[[Home|🏠]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> [[Interviews]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> June 13 2024 **Insider**: [[Peter Beck]] **Source**: [Off-Nominal](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo-IGp-agiI) **Date**: June 13 2024  🔗 Backup Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo-IGp-agiI ## 🎙️ Transcript >[!hint] Transcript may contain errors or inaccuracies. **Anthony:** Hey Jake! Happy, uh, I was going to say happy Thursday, but we're splitting the date line today. I think it's Friday morning down there, right? **Peter Beck:** Yep, yep, as usual ahead of time... **Jake:** Nice. Look at you! It really is Friday somewhere. **Peter Beck:** Yeah, it's quite early though. **Jake:** There's times of the year we've always said, "Oh, we haven't really had anyone from the southern hemisphere on." It's mostly because everyone's located in the southern hemisphere at a place in which our time slot just generally doesn't work. So we got to get the right time of the year when Daylight Saving Time maps up correctly and it's a reasonable hour for everybody. We did finally figure this out—this has been long awaited. You were on WE Martians at least once, right? **Peter Beck:** Yeah, a couple years ago we got to talk about the Venus mission, but yeah, it's been a while for that too. **Anthony:** So we're overdue, both of us, Anthony and I think, for having this. We've just been dying to talk about mostly rocket bikes, so I feel like there hasn't been a public reckoning of the rocket bikes since Ashley Vance's book came out, so we got to get into that. But yeah, we're going to have some hardball questions about rocket bikes, so I hope you're ready for that. **Peter Beck:** Totally, totally. I can tell you everything you need to know about a rocket bike. ### Drinks and Introductions **Anthony:** Should we do some drinks first here? What you got, something good there? What are you drinking? **Jake:** Yeah, I'm still in my white wine world, but I'm on to the Soave now. So I'm moving around the Italian peninsula a little bit over the course of the summer. **Peter Beck:** Nobody told me that we could be drinking in this thing. I would have insisted on like a nice New Zealand Pinot Noir. That would be great at 8 a.m. **Jake:** I love that energy that you're bringing to this. **Peter Beck:** It's Friday! Even though I'm down in New Zealand, I kind of operate on US time anyway, so I'm up super early. It's basically, you know, the same time as you as far as I'm concerned. **Jake:** Do you have a brand you recommend? Do you have a shout-out for a New Zealand wine? **Peter Beck:** Mission Estate—they're very good, very good wine. **Jake:** Mission Estate, okay. **Anthony:** I really want to visit New Zealand, so having some wine recommendations will be important, some clutch wine recommendations for sure. There's like one New Zealand white wine that's sold in stores in the Philadelphia area. It's Nobilo or something, N-O-B-I-L-O. It's like a blue label, a Sauvignon Blanc of some sort. I see it all over the place, so whoever that is got a huge distribution deal on the east coast of the US. Good for them. **Jake:** I got a fun one today. This is just a little craft beer called Bala de Plata—Silver Bullet beer. It's got this really cool label, it looked like a rocket. That's the only reason I picked it out. **Anthony:** Silver rocket on the show with Peter Beck, it's great. **Jake:** But I am repping the brand otherwise, though. I got this. **Peter Beck:** Nice, nice. An OG merchandise, I think. **Jake:** Are you drinking coffee or anything, Peter? **Peter Beck:** No, I can't drink coffee. It puts me to sleep, to be honest with you. I have like a millisecond high, and then I'm just instantly asleep, which is frustrating as all heck because I love the smell of coffee, I love the taste of coffee, I love everything about it, but I just can't drink it. **Jake:** Can you do like a tiramisu or something? **Peter Beck:** Oh totally, yeah. **Anthony:** The guy who's like, "Drink Pinot Noir at 8 a.m." is also the guy who's like, "Coffee will put me to sleep." **Peter Beck:** We've already established it's not 8 a.m. **Anthony:** That's true. Come on, make me sound bad. **Peter Beck:** It is whatever time it is here, body clock is not the same. **Jake:** I get it. ### The Rocket Bike **Anthony:** Okay, well, we probably should start off with a question of—obviously you're the rocket bike guy, but I assume these days you're making all the money from bike services. Is that fair? **Peter Beck:** Yeah, yeah, that would be fair. The trouble with the rocket bike is the most unique thing about that bike was you have no steering. So if you ever see a video of me riding it, you'll notice that I kind of kick frantically off the line and get it all stable, tuck my legs up, tuck my arms in, and then make sure it's all stable and push the button. Because if you literally have any steering angle or any lean on, it's just—think of it like a bullet, it just goes in that trajectory. So wherever you point it, you go, and then once you light it, you're basically just hanging on. So you have almost no control over its direction. It always looks extremely comical when you see me first start because I'm kind of, you know, dangly legs, sort of pushing this thing to try and get it up to enough speed that I can tuck in and then go, desperately trying to make sure it's pointed in the right direction before committing. **Jake:** And you found this out how? What was the learning series for that? **Peter Beck:** There was... yes, the learning curve is steep, to put it lightly. **Anthony:** Did you know when you got together with Ashley Vance that you were going to be getting into the depths of that story? Were you prepared, or did you like accept the interview and you were like, "Oh shit, I realize now that I'm going to get into all this backstory"? **Peter Beck:** To be honest with you, I stonewalled Ashley for years upon years. So the amount of information that he was able to extract is impressive given the amount of information that I gave him. All credit to Ashley to be able to—I think a lot of the information he got wasn't from me. He had to really work for it through external sources. **Jake:** That's interesting. He didn't bring that up on this show. **Anthony:** No, he didn't. I'm curious, but when he did come in though, I would love to hear sort of like what it's like from your perspective when you bring a journalist in like that. What is that like? I mean, I guess you probably hope it doesn't change your behavior in any way to have an observer, but it always kind of does a little bit. So I'm curious to see what is that like to kind of have someone who's, you know, paying attention to everything you're doing. Do you learn anything from them about what they choose to write down? **Peter Beck:** Not really. Ashley didn't spend a huge amount of time with us, and I guess it's fair to say you're always conscious when you're talking to folks. But what you see is what you get here. There's no creation going on really. We are what we are, we are who we are, we've got our faults. We do some stuff well, we do some stuff poorly, and it is what it is. That's just how it is. **Jake:** How did you feel about the peers that were written about in that book, like the set that he selected? Were you like, "All right, this, I get the theme here"? **Peter Beck:** I thought it was a good set. I would have liked to seen Virgin Orbit in there, to be honest, because I remember when I started Rocket Lab, Virgin Orbit was still Virgin Galactic at that point. I can remember going around all the VC firms, and the number one question I got was like, "Okay, you're from New Zealand, your country has no industry, you're raising a relatively small amount of money to compete with Virgin," and we were never ever the perceived winner in that small launch game. Virgin Orbit raised exactly $1.1 billion more than we did to get to first orbit. So it would have been great to see Virgin Orbit's story in there because I think that was the missing element. Everywhere I went to try and raise money, they were the pre-ordained winners. **Anthony:** That's really interesting. So there's a little extra behind the factory purchase is what you're telling us? **Peter Beck:** Just a little. There's a little good feeling behind it. **Anthony:** Fair enough. Long Beach is nice. **Peter Beck:** I think it's pleasing that all of that work and all of that infrastructure and all of that capital is now being put to work flat out on Neutron and other things. So in one respect it died, in another respect it was reborn. I think all of the people that worked so hard there should certainly take solace in the fact that all of their work has not gone in vain. **Jake:** I do love that you got the money either way. That's a lovely, that's a nice ironic win. I love it, it comes back around. ### Neutron Development **Anthony:** Neutron is definitely a whole wing of the show we should probably get into because you're at an interesting moment. Last time we talked, it was early days for the world knowing about Neutron, and now you're in the depths of it at this moment. Can you maybe back off that and just kind of give us an understanding for what the Neutron setup is going to be when this thing is totally rolling? Is that facility out in California home of Neutron production and all that, and then it would be heading over to Wallops for launch? I know there's a new facility out in the Maryland area or something. I'm just kind of trying to understand the map that you've got going. **Peter Beck:** So firstly, I'd say that whenever somebody looks at a rocket program, everybody looks at the rocket, and I would say that the rocket is probably 20% of the work and the capital. 80% of the work and the capital is everything else—the infrastructure around the actual rocket. So factories, launch sites, engine test facilities. The general gist is that the Long Beach facility, the old Virgin facility, is now called the Engine Development Center or EDC, and that currently produces Electron's Rutherford engine and all of the Neutron Archimedes engines. That's an end-to-end production line just spitting all of those engines out. Then we have the Middle River facility where we have a very large automated fiber placement machine, which is almost like a 3D printer for composite. Instead of printing 0.1 of a millimeter at a time, you're literally laying down meters a minute of carbon fiber in big wide strafes. **Jake:** So those are like, what, SP weave things? **Peter Beck:** No, it's a tape winder, a tape layer. Think of a giant mold and then a CNC machine head, and basically the head just zips in there laying down fiber backwards and forwards. Very, very efficient, used tremendously in the aviation industry for making fuselages and tail planes and all those kinds of things. But you measure it in like meters of carbon fiber laid per minute—it's just awesome. So the Middle River facility is really doing those large composite structures and some integration. Then the integration facility just outside the gates of Wallops does the final assembly of the launch vehicle. Then spread around the various other facilities, we have component-level stuff, component-level development. Like down here in New Zealand, there's a whole bunch of TVCs and bits and pieces spread across there. And then in Mississippi, we have the engine test facility. That's where all the engines go to test. It's kind of a little bit spread out, but actually pretty concentrated on the east coast in a lot of respects. That's kind of the gist of it. Now, the lovely thing about Middle River is it's an old Lockheed building that used to build Geminis, I think. So it's right on the water, and the rocket literally rolls out onto the barge. The barge rolls up the sea to Wallops, and then we're right there at the pad. So from a logistic standpoint, really, really efficient. **Jake:** I was going to ask that because it's obviously very close to Wallops. I was like, can you put that on a highway? I don't know if you can, it's totally too big for the highway, right? So you got a boat to just go through the bay or whatever, right? **Peter Beck:** Exactly. **Anthony:** Well, you guys know how much I love marine assets, so I'm making sure that I get the maximum use out of marine as possible. **Jake:** We were talking on the pre-show about how big the US is and how much space we've got, and the fact that you think that is close to Wallops is hilarious as someone who has driven that length many times. It's not close to Wallops, it's close if you zoom out. **Peter Beck:** But in the grand scheme of rockets, it's a lot closer than Falcon is to his launchpad, it's a lot closer than Vulcan is to his launchpad, it's a lot closer than Saturn or Shuttle ever were. It's close for rockets. **Jake:** That's fair. Those ULA rockets, they go, they take boats on rivers for a long distance. **Anthony:** I know that New Zealand has such a rich heritage in composites for sailing ships and stuff. Did you manage—does any of that heritage and skill and talent—has any of that been able to be transferred into your operation in the United States? If a New Zealander who makes those ships came into your rocket family, would he be able to point out stuff that's like, "Oh yeah, that's how we do it"? Is there any kind of character to that that managed to transfer over? **Peter Beck:** Definitely. Even in my background, when I was working for a government research institute, it was in supporting advanced composite structures for the America's Cup boats. So even my grounding is kind of there. But yes, I would say that New Zealand has an international reputation of doing very difficult and unique things with carbon composite structures. The US obviously has unique capabilities as well. It's not unusual to see Kiwis running around our US composite factories and facilities for sure. So it's a very seamless integration there. ### Carbon Fiber vs. Stainless Steel **Jake:** Let's keep the carbon fiber theme for a minute. So you've got Electron and Neutron, big size difference here. I'm curious to know, in the era that we're in now where Starship is doing its thing as a stainless steel rocket, and there was a whole branch of its history that was going to be carbon fiber—it's still like the one question I want to ask Elon Musk, like the day that they decided to make that switch or the day they officially said, "We're switching, we're trashing that big mandrel, we're going stainless steel direction." I feel like that's been explained in various ways throughout the years, but I'm curious in the lifecycle of Neutron design, did you put up other options when you were thinking about a bigger rocket, and what was it that said, "No, what we started with the carbon fiber branch here is the right decision for something as big as Neutron"? **Peter Beck:** Absolutely. Here's the thing—there's no silver bullet in this industry. Everything is an engineering compromise, everything is a compromise. The advantage with stainless steel is thermally it's got some great resistance, but the advantage with it is that if you want to iterate quickly, you can just weld stuff together and move and change designs very, very quickly. The downside with composites is you have to build the tooling to make the part. When you build the tooling, it's very difficult to iterate on that kind of outer mold line because it's new tooling. So that would make an iterative process very, very slow. The disadvantage with stainless steel is it's four times heavier per unit strength than carbon fiber. So for the same strength, it's four times the weight. The advantage with carbon fiber obviously is it's four times lighter for the same mass. So there's plusses and minuses. If I'm Elon and I'm looking at Starship, where you're going to be doing a tremendous amount of iterative design, then it's not feasible to build it out of composite because the time it takes to build the tooling would not be conducive to a highly iterative approach. Stainless steel is wonderful, but the challenge with stainless steel is it's very, very heavy. Where that drives other trades is: now you have to have extremely high-performance propulsion systems. So you put all of the compromise, if you will—you've got heavy structures, so if you've got heavy structures, then you need higher ISP and higher thrust and higher performance out of your engine. And that's the trade you make. The trade we made with Neutron is we know exactly the vehicle we want to build. There is no iteration cycle that's required, so we're happy to go in and tool that thing straight away. We end up with very, very lightweight structures, incredibly lightweight structures. I mean, the upper stage—the whole upper stage, 5-meter diameter tank of Neutron—weighs the same amount as a Harley-Davidson. **Anthony:** Everybody—it's not just the Americans that use weird units of measure! **Jake:** All right, listen, back off! Get out of here with the dishwashers in my football fields! We got a new one—Harley Davidson! I love it. **Peter Beck:** Exactly. And you think of Centaur—it's light, and it really is an amazing thing, but our Neutron upper stage makes Centaur look like an obese person. But what that means for us is, if you break it all down and you're trying to build a reusable rocket, what is the bit that from a reusability standpoint is one of the most complex? That's the propulsion system, its engines. What it enabled us to do is build engines that have a very, very benign operating point because our structures are so light, our performance out of our engines need to be very modest. If you're sitting on an aircraft and you're flying across the Pacific Ocean, hopefully coming to visit me in New Zealand one day, and you look out on the wing at that turbine, you do not want that turbine running on the ragged edge. You want that turbine just sitting in a real comfortable place. That's exactly what we've been able to achieve with Neutron. Those engines, their life will be measured not in seconds, not in minutes, but in hours, if not more. So that was the engineering compromise that we made. We traded lightweight structures, put the challenge in the structures and taken all the challenge out of the engine. **Jake:** Does that mean like you're coming to the end of the—well, maybe not the end, but you're deep into the development cycle for Archimedes. Do you find that that played out? Do you find that the development of that engine, because it didn't have to push so many boundaries, like did it happen easily and quicker than it may have if you had gone a different direction? Do you feel like that played out? **Peter Beck:** Engine design is always complex, but we weren't worried. We were lucky to have a whole bunch of the SpaceX Raptor team come and join us to develop Archimedes, and they're not trying to do pre-burners at 11,000 PSI. Our chamber pressure is like 2,000 PSI. Our biggest challenge to date with Archimedes is actually getting the pre-burner to operate so cold, not so hot, because it's such a benign operating point. That was actually the challenge of the pre-burner elements—to get them to light and run reliably at such cold temperatures. **Anthony:** That's interesting. **Jake:** Don't know what to do with that one, to be honest. Not smart enough. **Peter Beck:** But that's where you want to be. You don't want to be worrying about melting your turbine off. You want to be at the other point of that design envelope. **Jake:** Does that also mean though that you have headroom there, and that's something that you and the team would plan to eat into eventually if you want to get to a reusable upper stage or something that's more complex or human launch vehicles or things that would use up that other margin? Is that something that you kind of keep in the back of your head? Is it something that you would plan on? **Peter Beck:** We could, but it kind of defeats the purpose. What we're trying to build here is just an incredibly efficient reusable rocket. The moment you start cranking this thing up, everything is a giant trade. I want an engine that I can land the stage back, bring it back, walk up to it, do a couple of visual inspections, and carry on. That's where we need to be. **Anthony:** So like a Toyota Corolla of rockets, basically? **Peter Beck:** Yeah. **Jake:** I believe you, but also see Electron. I think it was one of the early shows, I was like, "You going to stretch this thing at all?" And you're like, "Nah, it's—we like the height of it." And I was like, "All right." And then I was like, "Well, I don't think he was lying, but certainly things change in Electron over time," and it's—oh, that's a natural flow of things. **Peter Beck:** Don't get me wrong, it totally will change, but I guess the reusability and reliability-to-design ethos is fundamental. That's like the tentpole of this versus where Electron was coming from. **Jake:** Exactly. So I'd be disappointed if we ended up with an engine that was a grenade and everything was just pushed to the absolute limits. That would be a failure of the program, in my opinion. But also, everybody—we joke here at Rocket Lab—it's like, nobody ever asks for more thrust. Of course, everybody asks for more thrust. There's always other areas of launch vehicle that don't meet the performance that you hope for. Certainly modest improvements of those kinds of things are very easy gains, but we hope we end up in that design ideal that we really want to be. ### Neutron Launch Timeline **Anthony:** A lot of people are curious about the launch date. Obviously, is 2024 still on the table? Do you think this thing's coming up, or is there changes to that? Because I know I've heard that date, and a lot of people are skeptical of it. I might be skeptical of it too, so I'm curious to see what you think. **Jake:** Surprised that none of us believe launch dates, Jake, like, just generally. **Anthony:** I mostly ignore dates, to be fair. **Peter Beck:** No, we already updated that. I think last earnings call we're targeting for mid-25 now. **Jake:** Mid-'25? **Peter Beck:** Yep. **Anthony:** That's still pretty soon. **Peter Beck:** It is. We say to everybody, these are targets, but it's a rocket program. Sometimes you get dealt a happy card, happy deck of cards, and sometimes you don't. As every day goes by, we get greater visibility to that launch date and the probability thereof as we move further and further down the program. But you can get right to the very end in an all-integrated stage test and have an issue. That's our target, that's where we think it's landing right now, but we're always cautious that it's a rocket program. **Jake:** One of the things we've been talking about on the show recently with Artemis and Vulcan and some of these other vehicles that are out there is the way that manifests build out. We've almost started joking that the distance between the second and third launch is the most telling aspect of an architecture. Like the Artemis or Vulcan situation that they're in with the payload shifting and needing engines and all this—you might have—"We're not going to be able to get to our third launch until really far in the distance, so the second launch is going to be delayed a bit, and it will fill that gap." You kind of have this thing in early programs where stuff predictably happens at the first mission or two, and it fills—it kind of obscures the fact that mission three is farther away. Now, in the Rocket Lab world, even with Electron early days, you were talking about, when competitors were out there still talking about their first launch, you were really harping on, "Yes, but it's this whole production line, it's the operations, it's flying with pace." Knowing that that's Rocket Lab's situation over the years, what was it that came out of the Electron world and fed into Neutron in terms of planning? Did you plan stuff differently this time, having that whole Electron rep in your past? **Peter Beck:** 100%. We've been very public with what we expect about the Neutron launch cadence. It's like 1, 3, 5. So that's in years: one, and then three the next year, and then five. **Jake:** Nobody could expect to do better. Oh my God, insanity. **Peter Beck:** I feel like a bit of an old person in the industry now. I even got the gray hairs to prove it. I can remember sitting on the stage at a Space Symposium proclaiming how we were going to commoditize launch and all this. Man, there's nothing like the launch gods to bring a baseball bat to your face and put you into reality. This is why productionizing a rocket, or productionizing anything for that matter, but a rocket especially, is just vastly more complicated than putting your first one on the pad. I look back at Electron, and it's all that really unsexy stuff—like supply chain, ERP systems, MRP systems, work instructions, quality. These are all the things that nobody ever sees but are the things that make a production line go. Your first rocket, you have all of your engineers pouring over it in the most excruciating detail, taking care of absolutely every little thing, knowing everything there is to know about the design of how something should be. Then on your 20th rocket, you have technicians reading work instructions, and some of those technicians can be brand new, that have just arrived and are in training, but yet everything has to be flawless. Creating a production system to allow that is so difficult, but also really transferable. The production system we developed for Electron is what we use in our Space Systems, and it's also what we're using for Neutron. A lot of that base infrastructure is kind of built, so we feel very privileged to have that. When you're going from zero as a new rocket company, if I could go back in time and give myself one piece of advice, it would be: prepare for how hard this is. **Anthony:** I fully believe—I have no problem believing anything you just said there. That is such a hard, hard issue. I mean, it's documentation, it's training, it's a culture, it's getting people to—it's to have a system that can accommodate people who make mistakes or quit or are slow, or what—you know, you have to have something that's robust to—or drink wine at 8:00 on Fridays, you know? **Peter Beck:** You know what if your CEO drinks wine at 8:00 a.m. on a Friday? Does the system still work? **Jake:** This is totally unfair. You guys are creating a persona that—anybody after one glass of wine... **Anthony:** I mean, there's probably time for someone behind the camera here to go and grab one for you before we get to the end of the show. I'm just gonna say that one out loud there. With how good the set looks, they got time to do all sorts of stuff. The lighting's great, this is the best lighting anyone's had on the show. **Peter Beck:** We've had professional YouTubers. It's all down to James. He runs all of the live streams, and you guys know what it takes to put a live stream together. There's a tiny little team here at Rocket Lab that produce all of our live streams, and they do a great job. **Jake:** Shout out to the people running the tech. ### Electron Lessons Learned **Anthony:** One thing you were getting at, and I'm curious about, is the thing that when you think back, you wish you did different with Electron out the gate. And what, if any, of those are still lingering? Is there a thing that is on Electron that the engineers are like, "Man, if we could just solve this one thing or tweak that, or I wish we made a different decision here"? What are the things that bug you and the team? What's the Electron tech debt? **Peter Beck:** To be honest with you, I don't look at things like that because all the decisions we made were made with the right information at the right time. I'm sure there's a number of things that I would love to have yield differently or we could have done differently, but honestly, I think the team did an amazing job. The first Electron that flew and the number 50 that's on the pad right now—if you stood in front of those two vehicles and looked at it, they don't look any different. There was no massive redesign of system, there was no minimum viable product just to get to the pad to show some investors we could do it. That thing was built for production on day one. **Anthony:** You did make 50, so that's a thing. **Peter Beck:** There's always things that with infinite time and infinite capital, you could streamline, but I think that has been some of the magic and the success of Rocket Lab. We have a core, fundamental belief here: build beautiful things. It's kind of like our Archimedes as well. We could have put a copper chamber on a test stand and made some fire a year ago and looked great for an investment pitch or anything. No, we put the engine on that stand that is in production. That's the difference. The Archimedes engine that's there now is going to look the same as the Archimedes engine that's going to go in orbit. Our approach here is focus on the engineering, focus on the end goal, and don't get polluted by perverse, fake goals on the way through. **Jake:** That's interesting. I like the classification of fake goals. That's a good one. **Anthony:** Have you had any fake goals crop up that you were like, "No, that's—I realize now that's a fake goal, we should stop doing that plan"? Is there anything that's come up in the past? **Peter Beck:** I'm sure, because sometimes you want to achieve something and feel like you're achieving something, and this is the challenge. This is why I say Neutron right now is the best part of the program, because for the first year and a bit, it's just all in CAD land. We're designing the rocket, and before we can make any of the toolings, the design of the rocket has to be finished. So you have to be very, very mature in your rocket design before you cut tooling for a composite rocket. It feels like nothing happened—probably does for the rest of the world on the outside, like nothing happened for a year on Neutron—but actually, it all happened in the first year. It's just no hardware. Right now, I say we're in the best time because all of the stuff is in our hands and we're testing hardware flat out. It's super exciting to see hardware turn up, all full of hope and promise, and you think it's going to be perfect. I'd say we're kind of in this honeymoon period where that is the case, but we're also learning what isn't perfect and what are the iteration cycles we need to do on particular pieces of things. We're transitioning out of the hardware honeymoon period into what is generally a pretty brutal period where you learn that actually that bit's not performing the way you want it to, and you've got to go back to it. So, everybody working on the program, enjoy right now because it's all downhill. **Jake:** Once you get into that integration stuff, it can go really off the rails. **Peter Beck:** But the good news is then it goes uphill very quickly because once you're integrating and on the pad, there's definitely a trough out there, that's for sure. ### Space Systems and Planetary Missions **Anthony:** So should we talk about some not-rocket stuff? I always make a joke that we have to stop calling Rocket Lab a rocket company because you're doing lots of other stuff now, maybe even more stuff than you are rockets. **Jake:** I have a duty as a planetary rep on this co-host duo to ask about a couple things. Actually, I want to start with ESCAPADE because are you still involved with the bus for that and everything? Is that still all go for you? **Peter Beck:** Yeah, we built the whole thing. ESCAPADE is—oh man, there's photos of it online. It's the most beautiful spacecraft, seriously. Whenever I get to headquarters, I literally walk past straight past my desk, gown up in clean room, and just go straight to ESCAPADE in the clean room, because that thing's going to Mars. The team has designed and built the most beautiful spacecraft, and we are on track to deliver that for launch. It's launching on Blue Origin's first vehicle, so we are on track to deliver that spacecraft. **Jake:** We gotta get that picture up there. I'm working on it. **Peter Beck:** Two of them! **Jake:** This is a big old... I don't know, this is the one that's on the site, but maybe this isn't recent enough. **Peter Beck:** I can't actually see it. **Jake:** There you go. Yeah. **Peter Beck:** There's better pictures than that, though. **Anthony:** I'll keep Googling. **Jake:** I mean, I'm curious. So you got that, and we have Venus. I think Venus is scheduled for—are you saying next year? That's kind of where we're at with that one, or the end of this year? **Peter Beck:** Venus is a passion project, and it's a nights and weekends thing. Of course, the challenge with Venus is that we've got a half-billion-dollar SDA contract to deliver, we've got MDA, Global Stars spacecraft to deliver, we've got the two ESCAPADE spacecraft to deliver, a whole bunch of spacecraft to deliver. So it's always kind of the poor uncle to all the real work. It's a huge passion of mine, and we continue to work on it, but we have to run the business first. If it happens next year, that'll be great. If it doesn't, Venus isn't going anywhere, and we'll get to it. But we have to deliver the projects first. **Jake:** I'm curious though, because those are two missions that go to domains that most of your other stuff is, you know, sticking around Earth kind of thing, right? You got some components on things like—I think you got solar panels on Psyche, I think—that's your stuff. But the bigger question is, what are you learning from exploring the solar system as you're building those systems to work in those environments? I'm curious to know if there's any kind of feedback loop between systems going back to, quote unquote, "the real work" you say, as you're going back and building these other satellites and rockets stuff. I'm kind of curious to know what, technologically, from an engineering standpoint, is going back and forth between those kind of things because they kind of seem like different domains. **Peter Beck:** What I will say is if you can build two spacecraft to go to Mars and operate around Mars, you can pretty much build anything. That's kind of one of the reasons why I was so keen on the project, apart from an unhinged kind of planetary desire. We really focus on doing the difficult stuff. If you look at all of our spacecraft and all of our programs, they're all crazy difficult. ESCAPADE, great example. Take VADA—that is a platform that hosts a capsule. We are responsible for all the trajectory and propulsion and targeting to reenter that capsule and land it in the desert. Ridiculously hard thing to do—it's a spacecraft that has a big ball of propulsion on board and a whole bunch of parachutes. That is not a basic bus, very difficult. The MDA Global Star mission—very, very long lifespan operating in an incredibly difficult radiation environment. This is not your small sat bus. There's a half-ton thing wallowing in the worst radiation you can imagine that requires an uptime of extremely high. So once again, really difficult. Capstone to the moon was another great example—crazy difficult. So we do this really difficult stuff because we're really good at that really difficult stuff. But what it does mean is you're kind of right—you do these difficult things and then everything else becomes relatively simple after that. What I'm trying to build here is an end-to-end space company, and I think that the large space companies of the future are not going to be a company that just focuses on launch or just focuses on building satellites. The large space companies of the future are going to look like Rocket Lab, where a customer comes to you and says, "Hey, I want some telecommunications over Brazil," and you go, "Okay," and you build the satellite, you deploy the satellite, you operate the satellite, and you just provide that service. Because anybody who wants to provide a service from space has to become like domain experts in how to build a satellite and how to launch a rocket and how to operate in space, and the barrier there is extraordinarily high. I think you can look at the Starlink example. Nobody can compete with internet from space unless you have your ability to build your own satellites, your ability to launch them on your own rocket, and at scale. We're trying to build the same kind of model there. We can go to Mars, so if you want to do a comm satellite in low Earth orbit, that's no big deal at all—that's piece of cake. We'll have Neutron online shortly, and we can deploy those en masse with Neutron. So I really think that is what we're trying to build, and that's what all large space companies of the future are going to look like. I think we will quickly remove this idea of just a launch company or just a satellite company. **Jake:** Emphasis on the "lab." Future rebrand—just drop the "rocket." **Anthony:** That's great. Well, do you know the story with the name Rocket Lab, how it came about? **Peter Beck:** As I was sitting on the plane back from my rocket pilgrimage in America, starting Rocket Lab—shows how innovative I am in the naming convention, but what am I doing? Rockets. And I was worried that I'm this Kiwi from a country with no rocket experience, I have no aerospace degree. I needed something that would give us a little bit of credibility, so call something a "laboratory" and all of a sudden it sounds sciency and techy. So, ah, Rocket Lab, yep, that works. And that was the name. **Jake:** I have a very Canadian analogy to that exact thinking. I used to live in Edmonton, Alberta, and back when Alberta was becoming a province, they were trying to pick the capital of this province, and all the cities were sort of applying. Edmonton got the job, and the way they did it is, in their application, it said, "Where are you going to put the legislature?" They were still naming the streets—it was a very small town. So instead of the middle of their town being like Main Street or whatever and then going first, second, third, they made the middle 100th and 100th. And then it made the legislature address going to be like whatever-whatever-100th Avenue, and that made the city look a lot bigger than it actually was. **Peter Beck:** There were two options: it was name it after the guy picking, or prop it up. ### Planetary Protection Requirements **Anthony:** A small tangent question on the planetary stuff, just because I have you on the horn here and I want to take the opportunity. Mars, Venus, Moon—all of those have some degree of planetary protection requirements, and I'm really curious to hear a perspective from a service provider. How is it working with those policies? Because they're kind of a weird mishmash of not quite clear things, and it's not super clear who's in charge of them half the time, and it seems an interesting requirement to work with. I'm just kind of curious to know how that impacted your design decisions. Was it easy to work with, was it difficult? **Peter Beck:** It's pretty easy for us because at least the Capstone and the Mars missions are NASA, so we just follow the NASA planetary standards. I don't know, call me a geek, but I think it's quite cool. I love the fact that when I go into the clean room to go and look at ESCAPADE, I have to go through an extra layer of planetary protection so that I don't put Pete-germs on Mars. I think that's just cool. I think it's responsible. Maybe there's other members of the team that have to experience it that I don't, but I think that's fine. I think the interesting one is going to be Mars Sample Return. It's going to be interesting because, of course, you don't want to bring anything to Mars, but equally well, if you're bringing something back, it should be dead. I think planetary protection is kind of inverted in that sense. So that'll be a really interesting one to follow. **Jake:** I know it's a practice that's been undergoing a lot of changes over the last few years. Planetary protection's had a lot of eyes on it, mostly because there's lots of different things happening. One of those being people like you are getting into the space, and even if it's a NASA mission, it's never been like that before. You've got Mars Sample Return that's going to be the highest level of stringent requirements you're going to get, and we've never done that before. So there's lots of stuff happening in that world, and I was just kind of curious to see what you think of that. ### Lightning Round Questions **Anthony:** Lightning round things I've been thinking about with regards to various Rocket Lab projects over the years. One is, there was a thing like a year or two ago where Rocket Lab got some sort of agreement with NASA to look at payload return from low Earth orbit or something like that, and I feel like it never got full resolution. Was I having a fever dream, or was this actually a thing that happened? **Peter Beck:** You might have been confused because we had a Space Act agreement with NASA, and we still do, on the Venus reentry, Venus entry probe, on the heat shield. So using some their new materials for our probe for the Venus mission. That's the only thing I can think of that might be a line there. Obviously, we do the VADA reentry stuff, but... **Jake:** The paperwork seemed more interesting on that one than the space side. Things hung up there for a couple of months. **Peter Beck:** All credit to the team—they're doing, they're pushing the boundaries and doing new stuff. I think there was a lot of learning that had to be done there, and they managed to get through it. **Anthony:** Next random thing: I cannot figure out the size of the fairing on Neutron. Something about it, I feel like it looks too small, but maybe I'm just not sure of where the second stage ends and the fairing technically begins. There's like a tube part of this. Can you give us some estimates or comparisons between what the effective area would be in there versus some of the other competitors in that 5-meter class at the moment? **Peter Beck:** It's all on par with all 5-meter class. You're exactly right: we no longer have fairings, we have a nose cone, because the fairings aren't jettisoned. The nose cone is just an aerodynamic inconvenience, and it just needs to do the job of a nose cone. Yes, a lot of the payload is buried sort of deeper into the interstage. That's probably quite an old image too. **Anthony:** You always say that every time I talk about an image! You always say it's out of date. **Peter Beck:** We're more worried about building the rocket than creating images. But yes, you're actually right—it is buried within that interstage a bit because from an engineering perspective, we want to keep the opening of those items or opening to the lowest mass possible. The larger this shell that you have to open, the more challenge you have with stiffness. So like I said, they're just an aerodynamic inconvenience, and we just need to actuate them—actuate the minimum amount possible. So the most efficient way is to suck the payload down a little bit. **Jake:** But is this like comparable with the short fairings on Falcon 9 or Vulcan, or I guess old Atlas 5—the shorter fairings, but not necessarily the extended Falcon 9 fairings or the super long confering? **Peter Beck:** I have to get back to you on that, exactly where we landed on that, but it's all kind of customer-driven anyway. A lot of the constellation is all pretty short stack anyway—it's mass limited first. And it's like any of these design points—everything is a trade, everything is a giant tradeoff. You can very easily find yourself in a situation where for a payload that represents 3% of the market, you remove 20% of the rocket's performance. All of those trades and decisions around those kind of things are very much customer-led and also being grown up about it. There will be some—it might be 3% of a particular category of missions that we just can't do, and that's fine because they represent 3% of the total market, and someone else can do those. **Jake:** I feel like you're doing fine in the NRO department anyway, so I feel like they'll be fine with it. **Anthony:** They would be happy if the entire rocket was a fairing. That's kind of where—so they'll figure out what to do with it. **Peter Beck:** All right, so you're talking some trash about this drawing. Can you tell us, can you describe with words what is new now? You're saying this is out of date. What's the current Neutron looking like these days? **Peter Beck:** It's looking pretty similar to that. Strakes are slightly different, canards are slightly different, fairings are definitely slightly different. They're all just sort of tweaks. One thing I would say is, you notice the upper stage—this is cool—the second stage is actually really tiny compared to the first stage. That's a bit of a hint at the design element here: put all the most amount of energy you can into the first stage because the first stage is the bit that you're reusing. With a non-reusable upper stage, you have a really competing set of requirements. It has to be the highest performance and the lowest cost. Generally, those two things collide, they don't converge. So for it to be the lowest cost, you need it to be really small and efficient. That's the thing that you always see is the upper stage compared to the first stage looks really small because the first stage is just doing so much work, as it should, because that's the bit that we're bringing back and reusing again and again. **Jake:** Doesn't that put you into the area though where entry and recovery starts to get harder? There's a tipping point somewhere in there where if you've got too much velocity in the first stage, it makes work a lot harder. So how do you actually dial in that balance? **Anthony:** The Vulcan problem. **Jake:** The Vulcan problem, what do you always call it? It's like the ground-lit upper stage. Jake's theory on—and Delta IV to some extent. **Peter Beck:** As I mentioned, everything is a trade, and if all the engineers are sitting in the room, every leader of every discipline, and they're all unhappy, then I know I've done my job exactly right. If they all think the others should be solving their problem, then good start—that's how you know you've reached the optimum design point. But the interesting thing about Neutron as well is we don't have a deceleration burn, and we've been able to do that from the learnings from Electron because obviously Electron has no burn at any point. We've really mastered how to reenter these kind of things without doing these deceleration burns and scrubbing off the velocity in that sense. So Neutron is unique in that factor as well. ### Invitation to Visit **Jake:** When can I come down to visit? When are you in Virginia next? That's my final question. **Peter Beck:** I'm all over the states, all over the world all of the time. So if we can get a calendar sync, that would be great. But mid-2025, I'm there for sure. **Jake:** Mid-2025! **Anthony:** I always tell Jake, when you go to see something there, it's great because it's like minor league Kennedy in the way that everything's a little closer and a little easier to access. The press site is arguably too close, and it's really loud. The first Electron I saw from there, I was like, "Damn, that thing's got a kick to it!" I've seen an Antares from there before, but I didn't know what it would—no one, I don't think, at that point—anyone had seen other than the team had seen an Electron from that close because the New Zealand site, you're pretty far out there. Although you're going to bring some launch photographers there—I don't know if people were asking if you've selected the photographers that are heading down, or that's still in process? **Peter Beck:** I'm not sure if we have it or not, but I'm looking forward to that. It'll be a good opportunity. **Jake:** Arianespace needs to take a note out of that book. The only thing that beats out how far you can watch an Electron from New Zealand is how far you watch an Ariane 5 or 6 from French Guiana. It is, from people that have been, forever away. **Peter Beck:** We're solving that at Wallops. Are we going to be able to stand that close for Neutron at Wallops? **Jake:** Big ass rocket, we're gonna be like two miles away from that thing? **Peter Beck:** All the hazard areas are all within limits. **Jake:** That's gonna be the best. That's awesome. ### Conclusion **Anthony:** Well, this has been fun. I appreciate hanging out. **Peter Beck:** Always great to hang out and get some questions asked. We kept Jake's planetary—scratched his itch a little bit. **Jake:** A little bit, yeah. I just want to see it fly. I can't wait. **Peter Beck:** Me too. And ESCAPADE is going to be an awesome mission. It's going to be really cool. **Jake:** What are you going to visit next? When ESCAPADE's out the door, what's the thing you're going to do? Europa? You said when he goes into work, he said he goes and visit ESCAPADE. What are you going to do now? **Peter Beck:** We always have to have one planetary interplanetary mission in the clean room. **Jake:** Just for your morning ritual? **Peter Beck:** My morning ritual, yeah. I think it's inspiring, it's super inspiring. It's hard to explain until you actually stand there and you go, "Man, this thing's going to another planet." That's cool, that's real cool. **Anthony:** Perfect ending. All right, y'all, what do we got next week, Jake? **Jake:** I think next week is Vulcan week. We're doing a bit of a tour of rocket executives. We're gonna have someone from ULA come on. Mark Peller's coming on, and we're gonna talk about Vulcan, and we're gonna ask him all the same questions about production, difference between the second, third launch—that's the big one, third launch. **Peter Beck:** Mark's great, so that'll be a great show. I'll look forward to watching that show. **Jake:** We're excited to have them. All right, well, Peter, thanks so much for coming on. This has been great. We appreciate the time, and good luck with launch 50. **Peter Beck:** Thanks very much. Look forward to seeing you all. **Jake and Anthony:** All right, bye everyone.