really high pressures, so that has a lot of gap associated with it. Certainly pressurant systems we were looking at, and some electronics and a bunch of other things. The plan was to take some sweet photos of the components that are going back in the vehicle, so I don't want to give too much away before we do it. ### Engine Reusability **Thomas:** You did mention that when people think reusable rockets, you look at Rocket Lab, you also look at SpaceX, but SpaceX was for a very different purpose. They're going at the reason of cost reduction; Rocket Lab's looking at aiding their manufacturing cadence. People talk about how the most important part on a Falcon 9 is to recover those engines because they're the most expensive part. But at Rocket Lab, you guys are 3D printing engines. Are those engines actually one of the easier components to make on an Electron? **Peter Beck:** A Rutherford engine is a very simple engine. If you look at all the stuff that's hanging on the outside, you don't see a plethora of pipes and sensors and valves. It's a very clean engine, and as you mentioned, it's all 3D printed, and we can spit them out pretty quickly. However, with any rocket engine, there's a lot of testing that takes place. So although you might be able to manufacture one with relatively small amounts of time and effort, it's actually the testing of an engine that takes the most amount of time. Being able to reuse an engine - although the componentry might not form a big part of the cost, transforming that componentry into an engine that you're happy to fly is where all the value is. If you can avoid doing that component-level testing again, then you can save a lot of time and money for sure. ### Possibility of Larger Launch Vehicle **Thomas:** We're talking about Electron reusability. We know you've said multiple times that you would not make any sort of larger launch vehicle with Rocket Lab, but you did eat your hat on reusability. Any chance of you eating your hat again? **Peter Beck:** Here's the thing I've learned - I should just never say never, because I only end up eating just about every piece of clothing I own one day. The reusability thing, on first blush, if you take normal accepted methods, it just doesn't look feasible. We had to stand back and go, "Well, we can't afford the mass of the landing legs, we can't afford the mass of this..." So what you trade there is you let the atmosphere do the work, and you trade in infrastructure - boats and helicopters and all that other stuff that you need to be able to successfully recover it. So yeah, never say never, but we're on a pretty rock-solid trajectory here. I guess I should learn to never say never to anything anymore. **Thomas:** If you were looking at some sort of different launch vehicle or a next launch vehicle for Rocket Lab that might not be larger per se, is there something else about the original Electron design - which of course has been upgraded a couple times but overall is a very similar rocket to the very first one that flew - that you would change? Or a different approach to a small sat dedicated launch vehicle? **Peter Beck:** Hindsight is always 20/20, but honestly, the vehicle that we flew on flight one compared to the vehicle today is in all respects pretty much identical. We've released more performance by upgrading some batteries, but it's a battery cell - it looks the same as the battery cell that we took out to get that extra performance. There's been no "Gosh, that was just a terrible design, let's start fresh" on any major component whatsoever. That was kind of how we wanted it because the last thing we wanted to do is race to get to orbit with a vehicle that wasn't ready to go straight into production. We built that vehicle with production in mind, and reliability, and manufacturability in mind. So there's been very, very small changes and tweaks to the vehicle as we've gone along. I think we made the right decision on payload size and payload class. I know there's a lot of one-ton vehicles in development right now, and when we saw all those one-ton vehicles in development coming out, we were thinking, "Have we missed a beat here? Should we be building a one-ton?" But we have a unique advantage of actually launching and flying a bunch of our customers, and we kind of realized that with the one-ton class - and look, I'm completely happy to be wrong on this one, this is just our view of the world - the one-ton is too big to be a usable dedicated ride-share vehicle because the price is too high and the payload capacity is too large. Most of our customers coming to us sit exactly in that sort of 1 to 250 kg range. So if you've got a vehicle that lifts a ton, it's sort of hard for that to be a really competitive dedicated vehicle. And then it's too small to be an effective ride-share vehicle. If you want to just focus on ride-share and compete with a Falcon 9 for example, the cost per kilogram and the size is just too small to compete with a larger ride-share vehicle. I think with the size that we've sized Electron, it's kind of ideal for about 80% of all the dedicated missions of small satellites. It has enough energy to go into MEO and even further, but also the customers that are coming to us for dedicated rides find the price point and the throw weight really are in a sweet spot. But like I say, we'll see if we're right or wrong about that in the future. **Thomas:** Are there any other upgrades we're looking at? You mentioned the battery upgrade, I believe there was a Rutherford engine upgrade at one point not too long ago. Any other small changes that Electron has gotten over the years or might get in the future? **Peter Beck:** It's just tweaking really. The battery was probably the biggest thing we did, and it's just an exchange of a cell. The Rutherford tweaks are just little bits here and there to make use of the extra energy we have from the battery. I'd say the majority of the change that occurs in the vehicle is production based. Regulators are always one thing that anybody who plays with regulators knows absorb a lot of time and energy, so there's some changes with regulators coming through. But really now, I'd say the product is really, really stable, and any change that is occurring is really just fidgeting around the edges. Change is really painful, especially when you're in a production cadence that we are. I forget what tail number we've got coming on down the factory floor, but probably nearly into the 30s - we'll probably have tail number 30 in parts anyway coming down the floor. To make a change, you have to roll it back through a lot of vehicles, so we try to do the block upgrade approach. When you've got this kind of production cadence, making a change becomes painful. You can physically make the change really quickly, but that's not where change is really a concern. Where change really plays the devil is through all of the ERP systems, the MRP system, work instructions, training, and so on for all the technicians in the system. ### 3D Printed Nozzles **Host:** There's a good question here about production cadence: "Does the 3D printed nozzle affect the rigidity of the nozzle? And if it does, is it in a good way or a bad way? When you decided to 3D print those, did you figure out that's actually sort of useful, or did you find it was going to be a problem?" **Peter Beck:** The nozzle - in fact, the whole thrust chamber - is very, very strong because it's almost like a sandwich structure. You have two skins, and then in between those skins, you have all the little fine channels for the coolant. So the thrust chambers are pretty tough. The bigger challenge with 3D printed rocket engines is the materials that you get to choose from, especially the material that you print from. A more traditional rocket engine has a copper liner and then a nickel closeout. The copper is great because you can really pull the heat from the wall, whereas stainless steel is pretty rubbish at pulling heat. So you end up going to thinner and thinner wall thickness to keep that energy flow into the fluid you're trying to use to cool it. That was more of a challenge in developing Rutherford - from a structural perspective, being able to print enough features to get the heat transfer you need into the actual cooling fluid, as opposed to a copper chamber where it just kind of happens for free. ### Small Sat Launch Market **Thomas:** You mentioned a bunch of other small sat vehicles coming up. Rocket Lab beat that wave by a couple years - three years ago earlier this week, Electron reached orbit for the first time. But you do mention we have a couple other vehicles coming up. Virgin Orbit just made orbit not too long ago, Astra is getting very close, several others. Where do you see Rocket Lab fitting into that small sat launch market? **Peter Beck:** It's going to be fun times, and there's nothing like better competition to keep everybody on their toes. But I guess we have a slightly unique view on the world because we fly a lot of customers now, and we think we have a good view of the industry. I think it comes as no surprise that the amount of launch vehicles that are in development versus the number of payloads that require flight are dramatically mismatched. So there's going to be a day of reckoning here one day, for sure. But who will come out the other side - that's the competition. Firstly, congratulations to the Virgin guys. I know that it's been a long time and a lot of money to get to orbit, so especially congratulations to those guys because first flight is a big deal. And as you pointed out, Astra is getting closer, so hopefully that team can get there as well. I think all ships rise with the tide. The more commercial entities that can make it to orbit, ultimately the better we are as a human species because that just means that access to space is getting easier and easier. And we're certainly not afraid of a little bit of competition - like I say, it keeps everybody on their toes. But if I think back from a Rocket Lab perspective, getting to first flight was hard, don't get me wrong, but it consumed less capital, less time, and probably it was a lesser feat of blood, sweat, and tears than actually scaling. When you've got no customers and you're just focused on getting to orbit yourself, that's one thing. But your customers bring a whole lot of different requirements to the piece. Building a launch vehicle over and over again and doing it reliably and achieving that kind of cadence is just a way harder thing to do. This is something that Elon and I will agree very, very strongly on - the production element is just way hard. So scaling is really difficult. Ultimately, whoever's most successful in this market will have something that is not only affordable but also has a high degree of reliability, because nobody wants to lose their payload, and who can respond to customers quickly. The last flight that we just flew was six months from initial customer contact to them being on orbit. So being responsive is going to be important as we go into the future. It's going to be fun times. **Thomas:** As the people who cover all these launches, we completely agree. The more launches we can webcast, the better, which is why we are very much looking forward to getting some cameras at Wallops. **Thomas:** You mentioned reliability, and we were talking about reusability earlier. Do you think that will factor into reliability? Electron has been very reliable in its first 18 missions - only two failures, the first being that very first flight, which was a test and only failed because of what, one line of code? **Peter Beck:** It wasn't even on the vehicle. It was a flight termination system issue. Basically it was one tick box in a piece of configuration software that wasn't ticked. It accumulated error as we ascended, and it accumulated such an error in position that it pointed the dishes to the center of the Earth. When we lost communication with the vehicle, it was terminated. So check your tick boxes, that's all I'll say. **Thomas:** Talking about reusability, do you think that will give you even more confidence in your vehicle's reliability if you're flying components that have literally already done what you're asking them to do before? **Peter Beck:** Yes and no. Firstly, just getting one back gives you such an insight into the margins that you have in a vehicle. It gives you a tremendous amount of either confidence or the complete opposite - because you can see actually how close something was to a limit or margin, or how far away something was. In recovering that first stage for us, all of the systems that were in there, whether a pressurant system or an avionics system - you would have absolutely no concerns just putting them back in the vehicle. We were really happy with that. Now obviously we cooked it on the way in, so you're not going to fly that tank again, but certainly the areas that had good thermal protection - we're able to really understand what happened there. All the things like the baffles and level sensors and all that stuff that goes for a ride on a ballistic trajectory - you can crawl around on the ground, but you never know what it actually saw or what condition it's actually in. To get all that back is just phenomenally useful. Some things have service life and cycle time, so reusing some of that won't aid reliability. But I would say the biggest thing that will aid reliability is just getting one back - even getting one back, because that tells you so much about the vehicle. ### Supporting Human Spaceflight **Thomas:** I've got one more big talking point. You have mentioned in the past that Rocket Lab is not in the business of flying humans - it would be a bit of a tight fit in an Electron fairing - but Electron is still supporting a lot of human spaceflight programs. You've got this CAPSTONE mission, which is an integral part of Artemis. What other ways do you see Electron and Rocket Lab overall supporting human spaceflight missions, including ones to the Moon, Mars, and other deep space destinations? **Peter Beck:** I think it should be said firstly that I'm a huge fan of human spaceflight. Just because I've said that we won't do it doesn't mean I think it's a waste of time or anything - I'm the biggest fan of it. I just don't want to have to be the guy that has to go up to somebody's house and knock on the door and say we've had an accident. That's just not something I ever want to be in a position to do. But I have enormous respect for all of the engineers, the teams, and the people that build those machines and take those risks. In saying that, we are huge supporters and we can help in our own right. To your point exactly, the CAPSTONE program and a number of other things that we haven't disclosed publicly that we're doing all link back to human spaceflight. We work with a lot of the other teams and companies that are doing these things. The most important thing is to get across that we are huge proponents of human spaceflight, but I'm not in a particular hurry to put humans on anything we build. That's not because we don't think we can build something that's reliable enough - it's just that the reality of sitting on a rocket is a real thing. We're super excited, and I think we will do whatever we can to move human spaceflight forward. We're all very excited for it. ### Engine-Out Capability **Host:** We know that Electron has multiple engines on the bottom. Does it have any engine-out capabilities? If you lose a Rutherford at some point in the flight, could it keep going? **Peter Beck:** Absolutely. Each Rutherford engine is on what we call a pie wedge. Each engine is on a pie wedge, and each engine is a completely independent system. There's no commonality between any other engine - there are a couple of electrical connectors, high voltage and low voltage, and propellant lines that plug in at the top, and that's it. The whole point of that was actually from a production perspective. The last thing you want to do is test an engine and then have to disassemble half of it to test it again or disassemble half of it to put it into a launch vehicle. So each of these engines is on a pie wedge, and all those pie wedges interleave and intersect and bolt together to form the bottom thrust structure. When an engine comes from production, it goes down to the engine test cell and is tested as a complete engine. Once that engine comes back, the pie wedges are all integrated together into a thrust module, at which point that thrust module goes for a complete stack test, and then we do the final integration and launch. The cool thing is, if there's any issue with one engine, we just pull the pie wedge and put a whole other pie wedge back in. We don't need to try to fault-find and solve issues on one particular engine - we can just hot-swap an engine. All Electrons are built the same - any first stage can work with any second stage, any fairing with any engine, with any rocket. It's really as close to LEGO as we could possibly make it. **Host:** Is there a part of the launch where, right off the launch pad, you need to have all the engines firing at full tilt, but say 60 seconds in, you have a problem with an engine - is that anything you've ever experienced? Could you keep going from there and still make orbit, or are the margins so tight on such a small launcher? **Peter Beck:** It depends on the mission. In some missions, we can lose an engine off the pad. We can lose an engine off the pad and still clear the pad - not make orbit, but that was part of one of the design elements for the vehicle originally. If we lost an engine a couple of seconds off the pad, we would still clear the pad, but might not make it to orbit. But I'll tell a little secret here. If you listen on the live stream, you'll hear a call out - "burnout detect" - and it's really low. At that burnout detect point, if you lose an engine from that point onwards, you can still make it to orbit. The reason we call it burnout detect is that we switch into a different mode that is protecting if an engine is shut down. If it has shut down, then the vehicle starts making changes. If you go back and watch the live stream, you'll see we come off the pad and fly for a very short time. I think we just pitch over, and then we enter into a burnout detect mode. From that point onwards, we can lose one engine, and the higher in altitude we go, we can lose more engines and still make orbit. **Host:** That's interesting - the first time I heard it, I thought it was just Electron's standard Stage 1 MECO mode - that you will burn the first stage until you are detecting that an engine's burning out for lack of propellant, and then you move on. So it's actually that engine-out capability. Does that mean that first stage burns for a specific amount of time, and if the engines had a good day and there's some residual propellant left, you'll just leave that in the tanks? Or does that first stage burn until fuel depletion every mission? **Peter Beck:** With a small launch vehicle, it's absolutely critical that you use all the residuals. If you've got a 100 kg payload, you can't leave 100 kg of propellants in the tank. This is the beauty of the electric pump - we're load sensing that pump the whole time. We suck the tank absolutely dry. It's not like a gas generator cycle where if you start sucking your tank dry and you lose prime on the oxidizer pump, then the turbine just overspeeds and blows the whole engine apart. With an electric pump, we're just load sensing those pumps at all times, and within milliseconds we can see the load profile coming off and react because it's a really low inertia electric motor. There is not a drop left in those tanks - we suck it absolutely dry. ### Mission Control Headsets **Host:** One of the first things I noticed when I saw the first Rocket Lab webcast was everybody seemed to have on gaming headsets. Did somebody just run into the electronics store and grab 50 gaming headsets and come back to headquarters? Where did these come from? **Peter Beck:** The IT department can probably claim credit here. You can go and buy proper launch and aviation headsets, but they're kind of designed in the '80s or something, they look naff, and they're really expensive. Gaming headsets probably represent pretty decent state-of-the-art stuff. Just because it doesn't have an aerospace certification behind it doesn't mean it's not good - they're comfortable too, they're not horrible on your ears. We're happy to break the mold where it makes sense. And look, probably if we're honest, if you look at the volume of those gaming headsets that are sold and the failure rate of those, it's probably a more reliable product than something with an aerospace logo on the side, in reality. ### Peter's Role During Launch **Thomas:** You mentioned wearing the headsets, and we see you in launch control on every webcast. What are you doing on launch day? When you're in mission control watching your mission go, what are you looking at, what are you doing? **Peter Beck:** To be honest with you now, I'm completely irrelevant. I've been made redundant totally, which is the definition of success, in my opinion. I feel an enormous personal responsibility every time we fly somebody's payload. Customers spend a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of effort, and they trust a lot with us. I don't even do the countdown anymore - I like to say I'm completely redundant. But I like to be in mission control, and if decisions need to be made, ultimately if it's a hard decision, it bubbles up to me. Those don't happen very often, but I'm there to support the team and to represent the customer and make sure that the customer gets the job that they expect. But brutally honest - I don't do anything. It's not like in the middle of the launch somebody turns to me and says, "Peter, what do we do?" These are absolute professionals executing as experts at their job. So I'm almost totally redundant, but I still think it's important to show up. ### Mission Names **Host:** Which brilliant mind is responsible for the very cool mission names? If we had an award show for the year and asked who has the best mission names, I think Rocket Lab would be a shoe-in to win that award. Is that the entire team putting names up on a whiteboard? And as a follow-up, do you have any rejected mission names that you could share with us? **Peter Beck:** So many rejected mission names! How it all started - I think it's probably a little bit of a New Zealand thing. If you ever come to New Zealand, New Zealanders are pretty pragmatic people. If you're driving down the road, you'll cross a bridge and it'll say "Bridge Number One," and you'll get to the next bridge and it'll be "Bridge Number Two." It won't be called after some Zeus god or something - it's pretty pragmatic. When we were on our very first flight, I wanted to make sure that the guys in Space Command who are watching it weren't watching "ZX351" - they're watching a test, so they know that if things go in a funny direction, well, it's a test. That's where it was born out of, and then from there, it just sort of grew. We take input from everybody in the company. For every mission, we'll put out a call out amongst the company, and then there's a small group of us that sit together and generally spend lots of time in hysterics and laughter choosing which one we want. Then we choose a name, and then like two days later we go back and go, "No, we can't do that," and choose something more conservative. We always love to get names from the general public as well. We've got quite a repertoire of them sitting there and a lot that we're just waiting for the right mission to attach it to. Also, we have to make sure that our customers are happy with the names - that's why we're doing this. So the odd one gets killed from that as well. But generally, it's such an incredibly stressful and serious business, it's the one thing that we like to have a bit of fun with. **Thomas:** Do you ever get any pushback where people say, "Oh, you're not really taking this serious enough - it's super serious to get this payload up" because you named it something fun or engaging? Don't change it please - don't stop with the cool names - but do you ever get any pushback there? **Peter Beck:** Not really. I think everybody kind of feels the same way, and I think it's become quite a trademark of Electron and Rocket Lab. Even our government customers, who are some of the most serious people in the world, really get into the mission patch design and the name. **Thomas:** It's just such an important thing for engagement and getting more people excited about this stuff so they understand what's going on. The fun mission names, the creative mission names really make it like, "Oh, it's Rocket Lab again - I want that patch, I want that t-shirt, this is really cool." Making space cool - even small sat launches - is really awesome. So please don't change - it's a fantastic part of your launches. **Host:** Any rejected mission names you could share? **Peter Beck:** You guys are gonna get me in trouble! Generally, they're just either inappropriate... the biggest ones we have to kill are kind of sexual inappropriateness, if I'm honest with you. But certainly all manner of inappropriateness, really. ### Scaling 3D Printed Engines **Host:** About 3D printing engines - how much larger do you think you could make an engine? Did you learn anything that said, "Wow, we're really not going to get much bigger than we already have," or could you scale it up if you ever wanted to? **Peter Beck:** Actually, a larger engine is more simple than the small engine because for the small engine, the fine details become so much finer. We're right down within the state of the art printing these thicknesses and controlling properties and strength. If we had an engine twice the size, that would become much simpler. There are a lot of things on a small launch vehicle that are just so much harder to do than on a larger platform. Some things are simpler, but there's a lot that really hurts. ### Competing with Heavy Launchers **Host:** How do you see yourself fitting in with some of these super heavy, huge launchers that are promising really cheap payload to orbit prices? How do you see Rocket Lab fitting in when somebody's out there saying, "I can send two thousand dollars a kilogram to orbit, no big deal - ten thousand kilograms, hundred thousand kilograms, whatever"? **Peter Beck:** There's a fundamental difference between a dedicated launch vehicle and a ride-share vehicle. If you were trying to get to London and I said to you, "You can fly to London for five thousand dollars or you can get on this other plane and it's going to take you to Australia for 200," that doesn't help you get to London. That's the fundamental thing - people fly on Electron because they have a very specific orbit or timeline they need to reach. Ride-shares are wonderful to just get bulk mass to a specific orbit. But if you look at Rocket Lab's history in our niche, no flight is the same - there are different altitudes, inclinations, orbits. The flight before the last one, we had an instantaneous launch window so that the customer could sync up exactly with another one of their spacecraft. You just can't do all these things on ride-share. The difference between a bus and an Uber is another good analogy. **Host:** That's exactly the analogy we were talking about previously. You can get on the bus with everybody else, and it'll take you to York or London or whatever, and then you get off and you've got to get to your house yourself. So then your spacecraft has to get you that last mile to the orbit. Versus you get in the Uber and it takes you directly to your house and drops you off right where you need to be - and that's what Rocket Lab does. **Peter Beck:** Exactly. And you don't have to stand in the rain waiting for the bus. **Host:** We all know Mahia is one of the most beautiful launch sites in the world. We're all jealous - what a terrible place to stand around and wait for a launch! ### Cost Drivers and Reusability **Host:** What's the largest cost driver for Electrons? Is it developing the engines, building the bodies, the electronics, guidance - what is the biggest thing you have to spend money on? And conversely, what would you really want to focus on getting back? **Peter Beck:** I think probably about 70 percent of the cost of the launch vehicle is actually in the first stage, and of that, the majority of the cost goes into engines. The cost of engines isn't BOM - it's not parts and materials, it's all of the testing and getting everything ready for flight. More largely across the launch vehicle, labor is always the big element, but if you ignore labor, the next big time commitment is really quality. We take that very seriously - every component goes through component-level acceptance testing, sub-assembly level acceptance testing, and then into stage-level acceptance testing. You might take a LOX valve, for example, like a fill valve. By the time that valve gets into the vehicle, it's gone through multiple acceptance tests at both the component and varying assembly levels to make sure it's good. That's probably one of the key cost drivers - just ensuring quality is always there. **Host:** And for reusability, does that affect it? When you get this part back, is it more on the side of "Hey, this has already done its job, we're pretty good, it's good to go"? Or is it "Wow, this has already been blaring through the atmosphere, we have to spend more time checking it to make sure it's still good"? Which way does the needle fall there? **Peter Beck:** It can pull either way depending on the component system. For example, a pressurant system - once it's all settled in, there's a bunch of tests you can run as a total assembly to give you confidence that everything is good. So for something like a pressurant system, you'll do a relatively short acceptance testing campaign and move on. But I should also preface that with - any re-entry system needs to be requalified. Because you've qualified that system for an ascent, you haven't qualified it for a re-entry. That's some of the work we're doing right now - requalifying a bunch of these systems using the re-entry environment such that we can ensure it's qualified for re-entry and return. But then something like a tank skin - that's a completely different scenario where you're really going to want to do another acceptance test and probably spend a fair bit of time on that because that sees a pretty harsh thermal environment. So the needle swings either way - as with anything in space, it's always a giant engineering compromise. ### Helicopter Recovery System **Host:** What were some of the technological obstacles when developing the system to catch the rocket with helicopters? Was there a lot of experience to lean on there, or was that like green grass - you're trying to make this stuff up from scratch? **Peter Beck:** Firstly, I love helicopters, so they had to prove that this was going to work so I could justify owning a helicopter! But in all seriousness, the first thing we did is look at what had been done in the past. There's been quite a lot of work in mid-air retrievals, even with helicopters. Secondly, our pilot has got a lot of experience in what's called long-lining. Before he joined us, basically his job was to send a person on the end of a long line beneath the helicopter and fly them onto giant power poles - the grid-sized power lines. He would hold a guy on the line and fly that person up to inspect all the insulators on these giant utility power lines. So when we said to him, "Hey, we want you to catch a rocket out of the sky," he just said, "Well, that'll be fun," but really wasn't entirely too fazed about that as a thing to do. One of the key elements is the aerodynamic wedge that you can see in some of the videos. Having a really stable platform with a well-weighted line that is very predictable was incredibly important. We spent probably the most amount of time with that, flying around in helicopters with the big long line on the bottom and making sure that it did everything it needed to do. When we did the full-scale test, our helicopter pilot was able to grab it first time. While he admitted that he worked for it, he certainly wasn't concerned about doing it again as a regular thing. But I have to say that the skill of our pilot is incredible. **Host:** I saw your tweet the other day where you're getting off the helicopter, approaching launch day. How are you gonna justify using the helicopter to commute to Wallops? You don't really need a helicopter to get there - you have to justify that somehow! **Peter Beck:** Actually, I've landed in Dulles and flown over from Dulles directly to Wallops. It saves like a four-and-a-half-hour drive. Actually, it's more like a six-and-a-half hour drive for me because I always mess up the turns and end up in the middle of DC. So I actually have flown from Dulles down to Wallops, and it's a nice quick trip. **Host:** You have to drive all the way around the bay if you're going from Dulles to the launch site, so hopping straight across makes perfect sense. ### Photon Propulsion System **Host:** Can you elaborate on the fuel/oxidizer that's used on Photon? I understand it started as a green monopropellant or some special chemistry there. **Peter Beck:** We've spent a lot of work on that. That's our own formulations, and it's a very unique propulsion system. It's an all-but-storable, really high-performance, and hypergolic system. And it's not a toxic hydrazine one or anything like that. **Host:** Thomas, anything else? **Thomas:** I don't think so. I know I'm looking forward to a trip up to Wallops to see your Wallops debut before too long. I know a lot of the NSF team is - we're all looking forward to seeing an Electron up close and personal. Thank you so much for coming out; this has been a great show. I think it's safe to say you are welcome back whenever you want. This is awesome - thank you so much! **Peter Beck:** Absolutely, no it's great. And everybody in chat - there's no way we can get to all the questions, but thank you all so much for participating today and asking so many great questions. ### Conclusion **Host:** Peter Beck - guy in charge of Rocket Lab, the great mission names that we all love, the payloads that are getting deployed to orbit, and hopefully a lot of really cool upcoming missions including that reusability and the trip to Venus. Peter, thank you so much for joining us today. **Peter Beck:** Thank you, and thanks for everybody's support out there as well. It means a lot when we see so much support from space enthusiasts and the general public. We certainly feed off everybody's excitement, so thank you to everybody out there. **Host:** Y'all keep doing what you do, and we'll keep tuning in and sharing in your success. **Peter Beck:** Sounds good. **Host:** That is going to mark the end of this week's NASA Space Flight Live.