[[Home|🏠]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> [[Interviews]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> December 19 2021 **Insider**: [[Peter Beck]] **Source**: [NASA Spaceflight](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNx4tpiyUAM) **Date**: December 19 2021  🔗 Backup Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNx4tpiyUAM ## 🎙️ Transcript >[!hint] Transcript may contain errors or inaccuracies. **John Galloway (Dos):** [Music plays] All right folks, you know the drill, it's time for another exciting episode of NSF Live, our weekly show where we talk about what's going on with space. This is one of our special shows because we've got a special guest - you can see him, no spoilers or anything, it was in the stream title. You know that today we're going to be talking with Mr. Peter Beck, the champion of carbon composites, the rocket launching wonder from pretty close to down under, the hat connoisseur of the space flight industry. Peter Beck, thank you so much for joining us today. How are you doing? **Peter Beck:** Yeah, good thanks. Thanks very much, but I have to call you out on your intro. There's every rocket except an Electron! **John Galloway:** Oh, we need to get some Electron footage in there. I think LC2 had a cameo in the Antares shot, but we need to get the rockets in there. Jack, I think Jack's in charge of that. Somebody at Jack buyer so that we can get that handled there. Peter, thank you so much for joining us today. Also, we're going to have Thomas Berghardt, News Director for NASA Space Flight. Thomas, how are you doing? **Thomas Berghardt:** I'm doing good, excited to talk about Neutron today. **John Galloway:** All right, well maybe that needs to be in the intro too then. I think we've got some exciting information about that. And lastly, here y'all, I'm John Galloway. Some of you may know me as Dos for NASA Space Flight, but it's time to get started in today's NSF Live. Like I said, we've recently moved this show - it's our weekly show, but we just moved it over to Sundays 3 PM. We try to do it every single week, just talking about space news and, like I said as well, today we're going to be focusing on big space news that's been a couple weeks here - the new developments around Neutron that Rocket Lab and Peter here are working on. ### Rocket Lab's Evolution and Mission **Thomas Berghardt:** I want to talk about Rocket Lab because they started off in a very different sort of aim to how they're going to improve access to space. You start with small dedicated small launch services with the Electron rocket, and then once Electron was flying, that kick stage turns out it was actually really a satellite. So you've added space systems with the Photon satellite bus as a way, another step towards improving that space flight access. And now that Photons are flying, you're looking ahead to a medium lift launch vehicle that is also reusable, an evolution that also happened with Electron. So how are all of these different offerings Rocket Lab's way of improving access to space? **Peter Beck:** I think you have to take one bit of a step back there as well. It's not just about improving access to space, it's about how do we really democratize space in a wider way. The space systems division, I know that came as a bit of a surprise to a lot of people, but the very first kick stage that ever flew had a whole bunch of recesses in it for solar panels, and that was flight two actually. So that's always been part of the plan from day one. Launch is incredibly important, but launch is kind of pointless if all the rest of this stuff isn't lined up as well. If you look at the space industry, it's very much subscale. You can go to just about any supplier in the space industry and say, "I want 2,000 of something," and you can just watch them spontaneously combust. It's just a large number in the space industry, but any other industry, 2,000 of something is like a sample size. What we've been trying to do with the space systems group is really enable scale across satellite platforms, which in turn will help feed launch. Because unless there's a large supply of satellites, then there's not going to be a large supply of launch. So that's kind of the bigger level element here. Then Neutron, of course, comes in and we think plugs a really interesting gap. Electron has been super useful at really dominating the small satellite launch side, but as we looked across, we really... how Neutron was sized is we looked at all the spacecraft that are going to be launched in the next decade and all the spacecraft that were launched in the previous decade, and that sort of rounded up to around about an eight-ton number. So that's how Neutron is sized. Between Neutron and Electron, we can lift over 90 percent of everything that's predicted in the next decade or so. **Thomas Berghardt:** You talk about future-proofing through Photon. You know, that kick stage was already integrating lots of things to build into Photon. That seems to be a common trend because even with Neutron, you're actually future-proofing for future capabilities that we're definitely going to dive into later. But is that a prevalent sort of design philosophy at Rocket Lab, where when you come up with new designs, you also incorporate the potential for future capabilities and evolutions that you're already thinking about? **Peter Beck:** Well, sometimes we're not always that forward thinking, but wherever possible. The Photon satellite was an obvious one, that's where we were always going to go. But there's a bunch of stuff like reusability on Electron that we didn't think was even possible, certainly not using traditional techniques. So there was no future-proofing there. I'd like to think that we're good enough to future-proof well in the future, but the reality is that these things don't always happen like that. ### Electron Reusability and Lessons for Neutron **Thomas Berghardt:** You've showed the ability to pivot Electron from a completely expendable vehicle to "actually, we can incorporate reusability with some minor changes." And of course, I'm assuming that is going to greatly inform the Neutron program, where these reuse experiments connected with Electron are going to give you tons of data that are directly applicable to Neutron, right? **Peter Beck:** I wouldn't have even attempted to build a fully reusable first stage without doing the Electron flights. We learned so much. Plenty of people had tried and not been successful in re-entering a first stage under parachutes, for example. Really understanding that re-entry corridor, controlling it through that re-entry corridor - and then we've got a carbon composite vehicle, which is like plastic, so keeping it right within those temperature boundaries and re-entry conditions is non-trivial. We learned a tremendous amount with Electron and Electron reusability. Not just reusability, but across the board. Everything that we've learned from flying Electron is what's informing Neutron. I think a lot of people believe that the bill of materials or the cost of parts profit is the most expensive part of launching something into orbit, and honestly, it's not. The operational costs dwarf the cost of the propellants, they dwarf the cost of the bill of materials of the rocket. That's why with Neutron, you've seen such a focus on removing anything operational possible. **Thomas Berghardt:** What does that mean? What kind of things are you able to remove that reduce operational costs? **Peter Beck:** Well, think of dumb stuff, just like a strongback. It's a dumb old piece of steel, right? It's full of valves, it's full of vidcon ducts and fill lines, and helium umbilical purges, and anti-geysering. It's just full of a whole bunch of crap, and all that stuff you have to maintain and operate all the time. Even just a stinking strongback actually takes a team of people to maintain and operate, and it's always got to work and all the rest of it. And then you extrapolate that to all the launchpad systems, and then downrange recovery, and all of these things. Actually, the real cost of launching rockets to space is not the hardware. **Thomas Berghardt:** Are you looking at areas such as the personnel, the teams that are working on launch day, and the ground infrastructure like we just talked about? Are those the kind of things that you see as even maybe a bigger challenge than designing a reusable vehicle? **Peter Beck:** It's not really a bigger challenge because it's pretty easy just to delete, that's not hard. But the harder thing is to incorporate them into the launch vehicle in a mass-effective way. For example, on Neutron, there is no services tower. All the propellants for the upper stage are umbilical up through the first stage, down the strikes down the side of the first stage, and up into the second stage. What that means is just a super simple ground-based umbilical. There's no breakover fixtures, there's no clamps, there's no anything. A rocket is a giant engineering compromise, so you're always trading one thing for the other. **Thomas Berghardt:** Is the main benefit of having this really clean ground infrastructure - I mean, we see these renders, there's not much ground infrastructure really to talk about - is the cost benefit, are there also reliability or schedule benefits there too? **Peter Beck:** Yeah, of course. The less stuff you've got to deal with, the less stuff you have to maintain. So there's operational and cost benefits. After launching 23 times, it's really obvious where the cost is in launching a rocket. A small rocket is way harder than a bigger rocket because it doesn't matter - there's a lot of stuff that are completely rocket size agnostic, like flight safety, for example. The flight safety team launching a really large rocket versus the flight safety team launching a really little rocket is the same, there is no difference. The one thing that Electron has forced us to do is be hyper-efficient at all of those tasks that usually would be really big teams. We've got a seven and a half million dollar sticker price on an Electron. If you've got a big rocket, say with a 60 million dollar sticker price, you can amortize that team across the 60 million dollar sticker price. For us, that's not an option, so we had to come up with ways of really streamlining all of these things into really small and efficient teams. But that's why on a small rocket, the majority of the cost goes around the launch and the launch infrastructure, not around the cost of the parts of the rocket. **Thomas Berghardt:** And that's gonna carry forward into like mass efficiency too. If a flight computer is a flight computer no matter what type or size of vehicle it's controlling, you put that on a small vehicle, the mass fraction of your flight computer is way higher. So there's benefits there. When we talked about reuse at the beginning of Rocket Lab, you said yourself it doesn't make sense for a small launch vehicle, at least it didn't seem so initially, because all of those things that don't change size when you scale it down to a small rocket just make it really hard to be mass efficient on a reuse project. **Peter Beck:** Totally. We call it the pressure transducer quandary because you can add a pressure transducer to a vehicle like Electron, and it represents 0.0001 percent of the payload. You put the same pressure transducer on Neutron, and there's not enough zeros to even make it worthwhile trying to count. In Electron, we measure stuff in grams, and Neutron we measure stuff in kilograms. That's the fundamental difference. ### Electron Reuse Progress **Thomas Berghardt:** Let's backtrack a little because we were talking about Electron and how that's going to inform Neutron. So let's start there. How are these Electron reuse experiments going? The last mission had a successful splashdown once again, there's been a few of those now, and it looks like the next reuse experiment is going to take that helicopter and actually maybe make a catch attempt. So must be going well, right? **Peter Beck:** It's going super well, actually. Really, really happy with the results we've been getting. We can reliably say that we can re-enter and control the rocket during re-entry now, over and over again. And we can deploy parachutes and get it to where we need to get it. The last flight was really about - we have to rendezvous with the rocket coming from space under a parachute with a helicopter. You can't just stick the helicopter right where that rocket is predicted, because you've got a whole lot of scenarios you have to allow for, like a parachute not deploying or a failure, all these kinds of things. Really, the last test was: can we work through all of these scenarios and actually have the rocket accurately rendezvous with the helicopter in such a way that you could catch it? And the answer is yes. So we have a giant helicopter that's on a ship right now making its way over here, and the next recovery flight will be attempting to catch. **Thomas Berghardt:** And I believe that next flight will also have a new thermal protection system on it. And does - I don't know if you can get the image of this - but it makes the Electron is definitely sporting a different look. Is that specific to the Electron architecture, or is that also part of informing some things for Neutron? **Peter Beck:** We've re-entered a number of Electrons now and we've cut them all up, done all the materials testing, and the carbon is fine. But what you have to allow for is some mutation on stage, for example, you can get some off-axis heating. You don't have to throw away a stage because one little piece got a bit of transient heating. All the TPS system does for us is it just gives us margin. We're able to control the environment such that the vehicle is not getting cooked. If you put a little bit of TPS on it, even if there are some areas that get a little bit hot for whatever reason, you don't need to worry about it at all. It's quite an interesting TPS system because we have no mass - we have no mass margin to be playing with here. So this is an aerogel graphite, which is really quite a unique TPS system with a thermal conductivity of, as you would expect with aerogel, of like zero. It's a really interesting system that weighs nothing but provides that level of thermal margin if we do get some kind of transient buffering and heating. **Thomas Berghardt:** So the shiny Electron, which is of course very different from the carbon composite, this is a layer on top of the normal carbon, right? **Peter Beck:** Right, yeah. It's a very, very thin film. **Thomas Berghardt:** Is this a like a one-off experiment that you're seeing how it's going to work, or are you expecting reusable missions going forward that will pretty much have this TPS on it? **Peter Beck:** Well, we'll see how it performs. It's a very, very new material. If you look closely on the last recovery, you'll see there's bands of the stuff up the first stage. So we actually tested it on the last flight, and we've had it on our static test tanks for about three or four stack tests now. So the material is behaving, looking really, really good, but the proof's always in the pudding during full-on re-entry. But yeah, it certainly provides a level of margin that is quite luxurious for its mass. ### Launch Cadence and Neutron Design **Thomas Berghardt:** We also hit a new launch cadence milestone recently - two launches in pretty quick succession, under three weeks. And I know Rocket Lab, a big part of them has been trying to ramp up launch cadence, and there's been a lot of challenges with that, especially in New Zealand recently. But two launches in pretty quick succession - next year hoping that that'll continue? And does that also inform quick turnaround times for Neutron operations, although that might be different because you're doing it for reusability rather than manufacturability? **Peter Beck:** We've actually hit this cadence once before a couple of years ago. It's always things that get in the road generally. I would say, except this year, it's always been kind of the cadence is customer-driven, so customer readiness driven. This year, of course, we got slammed with COVID, with New Zealand just completely shutting down. It's almost impossible to get people through the border, and it's just been a real... but that's pretty much finished now, so we're back into it. Next year, we're certainly... there's a lot of rockets on the floor, and it's going to be a very, very busy year. Like I say, the cadence is quite often defined by customer readiness rather than rocket readiness. I mean, we could... you guys love sharing the images of the factory floor - we just have lines of rockets. So clearly the rockets are there, we just need something to launch on them. ### Launch Sites and International Considerations **John Galloway:** We're currently launching Electron from New Zealand. The question for Peter is: will Neutron also launch out of New Zealand? And if not, what's the future of the Mahia launch site? Are you just doing Electrons there? Are you going to launch this from somewhere else? Are you still looking at launching Electrons from Wallops or other places? How does that announcement sort of look at those things? **Peter Beck:** For Electron, we'll continue to ramp the launch rate in the Mahia Peninsula at LC1. LC2, we're still waiting on NASA to just finish their certification of their flight software, which they assure us is going to be complete by the end of the year. So we'll be able to release Electron's fury out of LC2, which will be great. It's been a very, very long and tough delay for us to kind of deal with. With respect to Neutron out in New Zealand, the challenge that New Zealand has got is the industrial base. If we take all the liquid oxygen in New Zealand and pour it into a Neutron tank, it half fills the tank. So there's some industrial base issues down in New Zealand. So Neutron will primarily be a U.S. launch vehicle, at least for the immediate term. **John Galloway:** Is Wallops still the base plan for a U.S.-based launch site, although you also mentioned the clean launch infrastructure, which using an existing launch site maybe doesn't align with that? **Peter Beck:** I would say that there's a fairly good competitive selection process going on right now for a launch site. **John Galloway:** We know there's some different hardware that flies on Electron. Is there any specific hardware that's moving forward onto Neutron, like something like a flight computer or something like that? Or do a lot of things you learn on Electron just move right up because of what we talked about earlier? **Peter Beck:** 100% - like avionics, it doesn't matter if it's a big rocket or a little rocket, it's just the same. So there's a lot of stuff that moves across from there. But even things just like vent and fill valves, for example - whether it's a two-inch vent and fill valve or a six-inch vent and fill valve, the design is going to be the same. We've got just years and years of heritage of operation of these systems and knowledge of these systems. So there'll be a lot of stuff that just gets scaled slightly and moved across. ### Neutron Hardware Development **Thomas Berghardt:** Let's talk Neutron hardware, because in the update you stated that some hardware is already out there. You talked about both test tanks and then getting ready for first engine firing next year. So how has that hardware been, how's the manufacturing gone so far, and have you actually started testing those tanks? **Peter Beck:** The tanks under construction are a subscale tank. We're just testing different closeout designs. This is an evolved material from the material that we've used on Electron, so we've made some improvements there on both the material and the laminate. We're also doing full-scale areas where we're using the automatic fiber placement machines to do hatches and bits and pieces, just to get some of the more complicated details sorted. Then early next year, we'll run through a series of subscale tank tests just to validate laminates and design philosophies, and pretty much straight into full-scale tanks. The one challenge with composites is they're not very easy to iterate with because you have to build your mold, and your mold is a very expensive element. So if you want to iterate a design really quickly, composites are pretty painful because you have to start again and make the mold, and that's like building the rocket in the first place, except in a much slower way. Our philosophy and approach at Rocket Lab has always been to fail fast, but fail fast at the component and the subsystem level. By the time we get to full-scale tanks and bits and pieces like that, we don't expect to fail. We're kind of in the middle philosophy rather than just push stuff out and blow it up versus spin forever analyzing stuff. We're in the middle approach there - fail fast on components and subsystems and the bits that have a lot of risk, but when it comes to full-scale systems, we don't like to fail at that point. **Thomas Berghardt:** Would those tests be done at your facility in New Zealand, or are you doing tests at another facility somewhere? Like where would those be happening? **Peter Beck:** One of the early design trades we made is on diameter because a lot of diameters of launch vehicles are constrained by either ships or bridges between California and Florida. And that's just a terrible design constraint to have to leverage upon yourself. So because we are such a large diameter vehicle, we're going to be building this at the launch site. So that's where we'll be doing all the initial destructive tests as well. **Thomas Berghardt:** And then the new Archimedes engine, which you're hoping to get fired next year - is that starting to get... is that in design phase? Are there components there already too? **Peter Beck:** That's still in the design phase, but we're moving very, very rapidly. Both the LOX and fuel pump designs are complete, and we're moving pretty rapidly into GG injector testing and some work single element testing. The thing I'd say about Archimedes is like, if you're interested in a state-of-the-art, super high-performance engine, you're going to be very disappointed with Archimedes. The whole point of Archimedes is margin. If you're sitting on a 787 or your aircraft of choice and you look out the window at that engine, you want to know that that engine has got like two times safety factor, not 0.2 times safety factor. This is the challenge, and this is why materials are so important, because as I said before, everything is a compromise when you build a rocket. If you have structures that are heavy, then you have to make up for it with propulsion. If you have structures that are light, then you take the pain out of propulsion. From a reusability standpoint, that is absolutely critical - to have propulsion systems with a ton of margin and propulsion systems that are infinitely reusable, at least in some senses. So choose which area you want to endure the pain - it's either propulsion or structures. **Thomas Berghardt:** Does that basically mean you'll be firing these engines for flights at below maximum thrust? Or is it just - are we talking exclusively built-in margins? They're like, "Yeah, but the combustion chamber can just take way more pressure than it would ever fire at," right? **Peter Beck:** Totally. Like designing the engine with 1,500 PSI chamber pressure and copper lined, all just super boring - nothing's pushed to the limits. Look at the turbo pump shafts and welds and things, and just keep huge margins in all of that stuff, and bearings and seals, and just drive nothing to the limit on propulsion. What you end up with is, from an engine perspective, a pretty ho-hum engine. But actually, that's exactly what you want. I guarantee if you're an astronaut on the top, you want a ho-hum engine that is not absolutely peaked to the red line. This is why the choice of carbon composites was so fundamental for us because if you take stainless steel, it's a 7.8 density; aluminum, 2.7; carbon composite, 1.6. So automatically, you're at least twice or three or four times lighter than any of the metallics. That makes a huge, huge impact, not just on ascent, but it makes a massive impact on descent as well. Re-entering a Neutron is vastly different to re-entering a metallic vehicle because it's so light. Think of it like jumping off the roof with an umbrella versus jumping off the roof with a bowling ball. That's kind of the difference - you've got a very large diameter with something that's very, very light. With respect to heat generation and getting this thing through the atmosphere in the most economical way possible, it's super awesome. If you look at the standard Neutron reentry profile, it doesn't have three burns - it only has two. It has the RTLS burn and then it has a landing burn. There's no entry burn - it doesn't need an entry burn because, just like Electron, Electron doesn't need an entry burn either. And we've mastered that because the ballistic coefficient is okay, it's not great, but it's so light that everything happens very easily. Whereas Neutron is great because it's also really, really light, but it's got this great big hunking base, which gives us that awesome ballistic coefficient. ### Engine Design and Reusability Considerations **Thomas Berghardt:** You mentioned that you could design this engine with all of this margin here. So we're not talking about designing it in a way where if you were flying an expendable mission, you could throttle the engines up even more because you don't plan on reusing them? Or is that something that you also could do? **Peter Beck:** You could, yeah. If you want to juice up the GG and go for it, then sure. **Thomas Berghardt:** You said it's the eight-ton class with a reusable configuration, and that's baseline to a return to launch site profile. And then fully expendable, not recovering anything - does that mean that Neutron will be modular enough that you can remove those landing legs, remove the aerodynamic control surfaces, throttle up the engines, and go expendable that way? **Peter Beck:** You could. The way we think about expendable is the vehicle has a life, right? So kind of at the end of life, that's the time to run an expendable flight. And if you really wanted to juice it up, lift more than 15 tons, then fine, you could. But our baseline is a return to launch site and full reuse on the first stage in a very simple and minimal way. And I think that's where we offer our customers the best bang for the buck. **John Galloway:** We've seen this in the past where it's like, "Oh yes, reusable pricing but expendable payloads" - we've seen this sort of marketing thing happen. But the 15,000 kg that you're talking about here on the website is sort of not this juicing up and removing fins and stuff like that. This is just: send it, don't recover it? **Peter Beck:** Yeah, just don't recover it. And in fact, you'd probably find it's more than that because that probably still has SECO for an RTLS burn. But they're there or thereabouts - that's just as it is, just "see you later," which will hurt, to be honest with you. As much as someone might want to buy an expendable mission, it would still be very painful at that point. **Thomas Berghardt:** For usability and not flying up to those margins, are you expecting that to be a major part of Rocket Lab's customer request? Or are you expecting people will be operating under the reusable architecture? **Peter Beck:** The reason why we sized it to eight tons is because that's where we believe the majority of the market was going to land. So we expect the majority of the missions to be reusable. But like I say, there will be end of life behind the vehicle, so at that point, that's when you roll in some expendable flights. **Thomas Berghardt:** When does that end of life look like it might be? Or is it too early to tell? With Electron, you even said, "Listen, if we could reuse it once, that doubles the manufacturing rate, so that's great." But if Neutron - if you're designing it for a reusable architecture, you probably want more flights than that. **Peter Beck:** It's yet to be seen. We need to reuse a few. The object of the exercise is to get as many as possible. I could give you some number, but at this point, it's pretty arbitrary until we actually get data. The one constraint that I did set from day one of Neutron's design was it needed to be turned around in 24 hours. And I want to be clear here - it's not that I expect to actually turn it around in 24 hours. The point of that constraint was to get everybody thinking outside the box. Because if you say you want to return this vehicle around in 24 hours, then you're not landing downrange because it's a three-day haul home. If you want to launch it in 24 hours, then you're not pulling the engines out and refurbishing the engines. So that 24-hour constraint drove the decision to go with methox (methane-oxygen), it drove the decision for return to launch site. That one constraint actually provides a whole bunch of goodness when it comes to thinking about how you actually operate the system. You got rid of all the launch infrastructure because you can't be faffing around with breaking it over and integrating horizontally and all those kinds of things. So it really shaped the vehicle in unique ways. Even the "hungry hippo" fairing design where the fairings actually stay attached to the top - a lot of that builds into that where you land on your tail. You can get it reconnected to the ground infrastructure and stuff like that, but a lot of design decisions make this look like it's just one vehicle - it goes up, it comes right back down again, and it's ready to go. And it makes a lot of sense, what you're saying - removing all of those other complexities. **Thomas Berghardt:** How is that vertical integration going to work if you have a payload sitting on top of a second stage, and obviously the second stages are going to need to be - that's going to be the manufacturing constraints. They're initially expandable, at least. But if you're vertically integrating that, you have to have some sort of clean room element to that, and then you're bringing it out to a launch pad. What are the thoughts on how that might have to work? **Peter Beck:** There's quite a nice little design we've got going in there, which we'll talk a little bit about later, but it enables you to do a very clean integration of the upper stage and the payload all-in-one. That payload integration was one thing that we spent a very long time on. I think if you're designing your first rocket - I certainly know that we did this - you don't really think about your customers so much. It's always about the rocket, and the customer comes second. And then it's, "Oh, actually, you mean you want full nitrogen purges 24 hours and all of these kinds of things?" So we've learned all those lessons, so the way that payloads are integrated is, I think, going to be really, really nice for customers. ### Propellant Selection and Engine Cycle **Thomas Berghardt:** You mentioned that the methox fuel selection actually was driven by that 24-hour turnaround time. Can you talk about how those two things are even related? **Peter Beck:** If you look at the time it takes to reuse a rocket engine, a keralox rocket engine, the majority of the time is spent de-coking and de-sooting GGs and chambers. Kerosene seems an awesome fuel - anybody says that, "You've already got one cryogenic fuel, so it's easier to just have two cryogenic fuels" - that's just not true. Why would you want two? It's a giant pain in the butt. We didn't move away from kerosene easily, but the reality is, we run... even Rutherfords that don't have a GG, you've still got coking that you need to deal with. And once you put a GG in there, it's just scones (soot) everywhere. Whereas if you run methox, you can eat your lunch out of the GG tailpipe. So that's good. And because we've got such lightweight structures, the trade between the lower density propellant and the mass of the structure and the ISP is a winning trade. You actually come out on top, whereas if you've got metallic structures, you end up kind of paying for that slightly negatively with the increase in ISP but the decrease in density in the fuel. So it was a win all around for us, except the downside is we have a cryogenic fuel now. **Thomas Berghardt:** And then the other part that our community is interested in: you're going with the gas generator cycle with a methox engine, which - the other methox engines that are in development right now are not going that route. So what was the driving requirement behind that cycle? **Peter Beck:** Firstly, it's all about margins, and it's all about reusability. The GG cycle is just huge margins - nothing's spinning at crazy RPMs. And from an engine development standpoint as well, it's just super quick and super easy. The upper stage for us right now is expendable, and the jury's out whether or not that upper stage will make sense to be reusable anyway. And if you're gonna throw away an engine, then you absolutely want that engine to be as low-priced as you can get. Also, from a reusability standpoint, you have to think differently. If there's anything that needs service, that's going to be your turbo pump. So having your turbo pump to the side of the engine - the way we're designing it is you can remove that turbo pump super easily and just put a new one back on. Whereas if you've got a more exotic cycle, it's all generally stacked on top of the chamber, and the engine's coming out at that point. With GG, you can quite easily swap out a GG package and away you go. This is thinking about it absolutely from a reusable, serviceability standpoint. **Thomas Berghardt:** When going through this engine design, there's also considerations regarding the type of injectors you're going to use and things like that. And I think you may have mentioned in previous talks about Neutron that there's a very specific type of injector that makes - that is like the obvious choice for gas generator methox engine. What does that design process look like? **Peter Beck:** With the engine, obviously, using the fuel as your coolant, basically, the temperature of the fuel is ambient when it hits the injector. So it's like 20 degrees C, it's in a gaseous form. So you have kind of a gas-liquid injector, and typically, coax is a good injector - you get great shear from the high velocity gas, good and really good mixing. And that's different from Rutherford, right? Because that's a very different fuel combination and ambient sort of environment. Rutherford is just a screamer of an engine. It's an incredible engine. The performance we've been able to extract out of that little engine... and building super high-performance little engines is really difficult, especially ones that are an all-in-canal chamber, so it's not copper lined. The heat flux doesn't scale nicely with the size of the engine, so you end up with much hotter per unit area in a small engine than it is a large engine. So the Rutherford propulsion team have built an incredibly difficult engine to build. So when we look at Archimedes, it's like, "Okay, let's sort of sit back in the armchair just a little bit here." ### Archimedes Engine Specifications **John Galloway:** Are there any size comparisons or anything like that? I think it's powered by seven of them if I'm not mistaken, but how big are they? **Peter Beck:** It's a one mega-newton thrust engine with a 1,500 PSI chamber pressure. So you end up with like a 400 millimeter chamber thereabouts at those pressures. **John Galloway:** Paul Kelly is asking how you pick the size for Neutron. Did you work backwards from the current payloads? And that is what you talked about, sort of that 8,000 kilogram range. Something that we don't often hear, and a lot of people sort of miss this part, is: why don't you design for a hundred tons? It'd be so much better to spend 100 tons to orbit at once. And they don't think about, well, which orbit? Where are you taking these 100 tons? Right? So was that also a part? **Peter Beck:** 100%. I mean, if you have a vehicle that can lift, say, 60 tons, and you have an eight-ton payload, you don't get a discount for all the mass that you don't lift. The flight costs the same regardless of how much payload you put on it. When you're trying to build constellations, you want different planes, different LTANs, and what that really means is having to do a number of rocket launches to fulfill that plane. That's really where Neutron evolved from. We can lift around 90 percent of all the payloads that are predicted in the next decade or so. Now, we can't lift 100% of them, and you can argue that the 10 percent that we can't lift are probably disproportionately highly priced. However, if you look at the maximum impact you can have, it doesn't make sense to double the size of the vehicle to lift that extra 10 percent of the payload. And there's other people that do that better than us. **John Galloway:** That's not to say that there won't be rideshare opportunities because even on Electron, which is a dedicated small launch vehicle, rideshares have worked out nicely there as well. So would Neutron still have the ability to take advantage of the extra payload space to launch more small payloads, not just constellations but from different customers as well? Is that still going to be something in Rocket Lab's future? **Peter Beck:** Look, at the end of the day, we just want to get people involved. So if that closes nicely, then that works fine. I think the jury's still out a little bit about how effective those rideshare missions are with large launch vehicles. I mean, they're lifting a lot of spacecraft, but the average lift mass is sort of between one and a half and two and a half tons on a big vehicle. So they're getting payloads to orbit, but I'm just not sure it's actually financially break-even. ### Neutron Design Details **John Galloway:** Can you ask about Archimedes test infrastructure? Can they use the same test facilities as with Rutherford? Are you building new ones from scratch? Is this happening somewhere else? Are there tests that are happening at your current facilities? Or how is that shaking out? **Peter Beck:** Great questions. There's a bunch of stuff that we can do with existing Electron facilities - single element injector testing and GG testing and a bunch of stuff like that. But there's a fairly competitive process that's running with respect to Archimedes' home. With respect to stage-level tests, we're anticipating those being at the launch site because, for example, if you swapped out a bunch of your engines, you probably want to do a quick stage test to validate all the systems. You're not transporting a giant vehicle around the country to do those tests. So the larger infrastructure tests will be done at the launch site. **John Galloway:** Why does Neutron have four fairings/fairing parts? Why not three? Why not two? Why not eight? **Peter Beck:** I would say that's still in trade. Fundamentally, the reason why there's four at the moment, there's two reasons. One is because you need to have that payload kind of entry or exit clearance as you're dispensing from the interstage. If you have two halves, then the halves have to travel much, much further to provide that clearance than if you have four pedals - they don't need to open as much. But there's a trade there because four is more complexity and ultimately more mass versus the two. So that's something that is, I would say, still a bit in trade with the vehicle. It's kind of the four pedal camp and then the two pedal camp. The original rationale for four pedals was actually for aero-braking. Earlier on, we were hoping that we could actually control the cross-range and downrange using those pedals. But the challenge with that is that the loads get crazy, because for aero-braking especially, it gets super crazy. Also, the GNC team have got enough work doing targeting and cross-range and downrange, let alone give them a super stuck aero surface to work with. So if we give them some aero surfaces that, when you actuate it, you know what happens, that's a good place to start versus giving this more fuller shape. **John Galloway:** You've used the term "pedals" a few times here. So is that the official term we should use? Like, it's a four pedal design; we can call it that? **Peter Beck:** That's what we call it. It's more affectionately called the "hungry hippo" internally though. **John Galloway:** In your update video, you talked about the the second stage being hung from the payload separation plane. How does that work? How does that change the design? I imagine it means the second stage can be lighter because it doesn't have to carry load? **Peter Beck:** If you're a structural designer, your job in life is to get the mass of the payload, the reaction load, into the tank walls as efficiently as you can, and then down the tank walls and back into the thrust part at the bottom. That's your kind of job in life. Now, if you look at a normal kind of second stage, you have to go through the second stage, down through the aft of stage, down into the tank, and then ultimately back down into the first stage. The most efficient thing you can do here is to not have to transfer any load through that upper stage. This kind of comes back a little bit to the material experiment thing - the dominating load case here is not actually the pressure load. It's not actually pressurizing the tank. The dominant load case that you're always battling with is buckling. If you look at a lot of rockets, you'll see a tremendous amount of internal structure in them - vertical internal structures, a little less on the radial. And all of that is to deal with buckling. That is the dominating load case that you're always fighting against. If you want a balloon tank and just pressurize it all the time, then that's easy, but that's not really practical for loading propellants and all of those kinds of things. So the buckling load case is the one that you have to deal with the most. Going back to the second stage, not putting the second stage in the line of compression, in the line of stack, means you eliminate that buckling case. If you look at Neutron, you basically have the fairing - the fairing attachment point is the same as the payload cone attachment point, and then everything below that is hung - it's like a balloon, if you will, hung below all that. Because you're not transferring any of those buckling loads, basically all that tank is there to do is to be like a sack, a sack to hold fluid, if you will. The moment you pressurize that tank, it's all in tension to be able to react the thrust loads. So you just eliminate all the buckling loads out of it, and the upper stage just becomes ridiculously light. That's awesome because in an upper stage, the thing that you need to concentrate on is the lowest mass and the highest performance possible. So if you look at Neutron, the upper stage is actually pretty tiny compared to the first stage. That's because it's just incredibly high performance. I kind of think of it like a Centaur except made out of a material a quarter of the weight, and then you get this awesome high-performance stage, which costs nothing to build. I mean, the carbon is so thin you measure the amount of time to put down the carbon by an automatic fiber placement machine in hours. ### Material Selection and Composites **Thomas Berghardt:** Let's talk about materials here. You were talking about it's baseline to return to launch site, which as a rocket viewing fan, I am very excited about because viewing rockets coming back to land has been something very cool. **Peter Beck:** Remember, the dominating load case is an unpressurized rocket sitting on the launch pad. That's where the buckling is - that's the hardest thing to solve. **Thomas Berghardt:** We also talked about earlier how if you tried to incorporate pressurization earlier on in the process, that increases your turnaround time, makes it worse, and all of those things we talked about earlier. **Peter Beck:** There's one other myth I want to bust, and that is the cost in building carbon composite structures. You hear a lot of people say, "Oh, it's so expensive to build anything" - rubbish. Especially when you use automated tape placement - you can essentially 3D print a Neutron in composite, but not like a millimeter at a time or whatever - like at half a meter at a time, at like two meters a minute. To put it this way, to automatic fiber place an Electron fairing, it's about eight minutes of time. It's just nuts to watch. This is a kind of new technique in space, but in aerospace, that's how we've been building wings and wing spars and roofs and fuselage forever. It's actually a really well-understood technology. And if your material cost per kilogram is high, but there's not that many kilograms of material in there, you know... **John Galloway:** Is there a concern of the LOX reacting with the carbon fiber? And if so, how's the inside of the LOX tank protected from it? **Peter Beck:** That's a great question. That's actually something that we had to solve for Electron many years ago. Electron is a linerless composite pressure vessel, and we had to do quite a lot of work on resin systems and things like that. We actually ended up doing all of the BAM and hammer testing which tests ignitability in that environment. We almost ended up as good as aluminum with respect to that. So that was a huge piece of work that we had to solve for Electron right at the beginning. ### Landing and Flight Profile **Thomas Berghardt:** I want to talk about the flight profile. The benchmark for reusable rockets for a little bit now has been SpaceX's Falcon 9, and they developed two different infrastructures - you have the downrange landing and the return to launch site landing, and it does both. But the downrange landings have been the vast majority of what their customers have ended up needing, granted that rocket's in a slightly different payload class, more towards heavy lift than medium lift. So maybe that'll be part of your answer here, but why is Rocket Lab tipping the scales towards return to launch site? Is it really driven by that turnaround metric of not wanting to wait for a platform to come back? **Peter Beck:** You can't turn around a rocket in 24 hours if you've got to wait three days for it to come back on a barge. And also, I can tell you 100% in full honesty, marine assets suck. Like 100% suck. They're so expensive. We love our contractors that help us doing Electron recovery. It's 65,000 dollars a day just for the boat - one boat! And it's a tiny little tub of a boat that sits at the wharf for 65,000 dollars a day waiting for us to launch. Can you imagine what it costs to have a 200-foot machine out there? Marine assets are really, really expensive to run and maintain and operate. Ironically, it costs us like an order of magnitude, probably two orders of magnitude less to go and scoop an Electron with a helicopter than it does to even have a boat out there. The helicopter is 4,500 dollars an hour - takes a couple hours to get there, a couple hours to get home - it's dirt cheap. So getting rid of marine assets was something that - we just had to do that because it's just a whole other constraint with respect to sea states and all of that kind of stuff, and costs ultimately. So the obvious is return to launch site. But once again, you can see that it's a 15-ton expendable vehicle and an 8-ton return to launch site, and that's sporty. It's only because we don't do that extra re-entry burn that we're able to get such an increase in performance. We trade a lot - the vehicle grew a lot in size to be able to maintain that eight tonnes but to return to launch site. **Thomas Berghardt:** We've seen marine assets at those other companies kind of get streamlined into vessels taking on multiple roles, vessels being wholly owned and operated by the actual launch provider instead of contracting. So we can see the evidence of that happening, but there's the turnaround times, the cost benefits, and just the overall kind of CONOPS simplicity that comes with return to launch site. And even we mentioned the Starship program that's also moving towards everything returns to launch site, no marine assets. So we can see that's not an uncommon theme. **John Galloway:** We see it come in, and then all of a sudden there's legs to fold up and all this other stuff. And oh, it took them a day to fold the legs up, and now we need to lean it over, then we're going to transport it over, and all this infrastructure is really awesome to see. But if you're really trying to optimize for rapid reusability, putting it right back on the launch pad is really the way to go, it seems. **Peter Beck:** 100%. I mean, you've just described everything that is just like pulling dollar bills out of your wallet. I mean, that's all the stuff you want to avoid. So hence the reason that the whole design concept around Neutron is just: don't have it. **Thomas Berghardt:** On the return to launch site flight profile, you've gone with these canards. Of course, the fairings as control services sounded really cool, but obviously, there's tons of problems there. So you've gone with the canards design, which we've seen other reusable launch concepts use. We've also seen those with like grid fins. Is that a trade that you guys looked at? **Peter Beck:** Grid fins are an awesome control surface for a minimum package, and great drag as well. However, this vehicle is designed from day one to be reusable, and we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that the premier vehicle today that's being reused was never designed from day one to be reused. So it's kind of appended with things to make it work versus design from day one. Having things that you have to deploy kind of sucks. So let's not deploy anything in the first place. This is why the base is the diameter it is - because deploying landing legs is just another mechanism that you have to maintain and operate. From day one, we've got a picture of the whiteboard where we ended up drawing a traffic cone, and the traffic cone kind of evolved a little bit, but basically, it's fundamentally a traffic cone. Don't have any mechanisms, just make the base wide. I would also say that the design of Neutron has been informed just as much on descent than it has on ascent. A lot of the design elements you see there are for the descent, of course, but I would say that the overall design and shape of the vehicle is more informed by re-entry than liftoff. **John Galloway:** If we zoom in on the very base, it almost looks like these sort of slip together or something like this. So is there some sort of tech you're looking at there where these maybe don't retract but they have some sort of crush core or shock absorbers or something like that? Because it's not one continuous line. **Peter Beck:** No shock absorber. You have to attenuate some landing shot. Also, those legs are actually a surprisingly difficult part of the design because as you ascend, of course, your plume is expanding. So you end up with interactions between the plume and those legs. That's actually the toughest thermal load that we have to deal with - how we interact with the plume interaction. Because down lower, you've got the air pressure, your exhaust is coming out sort of like this. But once you get up there, you're in the lower air pressures, that exhaust is just coming straight out. **John Galloway:** So they don't get out of the way or anything? That's just the thermal load that you're designing towards. It's not like these are going to retract up out of the way or anything in the current design? **Peter Beck:** We have to allow them to be movable a little bit anyway for the landing attenuation. The trade's still out whether or not we'll suck them right up in there, but really trying to avoid any kind of active mechanisms possible. As a shock absorber, they're just a gas strut. If we can remove any kind of actuated elements, we'll definitely try to. But that's actually one of the toughest thermal parts of the design to deal with. And if we can't deal with it thermally, then we'll have to suck it back up in there, but at the moment, it's in the wind. **John Galloway:** Do those streaks running up the side double as sort of raceway protection for if you're going to have piping or electrical connections down the side? **Peter Beck:** They have two functions. One is for downrange - those strikes are actually aero services for downrange. And they form the raceway because, don't forget, we're umbilically everything in at the bottom there. All the upper stage propellant and service lines run up those raceways. **Thomas Berghardt:** Will the piping for the upper tank in the first stage also go up the side, or will you have a central through-the-bottom tank kind of design from the suction lines? **Peter Beck:** Through the raceways up the side. Think of it like stage one is fed from one side of the strike, and then stage two is fed on the other. **John Galloway:** The rocket isn't quadrilaterally symmetrical - it's almost like bilateral symmetry, where you have the two side strikes that go all the way up here, but then you don't see the thing on this face, and I'd assume the other side is the same way. So does that have anything to do with the way that it re-enters? Does it re-enter with those strikes coming into the airflow? Or it's not going to go sideways, right? **Peter Beck:** The downrange - one of the biggest constraints and the hardest things to deal with is over-performance on the downrange. Generally, in a rocket, over-performance is a good thing, but when you're re-entering, it's a bad thing. Because if you over-perform on the glide ratio on the downrange, then you overshoot the launch site and end up somewhere else, which is generally not good. So that's actually one of the bigger challenges - ensuring that the rocket does not over-perform. Because if it over-performs and then you go, "Oh, we've over-performed" and you terminate, it's still a problem. So that is actually one of the biggest challenges with RTLS - making sure that you sit in that underperformance regime and never end up in that overperformance. **John Galloway:** In the video, do we see a render of the engine placement? Are we doing six around the outside and one in the middle? Or are they all giving you some thrust authority or thrust vectoring where you can gimbal them all? **Peter Beck:** We always TVC all engines because if you lose an engine, then you lose control authority generally through max Q. So we always gimbal both axes of our engines. It's a little bit more complexity, but it just provides that extra reliability. For Neutron, it's really nice because the upper stage engine has almost the same throttling and performance requirements with respect to thrust than the landing engine does. So both those engines kind of drive - actually, the second stage is driving the engine requirement. If it was up to me, I'd just have one engine at the bottom if that was possible, because more engines is just more hassle. But that's not the way it works, but it's kind of a really nice ratio, golden ratio, where if you size the upper stage engine perfectly, then it's actually the perfect size for a landing engine generally. **Thomas Berghardt:** We're talking about how it'll land into that one central engine, and that'll be its landing engine. And of course, we were talking about how it's going to re-enter - is it coming in sort of sideways? Is it coming in engine section first? That's the other big question when you see an aerodynamic face shaped like that. **Peter Beck:** Engines first, 100%. The name of the game here is to push that shock wave with a big blunt body as far as you can. That's why Electron's so successful - we control that corridor just super accurately and just push that shock wave right forward. If Electron gets out of kilter a bit, like a few degrees or a degree here and there, then that shock wave kind of attaches itself and just unzips the rocket like a hot knife through butter. Neutron is a bit more forgiving. If you look at the shape of it, from the cylindrical tank section, it's continually decreasing in diameter in a relatively even way, mathematically even way. That's for a reason. So as you're re-entering, especially during those hypersonic velocities, having that ever-decreasing diameter means that it's always decreasing in pressure. And because it's always decreasing in pressure over the length, you can't have shock waves attached. **John Galloway:** For the return to launch site, we've seen some other vehicles where they sort of target something else, and then once everything's cool, then they sort of target the launch site. Are you looking for a similar situation here? **Peter Beck:** Yeah, that's the whole over-performance issue that you have to deal with. There's a certain point in the trajectory where it doesn't matter what you do, you can't over-perform the boundary. So once you reach that point in the trajectory, then you just kind of start to drift to the ultimate land point. But there is a defined point in the trajectory where nothing you can do is going to push it into an overperformance regime. **Thomas Berghardt:** Obviously, most reusable launch programs have had some sort of hop tests, ways to start working on propulsive landing, and this will be Rocket Lab's first propulsively landed vehicle. So is Neutron going to incorporate some vertical takeoff vertical landing test program of some kind? **Peter Beck:** We'll see where we end up. The control - we've tried to simplify the control system as much as we can, hence the reason for the canards up the front. But probably, the thinking is at the moment, we'll just target it out in the ocean, a point, and have a crack and see how well we can target it to that point and see if we can put it down softly in the ocean. I think that's pretty much the starting point for us because that doesn't take away from launching operational payloads on early flights because that post-separation experiment doesn't affect the mission success. One thing that is kind of the inverse of most rocket programs, and that's kind of one of the challenging things with Neutron, is that generally you build one rocket, and then you try and scale up from there, and you build more and more and more and more. Well, it's the inverse with Neutron because we'll need quite a few in the beginning as we get all of the reusability and everything kind of dialed in, but then after that, we don't need very many at all. So it's kind of like the inverse way you want to scale a factory. First up, you need it all scaled as much as you can. You'll be producing as many engines as you can and as many first stages as you can. And then once everything kind of settles out, then you need to turn factories off rather than ramp them up. ### Mission Profiles and Future Plans **John Galloway:** Are you looking for Neutron to be able to service all sorts of inclinations? Are we going to polar orbits? Are we going to GTO? Like, where all is Neutron expected to go? **Peter Beck:** We've actually had a surprising amount of customer inquiries from all sorts of trajectories. The one I guess that was most surprising is kind of GTO and GEO, where we never expected folks to be looking at those kinds of orbits. But actually, a surprising number of inquiries have had for those more high-end, high-energy orbits. And of course, we love doing interplanetary, more science interplanetary than anything. So we can get a fair chunk of mass to Venus, which is pretty cool. **John Galloway:** How do some of the higher inclinations affect the RTLS? Do you have to knock some of the payload off if you're going into a polar orbit but you're still coming all the way back to the launch site? **Peter Beck:** Definitely. I mean, they're always more energy-intensive, so you end up trading for that for sure. The thing is, with polar orbits, they are generally Earth observation platforms, so there's not generally huge numbers of constellations. It's 12 or 3 or something like that; it's not like 12,000. **Thomas Berghardt:** We're talking about the different missions Neutron is going to support, and you've mentioned that from the beginning, Neutron is going to be future-proofed for crew rating and being able to support human spaceflight, both for cargo launches to support space stations and things like that, or launching humans themselves. There's no spacecraft, as far as I know, that Rocket Lab is actually developing for that purpose, but you're future-proofing the rocket so that process can be completed more easily later on if a customer comes along for it. Do I understand that right? **Peter Beck:** 100%. It's like if you're designing your tanks, make sure when you qualify them that they can be qualified for human rating, so you have to go back and re-qualify all your tanks and make material wall thickness changes and structural margin improvements. The reason to baseline for human spaceflight is twofold. One, I don't like eating hats. Two is that if you're building a vehicle that's capable of human spaceflight, then it's a super reliable freight vehicle. So that's a good place to be - you already have the kind of triple redundancy margins built in, and if you're using it over and over again, you can kind of afford to put those things in and still maintain a really cost-effective vehicle. So that's kind of the ethos. **Thomas Berghardt:** I'm really curious to see how the pedal hungry hippo design works with a human-rated capsule system. **Peter Beck:** Now you're overthinking it. A capsule is appearing, so just remove the hungry hippos and put the capsule on top. Job done. **Thomas Berghardt:** And that doesn't affect when Neutron comes back? Obviously, it's coming back engine first, so coming back without the fairings, since they're not control surfaces anymore either, is okay? **Peter Beck:** Doesn't make any difference. The fairing has got such a roll-off on it anyway that the flow separation, the pressure's decreasing so rapidly over it. So whether it's there or it's not there... I mean, there will be some differences - it'll give the GNC guys a thrill, I'm sure. But it's not fundamental. ### Final Questions **John Galloway:** There was a question about the margins and Archimedes and engine-out capability. So you got seven engines under there, you lose one - how does that affect the mission? **Peter Beck:** As always, it depends on when you lose it. There's always a good argument to have because you can argue that while if you've got more engines, the probability of one going out is more. So the whole argument is: more engines is better? I always try and drive the team for the least number of engines possible because more engines means more cost. But the argument around is, is it more reliable to have more engines? Because to me, kind of you can switch it either way. You just miss that one very specific circumstance where one engine out gets you exactly a 1.0 thrust-to-weight ratio. **John Galloway:** Turnaround times for Neutron - you keep saying 24 hours. Is that sort of what you're designing for with all the different parts of the system? RTLS fairing doesn't go anywhere, payload just in the top with a crane or whatever - is 24 your goal? **Peter Beck:** It's a design goal. I'm not naive enough to think that that's a feasible turnaround time because there's always going to be checks you want to do, and there's always going to be weird stuff you want to check out and all the rest of it. But the point being is, if you start with that, then you're going to be somewhere in the ballpark of somewhere around that - maybe not 24 hours, maybe two days or three days or something like that. But if you start with three weeks, then that's just not the place to start. So it's more of a design challenge than an operational cadence objective. **John Galloway:** You've said that one of your favorite things are the interplanetary missions. So is there anything about Neutron that specifically helps enable interplanetary? Any sort of design constraint? I mean, we've got the second stage, the upper stage in there, but is there anything you're doing to help not just leverage the constellations but also further exploration with the design of the vehicle? **Peter Beck:** I think if Neutron is successful, then we continue to drive the cost of launch down and down. The really high-performance upper stages actually matter - if you look at a lot of interplanetary missions, they require very high-performance upper stages, typically hydrogen-oxygen stages. So the Neutron upper stage is a very high-performance upper stage, which means that we can throw some pretty decent mass to planets. I think we get like one and a half tons to Venus, I think was the number. So you can do a lot with that. ### Conclusion **Thomas Berghardt:** I just want to say a big thank you, Peter, for coming back onto the show. Glad to have you back and talk more about Neutron, and we're all very excited to see Neutron's development and see some more reusable rockets coming online. **Peter Beck:** Thanks very much, Thomas and Dos. It's super fun. I love to get to talk some more technical details, so the questions are great. **John Galloway:** We appreciate those details. It makes it a whole lot of fun for us too. It really is like I alluded to earlier - we love looking at renders, and the super space fans love to zoom in and say, "Oh, well, what's this? What's this?" And it's like, "Well, the artist thought that the dish looked good. That's why." But it's fantastic to have you on the show - always a pleasure. Here, folks, today's show with Peter Beck, CEO and rocket slinger, I guess, for Rocket Lab out there, talking a lot about Neutron. If you just came in in the middle of the show, you can always rewind back. The show is going to be here for you to watch again if you want to go and see some of the other questions. But just across the board - the design goals, the technical infrastructure, all the different things that Rocket Lab and Peter here are looking at to make this not a rocket for the 2020s but a rocket for the 2050s. Peter, thank you so much for spending the time with us today. **Peter Beck:** Thanks, my pleasure. **John Galloway:** Also, folks, with me today we had Thomas Berghardt, News Director for NASA's Space Flight. Thomas, thank you so much for joining us today. **Thomas Berghardt:** Always a pleasure to be with you, Das, as well. **John Galloway:** And lastly, here I'm John Galloway for NASA's Space Flight. Thank you so much for watching our weekly show. Again, these shows - we're doing them every week on Sundays now at 3 PM Eastern Time. It's our weekly space news show where we talk about space news, what's going on. But for now, that is going to be the end of our show. Hope to see you... not next week because it's holiday. This is actually the last show of 2021, so we'll see you first week of 2022 for NSF Live in 2022. Well, folks, thank you so much for watching again. We appreciate all the support, all the super chats and everything that came in. If this is the sort of stuff you like, you know what to do - there's buttons to click to follow the channels and stuff like that. But we're gonna go ahead and let Peter go now, and we will see you nerds later. Thanks so much for watching.