🏠 > [[Interviews]] > Sept 17 2025 **Insider**: [[Peter Beck]] **Source**: [NASA Spaceflight](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HatZIl3biHk) **Date**: September 17 2025  🔗 Backup Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HatZIl3biHk ## Transcript ### Opening and State of Electron (1:08) **Ryan Caton:** Good morning, good afternoon, good evening everybody. Welcome back to another episode of NSF Live. My name is **Ryan Caton**. Thank you so much for joining us. We're going to get straight into it because we've got a lot to talk about. Our guest, of course, the one, the only, **Sir Peter Beck**. Thank you very much, Peter, for joining us in this morning for you, afternoon, evening around the world. It's an exciting time for **Rocket Lab**, I think it's fair to say. **Sir Peter Beck:** Oh, thanks very much, Ryan. It's great to talk to you. And I've got to pull you up again, I'm sorry. Last time you had me on here, no picture of **Electron** flying on your opening credits. And here we go again. When am I going to get Electron on the opening credits? **Ryan Caton:** I will bring that up with Mr. Jack Ber, who is in charge of the intro. You are not the first guest to mention things that should be in the intro that are not in the intro, I will put it that way. But yeah, second most frequently launched rocket in the world. Come on. Come on, guys. We, I, Jack and Max went were invited down to **New Zealand** nearly a couple years ago. So, you're right. We do need to get some Electron footage of the intro. But also alongside me to bring in some of the chat questions, **Sawyer Rosenstein** joining us. How you doing, Sawyer? **Sawyer Rosenstein:** I'm doing great. Yeah, they were down there for the 50th Electron launch. So we have the footage. We just got to make sure we get that in there. I'm not going to let it slide, guys. Come on. I picked you up last time. **Ryan Caton:** I will make sure to bring that up with Jack as soon as we're done. But we've got you for an hour or so. We're going to be starting off with what's going on here on Earth. First of all, I've designed this very cleverly. We're going to start on Earth, then we'll move up to **Venus**, and then we'll move on to **Mars**, saving the best till last because there has been a lot of discussion as of late around Mars, **Mars Sample Return**, the Mars telecommunications orbiter, all of that jazz. We'll be getting on to that. --- ### Electron Recovery Status (3:00) **Ryan Caton:** First of all, we're going to start with **Electron**. The last time we had you on the show was just shy of two years ago. You just re-flown the **Rutherford engine** for the first time on a flight because you were recovering those Electron boosters. But since that point, it appears that the recovery has kind of dwindled out. You don't really appear to be doing that anymore. Is it officially cancelled? Are you no longer recovering Electron? Can you dive into any of the decisions behind the mission profiles that you've been flying with Electron? **Sir Peter Beck:** Yeah, sure. Sure. No, I mean we got to a really good point with **Electron**. In fact, the last reusable flight that we splashed down, the booster is actually sitting in the back of the factory there ready to roll through the line. But really what it came down to is **priorities**. And you know right now I need the recovery team and reusability team working **Neutron**, not Electron. And you know, there is a positive economic case for reusing Electron, but the reality is like an Electron sticker price is $8 million, call it. Neutron sticker price is $55 million, and sort of 70% of the total cost of a vehicle is in the first stage. So it just, you know, it's just a, you know, where is it most sensible to point the resource. And the most sensible place to point the resource right now is definitely on **Neutron**. So we might pick it up a little bit later but, you know, economically it's not a big enough lever to pull right now, and also just the resources of the team. But no, we got it in a good place and it's ready to ready to pick up when we when we get a little bit more time. **Ryan Caton:** That's awesome. So it's kind of **mothballed** for the time being. It's not entirely gone away. You can still spool it back up if that becomes, you know, if that makes sense economically at a later date. **Sir Peter Beck:** Yeah. Yeah. And like I say, we got the last one we were really, really happy with. We had all of our waterproofing techniques and design changes on that vehicle and it all looked really good actually. But yeah, it's just **Neutron is just a giant sucking sound of all resource and capital in the company**. --- ### Neutron Design Fueled by Electron Data (5:17) **Ryan Caton:** Speaking of **Neutron**, the transition from **Electron** to Neutron. You say that teams have been moving to Neutron recovery. Was there any of the experience that you gained by recovering Electron? Did any of that data fuel the design for Neutron? **Sir Peter Beck:** Yes. Yes. I would have hated to come into Neutron without doing that. Right. So **Electron** was a little bit unique in the fact that it was a completely unboosted re-entry. We had no burns. So what that means is we came in stinking hot. And we really had to manage the angle of attack. We had to manage the heating. And you know that that **aerothermal re-entry environment** is really hard to model. Like it's a multi-physics problem. You've got, you know, thermal, mechanical and chemistry. It's really nasty to model. So just actually, you know, getting real data and real control data going as as you come in was super valuable. We test a lot of materials. So a lot of the materials that are on Neutron all went through that re-entry program. So, you know, we we we bought a lot of risk down on those materials. But, you know, I would say that the, you know, one of the biggest was just, you know, the **GNC element**, the targeting, and and re-entry kind of interface stuff is was just super super valuable. We would we would have massive big holes in in our models and our data if we didn't weren't able to to redo those re-entries. --- ### Neutron First Flight and Schedule (6:54) **Ryan Caton:** We should probably talk about **Neutron** in more detail. Just very briefly, if you could give us a kind of a rundown of what you are expecting with the **first flight of Neutron**? **Sir Peter Beck:** No, yeah, no I don't subscribe to any of that 'clear the pad is a great day' kind of scenarios. No. So the clear intention is is to to go to to to go to **orbit with Neutron**. We cut everybody a little bit of slack on re-entry. We're not slipping a barge under the the first kind of re-entry. So, you know, yeah, we should absolutely be going to orbit on the first flight, but we'll do a soft splashdown in the ocean for Stage 1. And undoubtedly there'll be some things to learn from that before we go and you know, put a very expensive hunk of metal under it and try and land it. **Ryan Caton:** Do you have any payloads in mind to be deployed? **Sir Peter Beck:** Well, see, last time I put a fun payload on on **Electron**, I got into trouble by from a whole lot of astronomers for creating something shiny in the sky. So, I sort of a little bit gunshy doing that now. I've just been completely focused on the vehicle. I didn't really even give it much thought. But yes, no, I'll have to do something, but it's certainly certainly not priority right now. It's all about the vehicle. But it's a good kick up the butt to think about something cool for sure. **Ryan Caton:** Okay. So it's not ruled out. **Sir Peter Beck:** No, it's not ruled out. I'll try and do something **less controversial** this time though, that's for sure. **Ryan Caton:** And the date for when that first launch may be, are you still targeting that to happen **this year**? **Sir Peter Beck:** Yeah. Yeah. Look, I mean, we we will we're pushing super hard and we will be there in the last day of December until the last hour trying to trying to get a launch away. You know we run run **green light schedules** meaning that you know there is no there's no fat and everything. And you know, always caution everybody, look, it's a rocket program, but you know we are pushing super super hard like literally the team is sleeping in the factories to try and try and get one on the pad and away by the end of the year. But I mean we always like to put this into context. I mean, you know, the timeline that we brought **Neutron** to life is crazy short. And you know, a few months here and there is kind of irrelevant in a in a 20 or 30 year lifespan of a product. But that being said, nobody's waving the white flag yet and we'll keep pushing until until it's no longer feasible. --- ### Launch Complex 3 and Neutron Stacking (10:06) **Ryan Caton:** I'm wondering if Jake Eaggan, our wonderful producer in the background, can bring up some of the images of that launchpad, which you opened officially a few weeks ago, because we've been getting a lot of questions in chat and in the member Discord, because you've got a wonderful swanky looking pad, wonderful huge water tower, but your launch mount is static and there isn't a huge tower, so everyone is wondering, how are you going to be **stacking the rocket on the pad**? Is **Rocket Lab** in the market for a big crawler crane or how are you guys going to be working that one out? **Sir Peter Beck:** Yeah, know it's a great question. So, this is kind of phase one of the pad and then there's phase two and the kind of design requirements for for **Neutron** is **never break it over**. So, we want to launch it vertically, we want to land it vertically, we want to integrate vertically and and fly again vertically. When we sort of stood back at the very design point of the vehicle and said okay what are the conops that suck, what are the conops that take time, what are the conops that that that add cost and risk and it's always breaking it over, right? So stage kind of phase one is yeah we crane it on, that's fine. Stage two there is a there's a **rollover gantry** there that enables us to to to pick it and place it and then ultimately integrate in in that rollover gantry and that just means that the vehicle never ever needs to go horizontal. And I mean it's it's landed vertically, it's launched vertically, it's shipped vertically, and then it's just a whole another operation you don't need to do. **Sir Peter Beck:** And there's **no launch tower** because, you know, if we stand back and we looked at **Electron**, it's like, man, what is the thing that that sucks on Electron? And it's always a Stage 2 umbilical rebuild. So, after every flight, those umbilicals just get a hard time. This is designed to be a high cadence, high turnaround, short turnaround kind of vehicle. So, we put a lot of stuff in Stage 1 that you would normally kind of segregate out and into either Stage 2 or infrastructure. So, **all of Stage 2 is embedded in Stage 1**. We do that so we we have a really clean load path. So that means that all the fluids and gases are umbilical up through Stage 1 and into Stage 2. So there's just there's actually just **no need for a tower** anymore. And because we're not breaking it over, you don't need that structural element or member of a tower either. So it just keeps the pad super clean and like there's just no maintenance required between turnarounds and, you know, just keeps all the complexity kind of illed into Stage 1. --- ### Neutron Stage Two and Modular Design (12:51) **Ryan Caton:** Speaking of the different stages we're seeing there, that picture of **Stage 2**, it's within **Stage 1** because Neutron is a very... it's not a traditional one stage stacked top another stage. I'm just wondering if you could give us a little rundown as to why because between the last interview and now it was revealed on your website that Stage 1 is actually going to be kind of in **two modules** which are then going to be connected. So, I'm just wondering if you could give us a little a little insight into how that assembly process is actually going to take place cuz it's very untraditional. We haven't really seen anything like this before. **Sir Peter Beck:** Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And look, this all comes from the starting point of **reusability**, right? Cost and reusability. The best thing to do is to not throw your fairings away. So we we came up with the "**hungry hippo fairing**" that we we kind of lovingly named it, where you know the fairings remain attached to Stage 1. And then if you do the economics around total reusability of Stage 1 and Stage 2 it's kind of for a 13 ton vehicle it's kind of, you know, 50/50 whether or not the reusability of Stage 2 actually pencils out. And, you know, **Stage 2** is one of those things where in Neutron it is disposable, so it has to be incredibly low cost, but, you know, ironically it has to be the highest performing stage. **Sir Peter Beck:** The way we approach this is that you take Stage 2 **out of the load path**. If you look at the load through the upper stage, the dominant load is the bending moments. If you can take those loads out then you can basically make almost a **balloon tank of carbon**. So Stage 2 is is kind of hung like a like a, you know, a sack in Stage 1 where there's no structural load path through it. So the tank is super light. And because it's super light it means there's almost no carbon in it. Because there's no carbon in it, it means it's super cheap to make and the material cost is very very low. And because there's no mass to it, it's really high performance. So it's really about optimizing the disposal element to be just ridiculously cheap. And we think the economics in this approach are are very very favorable. So that's kind of how we end up with Stage 2 on the inside. **Sir Peter Beck:** Now your point about kind of splitting Stage 1 into **modules** that's kind of an intermediate approach again. The module design allows for a couple of things: one, you can do piloted integration off the vehicle in a clean room in the module. And if you look at Stage 1 it allows you to kind of have, I don't know, think of it like a truck trailer kind of scenario where the boost to the power pack, you know, all all the engines, press system, stage separations, all those kind of elements are all, you know, retained within that Stage 1, then you have the module that splits off the top that enables you to do sort of separate payload integrations and whatnot. So you can have like a couple of Stage 1, you know, booster sort of power packs on the on the pad, if you will, and then you can just integrate modules. And from a maintenance perspective, you can, you know, take out the bit that that has all the thermal cycles. A tank and power pack might be reasonable 20 times. An upper stage might be used reasonable 50 or 100 times. So it's really about, you know, splitting splitting those things apart for the **economics**. **Ryan Caton:** So those will be **mix and matchable**. It's not going to be like one module is directly tied to another module and it stays with that for its entire lifespan. You can swap those out as needed. **Sir Peter Beck:** 100%. Yep. Yep. Think about it like swapping engines on the wing of an airplane. --- ### Production Rate, Launch Sites, and Turnaround (17:33) **Ryan Caton:** What kind of **production rate** overall are you expecting for **Neutron**? **Sir Peter Beck:** Ironically, for for the early stages of the program, we need the most number of Stage 1s we'll probably ever need. Because the chances of us reusing them one straight away is is probably low. The way we're thinking about the **flight rate** for Neutron though is pretty much identical to to **Electron** and that, you know, we'll fly one, then we'll fly three, and then we'll fly five and then we'll scale from there a year, that is. To fly more than three the next year is kind of unrealistic really. You want to take advantage of those learnings. The time to get your change done is and your **block upgrades** are really early on. **Sawyer Rosenstein:** Ross was asking in chat, are there any future plans to launch **Neutron** from any other **spaceports** other than **Wallops**? Obviously, you have **Mahia** where you're launching currently with **Electron**. **Sir Peter Beck:** No, I mean I suspect in time we'll probably need a **West Coast site**. Although there is a quite a nice sun-synchronous corridor out of Wallops actually. It's still a big dog leg, so it's still a big energy sink. But, no, no plans for that right now. I really dislike building launch sites because they're the biggest **P&L burner** you can imagine. The vast majority of all Neutron expenditure has gone into infrastructure like literally pouring concrete and steel in the ground. **Sawyer Rosenstein:** Supersonic Retropulsion is asking, do **marine assets** still suck? **Sir Peter Beck:** They do. They, I'm sorry, but they do. They just you put them in the water and they literally just start melting away in front of your eyes. Now they are a necessary evil, I have to admit. We have our barge under construction, **Return on Investment**, right now. We took some learnings from others on that one and made a **speedy barge**, not a not a sluggish barge. **Ryan Caton:** Is **return to launch site** recovery still on the cards for Neutron? **Sir Peter Beck:** Yeah, I mean it's the same, it's physics. Absolutely much rather landed back on on land than than out at sea, but, you know, the penalty is always fairly high. The **licensing regime** for a return to launch site is is is quite complicated. We didn't want to bite that off right at the beginning. We'll bite that off later as is kind of a cost down reduction point. **Ryan Caton:** When **Neutron** is coming back through the atmosphere for re-entry, it of course has its flaps. It has its landing gear. How are you guys going to be powering those? Is that going to be powered by **hydraulics**? Are you using **electrics** to power that? **Sir Peter Beck:** No, so we're all all **electromechanical**. Our heritage is electromechanical. **Electron** obviously it has electric pump motors. The **Rutherford** is all electromechanical TBC. So the natural, you know, propensity for the engineers is to just just go electromechanical. The **canards** as you point out are they're electromechanical. We just basically scaled up all the electromechanical TVC stuff we did for for Electron that's proven to be really really reliable and efficient. We actually use the the Electron HVB bats that run the pump motors to run all those TBCs. So there's quite a few instances where there's there's the same part numbers between vehicles. **Ryan Caton:** Have you got any idea on the **turnaround times** yet? What kind of mission turnaround from landing the booster to re-flying it? **Sir Peter Beck:** The design point for the vehicle was **24 hours**. Now, I appreciate that's somewhat of an unrealistic design point, but everything was driven off that requirement. Right back to like **propellant selection**. One of the key reasons why we went for for for **methane and oxygen** was simply because of that 24-hour turnaround, because, you know, we have a lot of experience obviously with **LOX/Kerosene** and, you know, you just can't get around the fact that you get sooting on that locks that locks KO propulsion cycle. You have to do quite a lot of cleaning. Whereas, you know, you run a methylox engine and it's it's still shiny on the inside. --- ### Neutron Block Upgrades and Human Spaceflight (29:01) **Ryan Caton:** Rolling back to the opening of **Launch Complex 3** very quickly. We noticed that **human space flight** was mentioned in a list of various future capabilities. Has there been any sort of development towards that from **Rocket Lab**? **Sir Peter Beck:** I rule nothing out. And so, you know, **Neutron is being designed to be human ratable**. Not human rated out of the factory, but human ratable. So what that means is like stuff like **safety factor** on tanks. We've done all that sort of stuff up front. The reality is that currently there is one destination served by one and a half providers and and served well. We're very commercial here at Rocket Lab. There is no business case right now. There's one destination and one customer. There's no business case to go and run off and and develop a capsule. But I don't believe that's going to be the future. I think there will be **multiple destinations** and there'll be multiple customers and when there is I want to make sure that we're ready to ready to compete and ready to service. **Ryan Caton:** Is there anything already in your mind about what could come after the first few flights of **Neutron**? **Sir Peter Beck:** We're following pretty much the identical path we did with **Electron**. For **Block One**, if you will, we have **high margins**. We reserve a lot of payload margin. And over time you understand the performance of the vehicle, propellant residuals, all of these kinds of things. And our approach has always been we just sort of trim those down over time. There's no like major kind of **block upgrades** planned. We'll always start at conservative points everywhere. That includes in propulsion. So, you know, the **Archimedes engine** will be starting at a very conservative design point. **Sawyer Rosenstein:** Based on past **Electron** re-entry telemetry data, modeling simulations, what level of confidence do you have in recovering **Neutron** on your first attempt at recovery? **Sir Peter Beck:** I would say that just like an order of magnitude more confident than if we didn't do the Electron stuff. We have **validation points** for all of these things. Now it's a different vehicle. So, you know, shock shock interactions are, like I think I mentioned in with Electron like **plasma knives**. You have to manage those very very carefully. I can't give you a percentage confidence level, but I think it's in the medium to high kind of category. I think we'll have a good shot at getting the first one down. But there is other other things that are challenging there because obviously we have to we have to **relight the engine**. You've got **propellant management devices** to keep the propellant in you know in the down comers so that you can actually ignite the engine. **Sawyer Rosenstein:** What kind of overlap does **Rocket Lab** expect between **Electron** and **Neutron**? And eventually with Neutron being online, is there plans to **retire Electron**? **Sir Peter Beck:** No. **Electron is going nowhere**. The growth of the Electron vehicle and its cadence is just growing and growing and growing every year. And we just sell more and more Electrons every year. And that's fundamentally because Electron just does something completely different than any other vehicle that's on the market today. You can put Neutron on the pad and it can't do what Electron does. You're going to be spending $55 million for a dedicated flight, for a dedicated orbit on Neutron. Electron did for the **small launch market** what **Falcon 9** did for the medium-mass launch market. It just completely dislocated the the pricing and cadence structure. --- ### Interplanetary Focus: Venus (38:45) **Ryan Caton:** **Rocket Lab** has interplanetary ambitions coming up shortly. We have your private mission to **Venus**. I was just wondering if you could give us a little update of how things are coming along on that front at the moment. **Sir Peter Beck:** Well historically I think as we've pointed out that that's always been a, you know, a **nights and weekends kind of project**. And unfortunately, the amount of nights and weekends we're trying to get a launch vehicle to the pad right now are consumed. We haven't we haven't made tremendous progress on that. However, that should be changing shortly. That project will get a bit of a boost. The **re-entry capsule** is is complete. The **TPS** is complete. And the instrument is complete which are the, you know, long long poles. And now, you know, with **Neutron** coming online, we we no longer need to try and cram it into an **Electron**. So the aperture for the for the spacecraft is kind of opened up a little bit. **Ryan Caton:** Do you have a net date you're currently working towards or is it just it'll happen when it will happen? **Sir Peter Beck:** Well, there's there's some good opportunities obviously for **planetary alignment** in next year. So, it'd be great to see if we could get one, get it away next year. But I'm also, you know, just realistic. The amount of stuff that we've got on that's real paying work is is really high. So that always kind of takes a backseat, but hopefully we can we can improve that shortly. **Sir Peter Beck:** I'm fascinated with **Venus** and I think, you know, the some some of the discovery of some some life markers on Mars recently are super exciting, but it just it just so important to get to Venus and and have a look. So, you know, I'll be I'll be taking a much greater **personal interest** in that project here shortly. --- ### Mars Sample Return (41:36) **Ryan Caton:** Speaking about Mars, we should probably move on to discuss the red planet. It is a hot topic. Starting with **Mars Sample Return (MSR)**, NASA did that request for proposals for a more cost-effective commercial approach to do MSR. **Rocket Lab** is one of the companies offering a solution to **NASA**. In your opinion, how important is it to get Mars samples back to Earth for like full-on scientific analysis? **Sir Peter Beck:** I think it just highlights the fact that, man, we just need to get there and answer this question and and bring those samples home. I think it's it's **tremendously important**. I think there's probably, you know, half a dozen Nobel Priest prizes [Nobel Prizes] just just sitting on the surface of Mars right now. And, you know, the scientific discovery that that's available through those samples is enormous. They're like carefully carefully selected scientific treasure troves that that not only will give us some insight and discovery into into Mars but the **universe**. We just need to get them back here to Earth and get them in a lab and start unlocking some of these secrets of of both Mars and the universe. **Ryan Caton:** What are some of the biggest risks to conducting such a mission in your opinion? Literally, you know, going down to the surface of Mars and then returning those samples to Earth. **Sir Peter Beck:** Well, I think you have to look at the elements that **haven't been demonstrated before**, right? What hasn't been demonstrated is is **launching off Mars**, and that that is non-trivial. If you look at the most unproven, most complex element of the mission, I think we're we're in pretty good spot to give that a crack. **Electron** is an incredibly unique vehicle. It's payload mass fraction is really high for a small vehicle. **Ryan Caton:** Is **Rocket Lab** at all interested in doing a **private Mars Sample Return**? **Sir Peter Beck:** Man, I get in trouble for just, you know, spending a little bit of company money on **Venus**, let alone like spending, I don't think I could, I think I'd get fired as a CEO if I spent billions of dollars of of shareholder money trying to get samples back off Mars. MSR is is the perfect example of of, you know, why why governments do science because there's there is there is **no commercial justification** for doing it. It's 100% a scientific human good justification. --- ### Mars Telecommunications Orbiter (47:32) **Ryan Caton:** We should move on to talking about the **Mars Telecommunications Orbiter (MTO)** because that was of course a part of your proposal for your **Mars Sample Return** architecture. The current US administration is providing $700 million for an MTO. Why are you so interested in the MTO? **Sir Peter Beck:** Firstly, MTO was part of our MSR architecture and nothing happens without communications, great communications. You're not going to put a footprint on Mars until you have high bandwidth reliable, prolific, you know, communications on the surface of Mars. The saying, "**pixel it didn't happen**" is is is incredibly relevant here. Getting one critical element there is is really important. The MTO is a critical element to Mars Sample Return. It's also, you know, equally as critical element for **human landings** on the planet and it has to be there before the humans landing on the planet anyway. **Sir Peter Beck:** Our architecture is kind of like an **aerosynchronous orbit** or kind of think of it like a geo-geostationary orbit around Mars and, you know, high bandwidth communications obviously down to the surface, but also, you know, **laser coms** back to back to Earth. Our architecture is not a like a proliferated low Earth low Mars orbit architecture because, you know, the delay time from Mars to Earth is such that you don't need the really really quick surface to surface to satellite delay times. I just see it as like step one: are we going to go and collect the samples off the surface of Mars? Step one, Mars Telecommunication Orbiter. Are we going to land somebody on Mars? Step one, Mars Telecommunication Orbiter. **Ryan Caton:** What are you planning to actually use as the medium for communicating? **Sir Peter Beck:** Obviously you can have a traditional **RF link** that is obviously a big burden on **DSN** . We're starting to know quite a bit about **optical coms** these days. There has been some successful demonstrations of deep space optical coms. The **gold standard** here would be a laser optical relay link that would be the gold standard for for maximum bandwidth and kind of, you know, unburdening DSN. **Ryan Caton:** Do you plan to rely on the DSN or are you going to be doing your own relays back to Earth? **Sir Peter Beck:** In some respects, this is this is up to the customer right up to NASA as well. The blue sky architecture, I mean, we think an **optical relay link** is by far that solves all of the problems. It unburdens DSN and you can have a relatively, you know, boring and simple RF link back to Earth if needed be or, you know, even even look for for optical comms right back to surface. **Ryan Caton:** What actually makes **Rocket Lab** in your opinion the best qualified provider to provide this service to NASA should they want it? **Sir Peter Beck:** Objectively, if you if you stand back and you go, well, it's hard to get to Mars. So putting a a a **low orbiting constellation** that requires replenishment every five years is probably not a good plan. So that's why we like the architecture of something in very high Earth orbit that's got a, you know, **10, 20, 30 year lifetime**. We have some very unique expertise in things like **optical coms**. We're no stranger to Mars. We have a tremendous amount of hardware sitting on Mars. We have the most amount of, you know, **solar power** on Mars. And we've got two spacecraft, **Escapade**, that are that are on on the on their way to Mars later this year. **Ryan Caton:** Would this be a **bespoke platform**? **Sir Peter Beck:** In the President's budget, it has to be awarded by '26 and launched by '28. The way you can operate and turn around a complicated spacecraft in that time frame is to take stuff that you've got. It's a, you know, derivative of our, you know, **Explorer bus**. It uses some **Pioneer bus** parts and, of course, it's a communications platform so that uses some of the **Lightning bus** stuff. We're in a unique scenario where, you know, we've got enough platforms and enough components in house that, you know, it's it's it's literally go to the **Rocket Lab catalog** and start selecting the bits out of it that you want. **Sawyer Rosenstein:** **PM Rusty** saying **Rocket Lab** has indicated they may look at **partnerships** into the foray into commercial constellations for their own space applications. Are there any partnership ideas under consideration? **Sir Peter Beck:** From a Mars perspective, you know, obviously we'll partner with folks like **JPL** who have experience operating in Mars. But with respect to kind of other, you know, commercial entities, no, I think we've got everything we need to to be able to do that that particular project. **Sawyer Rosenstein:** Is the goal to kind of stick with the **one Mars telecommunication orbiter** or expand that network a bit? **Sir Peter Beck:** I think it would be great to have a, you know, **two or three of them**. But, I mean, you know, what we're focused on and I think what's important is like how do you get max, how do you like saturate the planet in maximum coms for the for the longest period of time for the **lowest price**. The most sensible thing to do is is start with a, you know, a very long longevity kind of designed and and operational spacecraft to just, like I say, just saturate the service with with coms. ### Closing Remarks (59:41) **Sawyer Rosenstein:** Fantastic. Thank you so much again for your time, Ryan, and I'll throw it back to you. **Ryan Caton:** I will say during the show I did get a message and that message said that we will like as a confirmation before the first launch of **Neutron** we will make sure there is an **Electron** launch in the **NSF intro**. **Sir Peter Beck:** There you go. There you go. Personally, I think it it reflects more poorly on you guys than me but there you go. **Ryan Caton:** Well, thank you very much. We always appreciate viewer feedback. So, thank you very much, **Peter Beck**. Thank you very much for coming on the show. It's been wonderful talking to you as always. It's Yeah, it's brilliant to see what you guys are up to right now over at **Rocket Lab**. And fingers crossed it's a very exciting next couple of years coming up. **Sir Peter Beck:** Awesome. Thanks very much, guys. Always love talking to you. It's awesome. **Ryan Caton:** And of course, thank you to **Sawyer** as well for joining me answering all or asking all of the questions from the chat room as well. Thank you very much, Sawyer. **Sawyer Rosenstein:** Absolutely appreciate all the questions and very much appreciate your time once again, Peter. Thank you. **Sir Peter Beck:** No, I love it. Thanks, guys. Cheers. **Ryan Caton:** And of course, thanks to Jay in the background pushing all the buttons, producing today's show. With that, my name's been **Ryan Caton**. Thank you very much for joining us, and we will see you next time. Bye-bye.