[[Home|🏠]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> [[Interviews]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> April 3 2025 **Insider**: [[Richard French]] **Source**: [Off-Nominal Episode 191](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50xR3qOCxPQ) **Date**: April 3 2025 ![](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50xR3qOCxPQ) 🔗 Backup Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50xR3qOCxPQ ## 🎙️ Transcript >[!hint] Transcript may contain errors or inaccuracies. **Jake:** Hello Jake. How's it going buddy? **Anthony:** Good man. Long time no talk. Yeah, I know. We did a secret one before this so we're tuned up. **Jake:** We did. We did a pre-recorded show. Yeah, tuned up. **Anthony:** I was mentioning this before we started. We got Richard French here from Rocket Lab who I've been told by many people that he's got the vibe. He's got the vibe in there. He's got the logo. He's got the vibe. How's it going Richard? **Richard:** *[Sound of opening a beverage]* You don't exist in a time zone. You're like the international airport of space companies. It's whatever time you want it to be. And we keep adding more. **Jake:** You could literally say it's 5:00 somewhere at a Rocket Lab facility. **Richard:** Extremely active. ### Beverages and Introductions **[01:13]** **Anthony:** All right. Well yeah, we're excited. We got here today to talk about Mars Sample Return, which you guys have been super active about. So we're really excited to talk about kind of what your ideas are and how it's going to work and where it fits into the new world. I don't know. We're going to see how this slots into the reality of today. So should be good. **Jake:** What did you crack open there? We want to see what you have. **Richard:** This is just a Kirkland sparkling water. So yeah, it's boring. Had a good sound to it. They got good carbonation. **Jake:** I'm doing round two, two weeks in a row. So this is the other one that I made. It was a double batch. I put vanilla and cinnamon in one. So this is the spiced one. So it's an apple cinnamon vanilla. They're all named after planets or moons. So this is Oberon. **Anthony:** I'm from Michigan and Oberon always signaled, you know, from Bells signaled the beginning of summer. **Richard:** I got a red wine which is also not daytime or seasonally appropriate, but I did work with this recently, this Merlot, and I was like "man it looks kind of nice today" so I'm pretty pumped. We got quite the spread here on the show. ### Mars Sample Return Strategy **[03:16]** **Anthony:** Where do we start? How are you going to crack this open? **Jake:** Well, there's been like seasons of Mars Sample Return. I feel like we've talked about it. There was the "hey this isn't going the right way" from the NASA side. Let's go out and look for proposals. Rocket Lab not included in the first round of those proposals gets added on, which I don't know if there's a story that can be told there. And then now you know since we got the can kicked down the road and everybody kind of was all right with it getting kicked down the road except Rocket Lab has been out there pounding the pavement trying to get this thing through everybody's head that Rocket Lab should do it. And I think that's where we've been intrigued from our side of like: is the strategy just like "let's ground game this and make sure that people know when they think of Mars Sample Return, they think Rocket Lab?" What's the strategy behind that? **Richard:** Well, you know we think Mars Sample Return should be done right. I mean, that's just the baseline, and the way MSR was proceeding, it was kind of on a path to cancellation. You know, it's getting too expensive and it was going to take too long. And we're kind of crazy about science at Rocket Lab. That was one of the things when I met Peter you know six plus years ago and he had this vision of an end-to-end space company. I was like, "Oh okay cool. We'll be able to build satellites. How do you feel about doing science missions? How do you feel about doing planetary missions?" He said, "I'm all about it." I said, "Okay, sign me up." And so this is really just the continued extension of this passion and strategy that we've had. And the more we studied it, the more we're like, "No, actually we can do this, or we should. We can do this in a way that balances cost schedule and risk." And it's the right strategy. **Jake:** This is really curious to me because the impetus to do Mars Sample Return has almost never been the question, right? Everyone agrees that it needs to get done. It's always just a matter of like when and how. Since there have been decadal surveys for planetary science, Mars Sample Return has floated to the top. I always kind of find it funny when I hear, and this is not a criticism, but you lead that off with "Oh, we think it should be done." I hear that a lot. I hear NASA gets on a call like "First of all, we just want to say that this is really important." Everyone seems to be affirming that it needed to be done. It's really interesting that everyone's just like "We want to make sure that nobody thinks that we think this is a bad idea." **Richard:** Yeah, I think it's actually important though because in the echo chamber that we're in, which is that we're crazy about space and we love space, it's all obvious to us. But somebody that maybe sits at the Office of Management and Budget or somebody that sits in a congressional office that has all these other priorities, they may need to hear stuff like that. **Jake:** Yeah, those keep coming up. Those are the times where we're not the audience. ### Business Strategy and Political Landscape **[07:00]** **Anthony:** So what is the strategy when you look at going out and communicating? I feel like it was either you or somebody at a conference recently that was out there talking about the Mars Return architecture. Peter's bringing it up all the time in interviews. Is there a map internally of how we would like to see this part of the process proceed from here? We've got a huge political upheaval going on right now with the NASA budget. This process that was announced last fall was like "we've got a year, a year and a half to figure this out again" before NASA's really going to commit to coming back with something, though we expect that to change when the Isaacman era kicks off. So when you're looking at it from a business strategy perspective, what are you trying to lobby NASA to put in place? Is it to rethink that punt a year and a half down the line? Is it to get some new contract mechanism in place? What would be the Rocket Lab solution to that? **Richard:** I think hopefully we've been clear about this. We're asking for leadership, which is action. Leadership should be leaning towards action, and that action is to empower the private sector and unleash the innovation and ingenuity capabilities in the commercial sector to bring solutions forward. That shouldn't wait. No more study is needed for us to do that. So we've called for competition. We called for something to happen this year that would allow one or more commercial solutions to get into Phase A, the standard mission processes, but to put ambitious goals in place - to do this on a cost and a schedule that makes it really relevant to the geopolitical situation but also palatable to the budget reality that we live in. ### Cost Savings and Technical Approach **[08:56]** **Jake:** I'm curious where you think that the program has opportunities because the initial problem we face here is that the price had climbed up to 10-11 billion or whatever number they had put together. Then we had this press conference as Bill Nelson was stepping out the door, and they came up with some ideas that they want to study and got the price down to seven or eight billion or something like that. To me that's like, "Yeah, congratulations on saving $4 billion," but you're still way out of line. And then you guys came in, and I think your number was somewhere in the four to five range. Is that about right? **Richard:** Yeah, we've been saying less than four. **Jake:** So how is it that your proposal is bridging an additional savings from both the original and the current plan of NASA? You're still beating both those like way out of the park. What's the difference? Where are they messing up? **Richard:** A few of the key features that allow us to hit that number: The first is that we're committing to an FFP contract. So we only get paid if we're successful. It's becoming an increasing standard with forward-leaning space acquisitions. A lot of the cost estimation with some of the other numbers that you're hearing are in the context of cost type agreements where it's sort of just assumed they'll keep growing, and there's not cost containment. So I think our agreement to do FFP is very important. Another is just that we're a single vertically integrated prime contractor. The existing MSR program was very much like everybody is involved - tons of NASA centers, tons of traditional contractors, the Europeans were involved. When you have all of those pieces to coordinate, interfaces to manage, and constituencies to keep happy, costs will be commensurate with that. We eliminate a lot of that with our single, vertically integrated prime contractor approach. And then we did what they asked us to do in the Rapid Architecture Studies - we simplified it. We brought forward a lot of technical innovations that we think are material in reducing the cost. We don't have complicated pera coupling, no dependencies on crewed operations which is some of the things being considered. We've got a single stage to orbit MAV. The MAV that was previously proposed was solid, multi-stage, had complicated mechanism, complicated ejection system. We really leverage a lot of our chemical propulsion expertise on that, solar powered systems, simplified robotics with partners that are proven. But one of the things that I really like about our proposal is that we're working with a lot of NASA centers. It's not about just like "NASA, you're out, we're just going to do it." It's we bring together the best of NASA capabilities, technology, test capabilities, analysis capabilities, with a commercial implementation. **[12:44]** A good example of that is working with NASA Ames on thermal protection technologies. You might have seen some tweets recently out of NASA Ames and our own feed about our Venus mission and how the Small Spacecraft Technology Program helped us out on our Venus mission with heat shield. We shipped the carrier structure to NASA Ames, they manufactured the TPS, they bonded it, and I think we're going to take it out of the box in like a week. **Jake:** I feel like this news went out and nobody noticed, and nobody talked about it. I was like, am I missing something here? Why is nobody paying attention to us? But it feels like a big piece of news. It's just a privately funded mission to Venus, looking for life. I mean, happens every day. **Anthony:** There was discussion in our circles of whether this was the real production spacecraft or if it was a test article because it was just not clear. **Richard:** Yeah, that's the real thing. That's what'll launch. We've been squirreling away avionics. We've been working with our principal investigator Sara Seager at MIT and her instrument team, Daryl Bomgardner at Measurement Technologies building the auto fluorescence nephelometer, and they've got it built. So we've got a bunch of hardware ready to go. I've been telling Chris Mandy, the guy leading this for us, "Man, get that probe into our clean room and people are just going to want to work on it." As we've said, this is a nights and weekends program. But the same philosophy - we couldn't have designed a 3MDCP for body heat shield ourselves. That technology just doesn't exist in industry. So we brought together the best of government and commercial. ### NASA Centers and Industry Partnership **[14:36]** **Jake:** Do you see that pattern or that kind of relationship where the NASA centers are operating less as the project managers and bringing in industry, and it's almost like a flip relationship where they are offering their services and then industry is going to them and kind of plucking the things they need to assemble something? Do you see that as a good future model where we can move towards? It feels like things are changing in the government-private space relationship world. Does that work pretty well for you guys? **Richard:** Absolutely. I think it's a really useful model. It's kind of returning to the NACA origins of the agency where there's this acknowledgement early on that there's a bunch of research and development and test capabilities and other things that would broadly be needed to drive the creation of aviation, and all the companies were benefiting from it. Like all models are wrong, some are useful. I think it's a very useful model. I don't think it's the only model. I spent 12 years at JPL, and maybe I just drank a lot of the Kool-Aid, but I do think that NASA centers should maintain their capacity to do hard things. So just becoming a service center to industry and kind of doing basic research and stuff like that is a very important piece of it, but what's the balance? I think that they should be centers of excellence for space exploration, but clearly it needs to evolve. Where commercial should do it or where the only way to meet our ambitious goals is for a lower cost approach, we've got to be open to it. ### Cost Comparison of Government vs Commercial Approaches **[16:34]** **Jake:** What's super interesting about this proposal is that we don't have a ton of examples of a big flagship NASA project where we get some legitimate cost estimates from a government-run one and then it flips and we move to this kind of commercial one. This is one of those rare times where we have the same scope and a price-for-price comparison for the private industry way to do it versus the government way to do it. Everyone knows that when NASA runs things themselves, think about the SLS rocket, it's not the cheapest way to go about the mission. But this is a really interesting way to actually quantify - okay, Rocket Lab can do it for 4 billion, NASA can do it for 8. That's how much it costs to do the centralized, "manage the constituencies" like you said. That's your premium to do it that way. There are benefits to that, but it's really interesting as a case study. **Richard:** It'll be a really interesting case study after we execute on it. **Jake:** Because if you mess it up, then we got a different result from this experiment. **Richard:** And risk management is a big part of it. Mission classification - at Rocket Lab, we do a lot of risk management, and I think we do it well. But you've got to know when that stack of paper is actually adding value or just costing you money. Undoubtedly a commercial approach will have its risk. ### Rocket Lab's Evolution and Capability **[18:27]** **Anthony:** Do you feel like there was an era of Rocket Lab or a position that Rocket Lab needed to achieve to have the heft behind it? You've accumulated all these companies over the years that are building out space systems. A huge percentage of the revenue is not rocket launches even though that's the name of the company. You've got the components that you're selling - the solar arrays, the star trackers, the propulsion. You've got enough of the constituent components that you can go out and be pretty brazen to say "We're calling our shot. This is how much money it is. We can pull this thing off." Was that possible before this moment, or do you feel like now Rocket Lab is at the point where they can do that? **Richard:** It's a really good question. When I left JPL, there were certain missions in my mind... *[Connection cuts out briefly]* **Anthony:** Hold on. You're back. JPL's hacking your connection - they didn't want you to talk about the things that you wanted to do post-JPL. **Richard:** Exactly. But Mars Sample Return was one of those missions where I was like, even though we wanted to do planetary, we'll never do that. That's crazy. That's a class of mission like James Webb that you're never just going to touch. So we were like, "Oh, let's do SIMPLEX. Let's get after these more modest things." Fast forward six years, we're 2,400 people now. We've demonstrated that we can do hard things. We studied it for like a year, broke it into its constituent parts, built up a plan. It's like, "Wow, our expertise is actually extremely well aligned with key parts of this" - like building small rockets, the chemical propulsion problem, the hypergolic mass fraction. We've been doing deep space comms and navigation, we're doing RPO on this mission, we've done entry missions for commercial. It's like wow, we're starting to put all these pieces together. Then we started looking at benchmarks - where was SpaceX when they were asked to go solve Commercial Crew and Cargo? They were nowhere near as capable as we are today. And there was no commercial industry around them that was like "Wow, look, there's a whole section of the industry doing it this way now." They were just the one. So the support systems have evolved in a huge way since that moment. We're not saying we've done it, we're not saying it's not going to be hard, we're not saying it's not without risk. We're not saying we're going to do it by ourselves. We've got partners, and a lot of those are NASA centers, Johns Hopkins University, a bunch of other industry partners who have deep experience doing Mars missions already. We're going to bring the team together, but we think the commercial lead is the right way to get it done. ### Space Systems Business and Diversification **[21:44]** **Jake:** It's exciting. You spend all this energy and effort and capital to build out your business in a more diversified way, and after a while, eventually you get to start cashing checks on that. Now you've assembled all this capability, and it's like "Now we get to go and do this and this." You're not just a rocket company anymore. You're a space services delivery company that just happens to have a pretty big rocket department. **Richard:** 100%. You look at our financials - we're 70% space systems. Despite having acquired a number of businesses that positioned us as a prolific provider of merchant component capabilities - solar arrays, reaction wheels, star trackers, radio, SEP systems, flight software, ground software - our biggest growth area actually is satellites and missions. That's all organic. We are building the engineering team, the production capability to do all that stuff. That was another one of the benchmarks that I did with MSR - if you break each of the major program elements, the SRL down with its pieces, and think about each of those as big programs roughly the scale of things we're doing today, it just happens that it's like four of them put together. So there are a lot of ways that we thought about it - actually this is a digestible problem. To your point about the space systems business, this is about business. We're not going to do Mars Sample Return and plan to lose money. This is important to the business. We think we can make some money doing it. But it's also bringing the values forward. We want our workforce to be able to work on cool problems, and this is a pretty cool problem. We want to be known as a company that solves hard problems. This is a hard problem. And we want to do science and work with NASA. So there's all these values being expressed in this opportunity. That's part of why we're being so vocal about it. ### Mars Sample Return Study Contracts **[24:21]** **Anthony:** So June NASA goes out and they award study contracts to seven organizations, October Rocket Lab gets added. Can you fill in any of the details? Because there was not much information. I've submitted requests to see if there were protests filed. The government told me no protests were filed, but I heard something different. Could you paint in the details? Something clearly happened. **Richard:** We were very happy to be given a study contract and that budget was found to do so. That was nice. We were working on it. It really supercharged our efforts and legitimized it. We had to catch up - the rest of the teams had more than twice as much time as us. We were told, "Listen, we're going to let you do this, but you've got to deliver on the same schedule." And so we kicked butt and did that. But no, we're just happy that we got a study award. ### Political Realities and Strategy **[25:26]** **Anthony:** You talked about the model difference between what the NASA program is going to be and how you're envisioning this new thing, but how do you look at the political end of that? Which pieces of the proposal that you're laying out are politically survivable? Do you think it's feasible that NASA and partners would be in a position to just say yes and greenlight the whole thing? That seems far-fetched to me. Not that it should be your responsibility to calculate that - you need to put your best foot forward. But where does the rubber meet the road, and how do you actually see that sort of thing getting approved or green-lit? **Richard:** It's civics 101. How does the US government work? There's Congress and they appropriate, and you've got the executive and they make budgets and budget requests. There's some key offices like the Office of Management Budget that have a big role in developing it and giving guidance to agencies. Then you've got agency leadership that can exercise their voice and their discretion as the law allows to execute. So you've got to work all of it, and you need leadership in every one of those pieces to concur at some level that it's the right thing to do. We're trying to create a scenario where they can do that. It's a good time to be in the commercial sector - we've got a lot of pro-commercial themes. It's a good time to bring forward a lower cost solution. It's a good time to cut Europe out of the program, for instance. We didn't think about that specifically - we were looking at ways to simplify. But getting something for free from Europe actually costs a lot of money, it's weird. And it also wasn't apples to apples - Europe wasn't doing the full ERO, they were doing a bus, and you still had CCRSs and EESs and other complicated things getting bolted on. And it's a good time to be offering solutions that are on relevant time scales to the geopolitical competition that we're in. We think we're scratching a lot of itches, but it's got to be a priority for the leadership at the agency that's coming in. We'll see how confirmation occurs with the new agency leadership, and with all the other priorities being balanced in Washington, where is this going to shake out? But we're hopeful. I am genuinely hopeful that this will be an opportunity for the commercial sector to bring the best solutions forward and compete. **Jake:** None of that was a criticism. I think the best way is force a conversation by putting out a plan that you could compare apples to apples, forcing a conversation by making yourself present and continuing to show up and knock on the door and make them respond to it. Whether you get 100% or 50% of the thing, it's better than just not being there and being in the arena at all. **Richard:** At the very least, you take the excuse off the table that "there's no good options for us at NASA so we're going to cancel the program." It's like, no, on record is a company that has provided a pretty good option. Now they need to justify why they didn't, if they cancel it. **Jake:** Right. **Richard:** I think we're prone to action. One of the stories I love, and I think it's even true - Pete got a hotel room in Washington outside Congress or some agency, and he didn't check out until he had a treaty signed between the US and New Zealand so that we could have an FAA regulated launch site in New Zealand. That's the kind of determinism - you just show up at the front door and don't leave. You got to be nice, you got to be respectful, and we're doing our best to do that and respect all the stakeholders. It's kind of personal for me. One of my technical mentors at JPL - one of his technical mentors was a key guy in architecting the parachuteless entry/descent/landing approach to meeting backward contamination requirements. So in aerospace, we're all like "my mentor was begat by his mentors" - there's this lineage. To actually get to work on this and build this thing that our forefathers thought about is pretty awesome. ### Rocket Lab's Approach to Projects **[31:04]** **Anthony:** That's the thing that hits different though, right? There are people like you in the company. The company is doing more and more things every day. Every mission that Varda is flying, they're kind of flying off the line right now. Every bit of that looks like the pictures on your website about Mars Sample Return. The drip campaign of actually flying missions in an industry where there's a lot of people that don't fly missions and talk a lot about flying missions - Rocket Lab has been one of the leaders in doing the thing and then talking about it. Sometimes to a fault, honestly - sometimes you probably should have talked about it a little bit more before the thing happened. **Richard:** Yeah, we don't need the minute-by-minute blog post of what went wrong. Just get back to work and make the next one happen. **Anthony:** I'll pull this heat shield up again - we were like, "Is this an April Fool's joke?" when this got posted. I sent this to Jake and was like, "Is this actually the thing that's happening - the spacecraft that has material associated with it that is part of this mission?" Because that message was not out there. All we ever hear is "nights and weekends working on it." It's a cool mission, but nobody really knows the actual atoms of this mission. That's one where I would have preferred to see a picture of this before this guy was putting the heat shield on. **Richard:** I've done an okay job not getting in too much trouble yet on this call, but hopefully you'll hear more about Venus. Hopefully we'll talk more about it. It truly is a nights and weekends mission. Our thing is to kind of talk about stuff after we've done it as opposed to what we're going to do. But as things get more real, it's easier to talk about it. **Anthony:** I love how much we're making him look off-screen. He's looking off-screen so much - I feel like we're doing a good job. **Richard:** I'm looking at my minders. **Jake:** You say nights and weekends, but we've already established that doesn't matter at Rocket Lab. It's always daytime somewhere, and you're always working. ### Space Systems Business and Platforms **[33:18]** **Anthony:** The space system side - you just recently announced the Flatellite platform, which is always talked about with your own constellation or constellations. Rocket Lab's involved with Space Moment Agency. You're hooked into the whole Apple/MDA/Global Star stack of companies working on that constellation. We are a couple years now into being a spacecraft bus provider, and I'm curious what differences there are now. It feels like it wasn't that long ago that they all got named and made official. **Richard:** I'm glad you noticed that. Yes, the naming was a thing. There was a point at which we were calling all of our spacecraft photons, but they looked very different. I was sort of fine with that, but at some point our comms team was like, "No, we really need to communicate a little better with the world about what we're doing." So we named them, and Flatellite is the fifth of the family. It's obviously a flat pack concept that's particularly well aligned with a lot of the comms applications that we see coming, as well as some key national security applications. It's all just about constellation economics. The best way to maximize the amount of satellites you can launch is to stack them up and get rid of that dispenser and use every bit of volume. We've been working on it for a while. We've had a number of customers that we're working directly with and felt like it was time to tell everybody about it. **Jake:** I feel like the spacecraft side has been a journey. Grant Bonin is in the chat who I remember for years - every time I'd interview Peter Beck, he would ask me, "Ask if Photon's ever going to launch on someone else's spacecraft," probably before this conversation was settled internally. But that's a long way now from that. You've got five different buses that you're selling to people. You're launching all these small constellations on Electron. What is the sales process like these days now that people know that you have this line of spacecraft and everyone's working on some sort of constellation? What is it like matching them to buses? I'm curious about what the sales cycle actually is in an era where there's so many people vertically integrating. **Richard:** Well, you mentioned Grant, and I'll just throw out - Grant, you introduced me to Pete. Grant was really the key guy that got me into Rocket Lab. I really enjoyed working with him. We were working on napkins to make CAPSTONE happen, working over that first Christmas in 2019 to get our proposal in. Honestly, CAPSTONE is where I think the company was sort of forged in fire - forged in the flames of hypergolic propulsion. That convinced us that we could do hard things. If you go back to that era with Grant and John Springmann and many others - Vince and Jake and a bunch of other really great guys - we were having this debate about what we want to be, what we want to build. I was very dead set on building shoeboxes and beer fridges - I wanted to build operationally relevant systems: high power, high delta V, long life, high radiation tolerance, precision pointing. Let's not let there be a problem that scares us. That's what we've been going after. So customers would come to us and say, "I've got a hard problem. Can you do that?" And we'd say, "Yeah, we'll do that." I think that's been core to our strategy. We think you get more value when you solve hard problems. Some of these other companies that you might be referring to - maybe they can give you a cheap bus, but does it work? Does it do what you need? Does it have high operational duty cycle? Can it get you to Mars? There's a bunch of things that we think we're specialized in, and that's driven a lot of conversations. As for the sales process today, it's good because there's so much demand. The government needs a lot of systems right now, whether it's Space Force, Intelligence Community, NASA - that's a huge demand signal. Then you've got commercial with huge demand signals - growth of 5G and TN networks, geospatial continues to grow. So we're kind of blessed with being able to pick who we work with right now because there's just a lot of opportunity. We can pick the type of people we work with and the type of problems. And six years on now, we've got some heritage. We've got some models to kind of fall back on and say, "Oh, we can do deltas and incremental things," and that helps guide us. ### Varda Missions and Operations **[39:02]** **Anthony:** The Varda Space missions have been a journey of their own. The first one is up there for a very long time. Second one's already landed in Australia. Third one's up there now. I have no idea. It's hard for me to understand where the line ends on what part of the mission Rocket Lab is doing and what part Varda is doing. It's a Rocket Lab spacecraft, but what are the operations like? How involved are you all in that program? Because it feels super integrated. **Richard:** Yeah, it is very integrated. I mean, that's a great example of a hard problem. You can't do it unless you're super integrated. From an engineering perspective, our mission ends when we separate their capsule. But we can't separate it until we very precisely target the entry interface. So the propulsion, the GNC, the flight dynamics - everything, all the meat and potatoes stuff that goes into the spacecraft up to that point - is all getting to that interface. Then once we release them, the rest of the responsibility is theirs. **Jake:** But that's like 99% of the mission. That's almost all the way to done with the mission. That's kind of wild. **Richard:** But as a former entry, descent and landing person, there's definitely some important stuff left. That's not a handwave. But yeah, it's not like Varda showed up the day we released the capsule. They were absolutely there along and collaboratively designed, developed, and were part of the whole operations. It's been a cool team effort. **Anthony:** The operations, the actual mission is what I'm interested in because that sounds really different than "this person bought 20 buses from us and they're going to operate themselves or fly their own constellation." How is this actually scalable? You couldn't sell 200 of these tomorrow because you'd have to operate them all, unless we're just doing that now and you envision that moving on. **Richard:** We could do that. I mean, maybe there are some customers that need that many spacecraft capable of dynamic space operations that might be used to target things in the upper atmosphere - hypothetically, like might be described by a color. Some of those capabilities may or may not be in discussion right now, and our capabilities may or may not be extremely well aligned with those solutions. Given our constellation class manufacturing of all the piece parts, you have to kaizen the problem at every stage. Every time we launch, every time we operate another one, we get better, we get faster. The team was so proud on this last one that we launched of how quickly we commissioned. It was like, "Wow, we had planned for all this time to commission and get stable, and it took so little time." So we're learning on every mission and getting better, and our ground software is getting better too. Constellation is kind of a key thread throughout design, development, manufacturing, and operations. We have to be able to answer the mail across the board. And I think we are. ### Potential Rocket Lab Constellation **[42:48]** **Jake:** That gets us to the million-dollar question - when do we see a Rocket Lab operated constellation that's selling services? It feels like you've been building all the constituent parts, not just technically but as a business. Peter has himself done some kind of wishy-washy, not quite clear but a little bit clearer statements about it. Maybe it's the public company stuff that's coloring the way he has those comments. But what's that look like? Will I be able to buy Rocket Lab internet at some point? **Richard:** What I'll say about that is hopefully the strategy is clear. We've been working from the bottom up to grow an end-to-end space capability - with the launch, focus first on meat and potatoes with the spacecraft bus. With Minieric as an example, you saw our intent there to fill in another key technology gap. But the mission layer is tough to go to that next step - payloads and missions. I'd say we're still developing capability there. Our Space Development Agency prime contract is a good example where we're working with a lot of partners to integrate payloads to deliver tactical communication satellites to the warfighter, and so we're learning how to do the comms problem on that mission. But it's not like we have all the payload capability today to go and have the cost structure to go and be our own operator. The other thing to say is that missions are a different business. The application layer is a different business. We're a manufacturer today. We're about enabling other customers. And you get exposed to whole different financial risk. **Jake:** I always say this about SpaceX that everyone - I felt like the last 15 years were dominated by Comcast being the butt of the jokes about hating your ISP, and SpaceX is on the glide path to being the ISP that everyone hates. If you get big enough, eventually you're the ISP for most people and they complain about you. So there's brand risk to going that way as well. **Richard:** It's actually funny. There's a life cycle to companies where they're the innovators and then they become giants and then monopolies, and then they start to atrophy and decay, and eventually all their piece parts are sold off for scrap. And that cycle seems to be compressing in time. ### Acquisitions and Business Strategy **[45:43]** **Jake:** You're the king of buying companies that are in bad financial situations and getting amazing deals. All the Virgin hardware that came out of Virgin Orbit - Rocket Lab scooped that up, integrated it. Minieric, I think the acquisition was like a third of how much investment they had taken over the time. And that's presumably a pretty good capability that's adding in. So whoever's out there scoping it out, they're doing a good job. **Richard:** We like deals. It's very scrappy. **Jake:** Very Rocket Lab. **Richard:** We also know what we bring to the table. It's not just about some capital. It's "Okay, we can help scale." We're a manufacturing company. We've demonstrated scaling. We're continuing to scale ourselves. So companies that didn't quite make it because of those problems are a natural fit. But we're going to take our time in getting to the application layer. I think we definitely want to talk about it because it's the purpose - like why are we putting all these pieces together? It is ultimately to go there, but there's just so much work to do in the meantime. I personally am super patient about it, but we also want to have a north star that we're pointing towards. ### Neutron Development and Integration **[47:04]** **Jake:** I know you're on the space system side of things, but there were some cool pictures the other day of Neutron stage 2 qualification. I'm curious, maybe from your perspective specifically - Flatellite is obviously designed roughly like the diameter of Neutron so it fits in the fairing nicely. Can you give us any Neutron intel from the space systems perspective on how things change when this is flying, not just Flatellite but other things in the line that you might see tweaks to? **Richard:** I'm not going to give you any Neutron updates, but I can certainly talk about how excited I am about Neutron. This is a super important rocket not just to the company and our broader strategy but also what we're doing in space systems. We certainly in space systems have not worried too much about which rocket we fly on, although not flying on our own causes a fair amount of trouble in some cases - designing for everybody's rocket, waiting around for other people's rockets to be ready and that kind of thing. It causes problems. So I'm really excited to get Neutron to the pad and start taking advantage of it. **Jake:** Vertical integration is a hell of a drug once you get in on it. **Richard:** We keep learning the lesson over and over again - it's really better to trust yourself to execute. If you can have that freedom, then do that. And it's great business also. I've always been a mission person, satellite guy. I didn't think the component business would be so interesting, but it is pretty interesting, and it's where a lot of our scale and manufacturing strength comes from. If we can make a business out of some of the stuff that we're doing and enable other customers, then we're super happy about it. In fact, one of the things I love about Rocket Lab period is that I think we've demonstrated to be a good partner. We're not about just vertically integrating for ourselves. We're vertically integrating to help solve other people's problems, and we'll continue to do that. **Jake:** It's definitely something that kind of sets you a little bit apart from some other vertically integrated companies. They're focused a lot more on the end product - SpaceX seems to focus a lot more on the end product, so they vertically integrate up so that you can buy a 7-day flight to the ISS. That's kind of their end goal. But you guys do a lot of stuff along that value chain. You can pop in and buy just the engines or just the rocket or just the ball bearings or whatever little parts you're selling there. **Richard:** I'd love ball bearings actually. That's kind of a romantic thing to have. We buy ball bearings today, but I'd love a ball bearing factory. **Anthony:** What a weird desire, but we'll allow it. **Jake:** You haven't dreamed about your own ball bearing factory? **Richard:** All the time. **Anthony:** I'm the guy trying to buy 200 of what's the returnable capsule called? I don't remember the names. This is the problem. What is it - not Photon, not Lightning? **Jake:** Pioneer. **Anthony:** I'm trying to buy 200 Pioneers. So I'm saving up for that, not the ball bearing factory. **Richard:** We'll get working on a quote. We do usually ask when we get those kind of requests, "Do you have any money?" So get ready with your answer. **Anthony:** You're on a podcast right now, so take it easy there. **Jake:** That's how it works - "Do you have any money?" Now you're talking to two freelance freelancers here who don't have bosses. "How much is this thing going to cost, how much do you have in your wallet right now?" The exposure you'll get on this podcast is pretty sweet. It's so good that most of the people that work at your company listen to it already. And that's pretty much the entire audience. If that works for you, then I'm your guy. Jake's point about the difference between Rocket Lab and SpaceX in terms of the parts that you're able to buy and supply outside of the company - I think this equation also often gets applied to SpaceX and Blue Origin in that SpaceX had to be scrappier than Blue Origin because Blue Origin had funding from day one and SpaceX had to work with contracts. Rocket Lab's like another level deeper where there was a scrappiness of trying to put together the business model that got you to where Rocket Lab is now that didn't come with a giant anchor project right up front of the company, in the way that the Falcon 9 early days are linked to a giant anchor project existing. Rocket Lab didn't have that - it's been a lot of these other missions that have flown or different constellation deployments. Factor in the era of Transporter and bandwagon missions flying, and then on the Rocket Lab side, it's like a customer will sign one mission and then eight, and they'll fly a whole constellation. I always find that funny that it's like "new company" - it's always like a Japanese synthetic aperture radar satellite. That seems to be your stick. That's like your huge market right now. They'll buy one flight and then they'll buy eight. **Richard:** Big in Japan. It's a good market for that. They love the Black Rocket. I think your observation is apropos. There are some similarities - SpaceX started without a lot of resources, but you have to give Elon credit, he can raise money. Basically, that company has unlimited capital it seems now. So that is a different world than we live in. We've always been very resource constrained, and I think we like it that way. Pete has his leadership style, and we love it and love working with Pete, but Adam our CFO has one too. And it's to protect the company's finances and to drive us all towards being efficient. We live that every day. When we got the Virgin building, whatever 144,000 square feet or something, and we moved our engine production over there, it's like, "Oh, we could just stretch our legs." But people are like, "That's how much space you get to build Rutherford. Okay, fit in that." It's like, "Well, there's all this..." "No, this is the resource that you're going to live within." I think that pressure to always be fiercely efficient, which is one of our values, is pretty important in the culture. **Jake:** There's a lot of benefit to that - that kind of growth is a lot more sustainable. You don't grow outside of your bounds by accident when you're growing that fast. If you're incrementally slow drip, slow and steady wins the race kind of situation, it saves you from a lot of the shitty parts of a giant company where it's like, "Oh yeah, today we have to lay off 2,000 people because we lost a big contract and we weren't planning on losing that." But if you've got a whole bunch of small businesses, you can really weather that in a lot more stable of a way, which I think is good. **Richard:** Yep. ### Future Projects and Closing Thoughts **[54:48]** **Anthony:** What are the things that people should be watching for? We've got obviously the Neutron schedule was announced on the last earnings call that this year is still the target, on-ramped to some programs. So that was big news. But what else should people have their eyes out for? **Richard:** We're continuing to execute. We've got a bunch of missions that you know about, continuing to deliver satellites for MDA and Global Star. It's pretty amazing - the factory here is just pumping satellites out for that. Of course, we've got a satellite in space right now. We're waiting for another entry with Winnebago 3, and Winnebago 4 is going to get to the launch pad after that. Bunch of cool missions - Victus Haes is well along. We're going to be flight ready this year to do our tactically responsive space mission, which to me is kind of all the pieces coming together. We've sort of been dreaming about this electron integrated satellite and electron capability that's standardized, and it's not like we're redesigning it every mission. It's just "okay, we're done with this one." And I can publish a performance curve - payload versus altitude with iso-lines of inclination. Here's how much power you get, or maybe we'll have a couple different power configurations, one with deployable arrays, one with body fixed. This is a product, and if you want 20 of them, fine, we can build 20 of these for you. So I'm really excited to see Victus Haes fly, and it just emphasizes all the parts of the company. We've got Electrons, we got our own launch, we got our own mission operations, we've got hard problems with dynamic space operations, RPO in space. That's one of the things I'm pretty excited about. And then of course Escapade - Escapade is sitting in the clean room, ready to fly. So stay tuned for the update plan when we've got it. **Anthony:** And apparently some mysterious Venus stuff, so that'll be good. **Richard:** More shocking pictures of the spacecraft. **Anthony:** We know you like talking about it after, but please tell us before you fly it. **Jake:** Don't let John and the radio operator be the one that breaks that story - "I'm pretty sure they just entered at Venus." **Anthony:** If you woke me up from a dead sleep and were like "Scott Tilly found the Rocket Lab Venus mission entering Venus's atmosphere," I'd be like "Yeah, I believe that entire story line start to finish." All right Richard, thank you so much for hanging out. Jake, do we know what we're doing next week? **Jake:** Yeah, we do because we recorded it earlier today. I'm traveling next week. We recorded one for you - Chris Carberry is back with a director friend this time talking about a movie that he made. **Anthony:** "Alcohol in Space: The Movie." That's literally the name. **Jake:** Which pairs greatly with your website - anthony-online.net. **Anthony:** Because I was very nostalgic for the late 90s. Worth $10. Check it out. It's a great website. All right y'all, Richard thanks again for hanging out with us. It's been a blast. **Richard:** Yeah, and I'll bring beer next time. **Jake:** We'll do it at the right... We got to figure out what the Rocket Lab time zone is and then we'll align it to that. **Richard:** Exactly. **Anthony:** All right everybody, see you later. **Jake:** Thanks everybody.