[[Home|🏠]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> [[Interviews]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> December 28 2023 **Insider**: [[Peter Beck]] **Source**: [Pounding the Table Podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5l5TuGym_W0) **Date**: December 28 2023  🔗 Backup Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5l5TuGym_W0 ## 🎙️ Transcript >[!hint] Transcript may contain errors or inaccuracies. **Host:** Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Pounding the Table. We have the special opportunity today. We have Peter Beck from Rocket Lab, so we are very excited to dive in. You guys obviously have a lot going on, but for those who don't know, could you just give a very high level of your background and what Rocket Lab does for the retail investors of the world? **Peter Beck:** Yeah, sure. So I started the company way back in 2006. You'll notice that I talk funny; that's because I'm a New Zealander, I come from New Zealand. The company is - I took Rocket Lab to the US in 2013, so we've been a US company since 2013. But the easiest way to describe us is as an end-to-end space company. So we're most well known for our launch vehicles, namely the Electron rocket, but also we build satellites and provide a large number of satellites and space systems. And we even operate and manage spacecraft. But yeah, an end-to-end space company. **Host:** And did you come from a background where you were like a rocket scientist, or what was your background? Because I was watching the Bloomberg episode, and I think he mentioned that you were actually helping create like dishwashers, I believe he said. I'd love to hear what initially brought you - your early fascinations with space or what inspired the creation of Rocket Lab. **Peter Beck:** I was lucky that right from the youngest age I can remember, I always wanted to work in space. My father took me outside when I was little, and we looked at the night sky, and he pointed out all the stars and then that those stars most likely have planets. And there could be somebody on one of those planets looking back at you. And that was really the moment like, "Wow, this is much bigger than everything else that's around me." And the original goal was to go and work for NASA or a space company. From a small town at the very bottom of New Zealand, options are somewhat limited to work in the space industry. In fact, prior to Rocket Lab, New Zealand had zero space industry. I set a goal that I wanted to work in the space industry and started out and divided my life up into two shifts - the first shift being the day job, if you will, and the second shift being the rocket shift. It really began because, as you mentioned, my journey was at a company called Fisher and Paykel that built whitewear appliances and dishwashers. Really, I started as a tool and die maker, as an engineer, and my rationale for that is that there was no university courses for space or aerospace. In order to learn the things I needed to learn, I needed to build them. So I started building rockets when I was still at school. The plan was to go and get a trade and then go to university and end up at NASA. It turned out that way - we ended up flying spacecraft to NASA for the Moon. It was just on my rocket, not one of theirs. We skip forward 20 years, but that was the generalized approach. ### Challenges and Opportunities in Space **Host:** Amazing. Question for you: so I reference this all the time on the pod, as the listeners know, that there's a couple thematics that I'm absolutely bullish on for the rest of the decade. The first one, AI, came absolutely strong this year with generative AI. Next is quantum computing. The third is the space frontier. So what do you think the biggest challenges and opportunities are facing the space industry for the next couple years or even next decade? **Peter Beck:** Yeah, I think I agree with your thesis on that one. I think the biggest thing that needs to be done in space hasn't even been thought of. We're tinkering around the fringes with putting a few interesting things up into orbit. I would always point to GPS, and I often get asked the question, "But how does space even affect me?" And the reality is that GPS just enables everything from your pizza delivery to aircraft. It's become absolutely fundamental in that space infrastructure. So I think it is an exciting time in the future. And in my lifetime, we've witnessed - and we've been lucky to be part of - the democratization of space. Like when I was a young school kid wanting to work for NASA, there was no such thing as a private company building rockets. It was all government. In a very short time frame, that's changed quite significantly, and I don't see that rate of change decreasing anytime soon. Because it's like every new domain - if you take shipping or even air travel, the domain of air travel was military, and then it grew and evolved and technologies developed and became a little bit more commercial, but for the really rich person. And then now it's just this - for me at least anyway, skipping from New Zealand to America is just like a taxi, it's just like standard mode of transport. And I think the same evolution or revolution will happen in space. But I guess the way I view the space industry evolving is probably somewhat different to a few, at least. I think the really large space companies of the future are not going to be companies that just do launch, not going to be companies that just build satellites. They're going to be the end-to-end space companies that do it all. And you just see the huge power that brings when you start to combine those things together. **Host:** Before we pass off to Nico, I also want to comment - like we mentioned all the time - how do you find multi-baggers or stocks that are about to be strong growth stocks for next couple years is finding these category leaders. What they do is they have a network effect. Rocket Lab fits both those criteria. Like Peter said, the end-to-end solution in this specific space frontier, and they are - they have a duopoly right now in these launches. Thank you for that, Peter. Nico, before Nico goes - sorry to cut you up - I did want to ask about that because that is really interesting, working internationally. I imagine with something as big as sending a rocket to space, you have to be in coordination with governments, right? So they make sure that no company is just sending up spy satellites or anything like that. As much as you could, can you share about some of that collaboration and initial conversations with the government of how you get approval? And do they have people that are, before each launch, making sure they know what's going up to space? ### Regulatory Challenges and Launch Capacity **Peter Beck:** Man, we could do a whole podcast on just that. It's a huge element. We were the first - and still are the first and the only - private company that owns and operates a launch site that's capable of and has delivered stuff to orbit. And we operate a private orbital launch range in a country being New Zealand. If you want to talk about regulation, I think one-third of my career was as a pseudo diplomat because we had to negotiate bilateral treaties between New Zealand and America. Then you have all of the ITAR rules and nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction technology and all of the licenses that need to go for that. And then it's funny, when we started launching down in New Zealand, we had to change and create a whole bunch of new rules. There was no space agency, so a space agency got created. There were no rules or laws about going to orbit, so all of those got created. And the craziest things happened. Every time we send a payload to orbit, at least in theory, a customer was going to get an export tax because it was technically leaving the country. So we had to get new rules made, and space actually - in New Zealand, space is a freight destination. So there's a temporary import/export rule, and then you bring the rocket home. And if you reuse the rocket, then there's a whole bunch of "now you bought the rocket back" - a whole lot of new laws and rules and stuff that all had to be created for us to do what we do. And then to your point, we fly under an FAA launch license if we're flying out of NASA Wallops range. We also have flying under a NASA license. And then when we fly out of New Zealand, we have the FAA launch license and a New Zealand license. So there's a lot of checks and balances and a lot of regulatory hoops that you have to go through. And those regulatory hoops are really focused around two things: one, public safety, which is paramount; and two, orbital debris - so keeping it safe in space as well. There's a lot of work there, but they're focused on the right things. **Nico:** Yes, so one of the moats that your company does have, like you just mentioned, is you could launch in New Zealand. I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's like 120-125 launches a year you can do at that specific complex. Do you know what the max capacity is on all the launch ports in the US? So I know that's something that other competitors can't really do internationally. They're capped in that box domestically. Do you have that number in mind? **Peter Beck:** Yeah, I don't. But out of the LC-1 launch range in New Zealand, we have generally larger launch capacity than most launch sites globally, simply because it is a private range, and that's what it's licensed to be able to deliver. And that was part of the reason why we actually built a launch site in New Zealand - because if you looked at the Cape and a lot of the other ranges, it's super busy. And the other key element is that you have to vertically integrate not just the rocket but the range. When you're building a small launch vehicle, a small launch vehicle is vastly more difficult to build than a large launch vehicle. The only delta is that the cost of the infrastructure is affordable. That's really the only delta. But technically it's harder. And then from a business standpoint, it's harder as well because no flight safety analyst team cares if the rocket is, you know, 1.2 meters in diameter or 10 meters in diameter. The same amount of work has to happen. So there's a baseline load of functions that you need, whether it be quality - like a quality guy doesn't care if it's a 2-inch valve or a 12-inch valve, you still need the quality team. So the challenge with a small launch vehicle is you actually have to amortize those functions over a much, much smaller ticket price. So if you've got a $65 million rocket, you can have 50 people in your flight safety team. If you've got a $7.5 million rocket, you can have one person in your safety team. And the way that we got around all that is being super smart and automating and coming up with really new and innovative solutions to solving these kind of tricky people problems. This is why when I look at Neutron and we think we're going to bring that to market, why we think we can be competitive is because we have been like intentionally starved. We're the skinniest people you can imagine on the planet to be able to do these kinds of things. So when we look at a big rocket, we don't - we're not coming into that with a 50-person flight safety team. We're coming into that with - I think we technically have three, not one, but a very small, lean organization. ### Current Status of Neutron Development **Nico:** Thank you for explaining about Neutron, and I want to continue with this topic. As we can read, the schedule forecasts that you want to launch Neutron the first time at the end of 2024. And as I can read at the moment, there could be only one small bottleneck, which could be the engine of Neutron. Can you give us maybe some hints what the current status of achievement is? **Peter Beck:** Yeah, sure. I preface everything - when it is a rocket program, we're in a honeymoon period where hardware is rich. We're hardware-rich, but we're figuring out all the things that work and all the things that don't work. And I've been through this meat grinder once before. And look, Archimedes - propulsion is generally the long pole in the tent. I would say that if we look at the vehicle (and I'll come and answer your question, but more generally), if you look at the vehicle, where does the biggest risk lie? Actually, the bit that's innovative in the rocket is the materials and the design and the method of construction. So that's why we focused on doing the second stage tank tests first, because that is actually the highest - it's not the highest risk element of the design of the vehicle because it's a disposable upper stage. You have competing factors that it has to be the highest performance but also the lowest cost, and generally those two things don't go together. And we can talk about all the smart architectures that we've employed to go and do that. But I would encourage anybody to go on YouTube and have a look at some of the tank testing videos, and you can see that the tank is very large. The thing that I think most people don't realize is that whole tank weighs slightly heavier than a Harley-Davidson. It's a 5-meter diameter carbon composite tank that's holding tons and tons of propellant that weighs almost nothing. And that is - that's been a really big technical achievement for the teams, and we're happy to have that development behind us. That's the R&D part of the R&D. And then on Archimedes, we purposely chose a really high performance cycle - a closed ox-rich cycle. So generally, you choose one of those cycles because you're trying to extract really high performances, really high ISPs, and really high thrust-to-weight. Now, we chose the highest performing cycle but dialed it right back, and the reason why we did that is because we want these engines to be reusable. Instead of building - instead of choosing like a gas generator cycle where you have to push right up to the edge of its kind of cycle performance to get the ISP you need, by choosing a really high performance cycle and dialing it back, we end up with a really robust engine. Well, that being said, one of the challenges with the closed cycle engine as compared to the gas generator is you can't separate the elements out and test them individually. You can't take a gas generator and run that up and test that individually, and then take a thrust chamber and run that up and test that individually. Because it's all one combustion, you really just have to build the whole engine, put it on the test stand, and go. It feels frustrating for me; it probably feels frustrating for other people to watch it as well because it's no engine. And when we put something on the test stand, it's not like a dev pre-burner for a gas generator or anything. It's the whole engine. So you start to see some things that look like whole engines pretty shortly here in the next year. And like I say, the least innovative thing we're trying to have is propulsion because we just need workhorse engines. When normal kind of stage combustion cycle engines, their operation points are vastly below a standard operation point. ### Falcon 9 vs Neutron **Host:** So one of the things I'm absolutely bullish on with the Neutron is for scalability for small launches. Like, you need to be able to turn around quickly. The Neutron, correct me if I'm wrong, you can turn around like less than a day or 24 hours potentially, which is massive. And I think the other bullish feature of that compared to the Falcon 9 is you can land it on a drone ship, or you don't have to land on a drone ship where the Falcon 9 does, and that's very costly. Can you describe some more differences between the Neutron and also like the Falcon 9? Essentially, that's why this tailwind of the Neutron would be so bullish for the firm. **Peter Beck:** Yeah, so I think the fundamental difference is that the Falcon 9 was appended with items to be made reusable. And look, it's been very successful. It's wonderful. The difference with Neutron is that it was designed from a blank sheet of paper from day one to be reusable. And if you look at the Neutron and compare it to, say, the Falcon 9, they look vastly different vehicles just right down to the aspect ratio. Neutron is short and fat. Why is Neutron short and fat? Turns out the very best shape for re-entering the Earth atmosphere from an efficiency perspective is literally the shape of a traffic cone. So the very first sketches of Neutron on a whiteboard were, in fact, a traffic cone. And then Neutron lands exactly as it looks like as it takes off with the fairings attached. We don't throw away fairings and then go and fish them out of the ocean and bring them back. We actually hold those fairings on all the way up. And then the second stage tank, as I mentioned before, is the paradox of the whole design. We stuck it inside the rocket so we don't have to transfer the load through the tank, and the load - the tank doesn't have to bear a structural element to the rocket. That takes enormous amount of stress out of the tank, but also mass and complexity. So it really is, and for me personally as an engineer, it's like the super privilege to have developed a small launch vehicle and made that reusable, or at least elements of it reusable, and then get to go around where you can take all of the stuff that you've learned, all the stuff that you're not happy with, and start with a blank sheet of paper and go, "This is how I would do it if I had no constraints." And that's what it is with Neutron, and that's fundamentally why we - one of the reasons we believe it's going to be really competitive in the market is because it was designed to do one thing from day one. **Host:** There's very few stocks in the market that have a 60% plus CAGR for the next couple years, and I think Neutron is one of those tailwinds for the company. Can you describe how much of a boost this specific - like Neutron will be on the revenue side for the next coming years compared to before, where the Falcon 9, as you said, has just been so steady, reliable, and like a great place to launch off of your business, pun intended, the firm off of. So can you describe like what the Electron means on the revenue side as well? ### Rocket Lab Revenue and Business Model **Peter Beck:** Yeah, obviously the sticker price is significantly higher, sort of $50 to $55 million for the sticker price. The ASP is much greater, which gives us greater certainty around the margins as well. We're modeling sort of a similar margin for Neutron as we are Electron. But all of that is in the noise when you consider what we're actually trying to do here in a much bigger sense. And we keep coming back to an end-to-end space company. We've always said that launch will be about one-third of our revenue; two-thirds of our revenue will come from space systems. And that's pretty much how it is today, and we imagine that to be in the future. But when you think about it, having a launch vehicle is great. You can - it's a nice little business line. It's a very difficult business to be in. But it creates a lot of value. But at the end of the day, having the keys to space - if you're only going to use it for other people's stuff, then it's a bit of a lost opportunity. What an end-to-end space company means for Rocket Lab is not just launching other people's satellites into orbit, building other people's satellites, it's ultimately - the end point is building and launching our own satellites and putting them in orbit and providing services. And I think if you iterate for the whole space model, that's where it ends up. Because if you're a government or a commercial customer today, what you have to do is you have to become experts in the fields of not only operation of spacecraft, spacecraft design, build a spacecraft, and launch a spacecraft. If you're just a government that wants a sensor, an optical sensor over their country to measure weather, there's a tremendous amount of kind of expertise that you have to build and create, and even more so if you're a company. So I think if you fast forward - don't quote me on the time frame here, I'm not sure what it will be - but fast forward some point in time, I fully expect customers to come to us and say, "Hey Pete, we need to measure, we need to provide communications to Hawaii this month." And you go, "Okay," and that's as far as a customer needs to know. If you pick up - ring up a plumber and you say, "Hey, I need water in my new extension I'm building in the back of my house," they don't go, "Okay, you need to become an expert in plumbing, an expert in civil works, and an expert in regulation." A ditch gets dug in the ground, a pipe gets laid, and you come home one day and turn on the tap, and there's water. And that's where I think ultimately we need to get to with space is services in space need to be much more seamlessly delivered than they are today. ### One-Stop Shop Value Proposition **Host:** Yeah, I think before I - one comment before I hand it to you - the reason why it's like what Peter is saying is so insightful is because Rocket Lab is like the one-stop shop for their customers. And I do think a lot of customers have some trauma from 2021 on supply chain issues or like having multiple different firm partners to fulfill, like, specifically Rocket Lab, their missions. But before, it was just like their product, and they don't want that anymore. They want the one-stop shop, and I think that's something that Rocket Lab should be associated with as the one-stop shop for customers who want to have these kind of missions. I totally agree with what you're saying about that, Peter. **Nico:** I think what you're piggybacking off what you guys were saying, I think as an investor and thinking through the lens, we want to understand the different revenue streams. And I think that's one thing with space in general or space companies - similar to quantum or similar to some of these other kind of far out where the basic, a typical person, Joe on the street's not going to fully understand this model. So for someone like me just trying to wrap my head around some of these different revenue models that you guys have today, so you touched on it a little bit, but can you give - I don't know - any public partnerships or how are you guys working with your clients today? And so they're paying for you to send a satellite up to the space, and just dive into that a little bit further if you could. **Peter Beck:** Yeah, we're already recognizing the strength of kind of the business model already. So, for example, a customer would come to us and ask us to build a satellite. And we'll just use one that's on orbit right now - the spacecraft that we built for Varda for their on-orbit manufacturing, very unique capability. That spacecraft needs to deliver a lot of power to their little factory, and then we need to reenter that spacecraft back to the Earth's atmosphere and land it in the desert somewhere. So the spacecraft itself has a lot of propulsion on board and ability to do that. If you look at that spacecraft, it has the spacecraft obviously designed and built in Rocket Lab, at Rocket Lab. All of the composite structures were designed and built by us. The radio was designed and built by us. The propulsion system was designed and built by us. The tanks are designed and built by us. The star tracker, the reaction wheels are designed and built by us. It's using our solar panels, it's using our software. Really, there's almost nothing on there that wasn't designed or built by us - using our batteries, everything. So when you think about being completely vertically integrated like that, the ability to innovate, come up with solutions, and solve problems, and also just the speed in which you can deliver things is - it's pretty unfair. And I know this for a fact because when we first started building satellites in 2019, we announced the Photon satellite - we announced and we thought we're going to get into this. The first thing that we did was place an order for some reaction wheels and star trackers, and that was from Sinclair Interplanetary. Doug built the most beautiful, lovely stuff - nineteen months. And he closed his order book in August. So if you didn't get in before August, then tough. It's a year and nine months. So that was the first company we went and bought - we went and bought Doug and Sinclair's business. And then we scaled it from 150 reaction wheels a year to 3,000 reaction wheels a year. And when it comes to building our own platform, we never have to wait for a reaction wheel or a star tracker ever again. Like, there is no supply chain problems. And then we did that for all of the long lead, expensive items in a spacecraft. Solar is another great example. So we bought a company called SolAero - only one of three space-grade solar cell manufacturers in the entire world. And the largest - solar is the most expensive, the longest lead time item on a spacecraft generally, apart from payloads sometimes. Owning that and keeping control of that is a huge advantage for us to be able to now compete and bid on much larger programs. Take the MDA GlobalStar constellation that we won - very large, very complicated spacecraft, 12-year lifetimes, and wallowing in radiation environments, really difficult spacecraft to build. For that particular customer, schedule was as important as technical capability. We owned all the supply chain to be able to deliver on that schedule. So we won, and we'll see that more and more frequently, I'm imagining, as supply chain and the constraint of supply of a lot of these systems is really hard. When we talk about an end-to-end space company, that's really what we mean. ### Space Infrastructure and Future Plans **Nico:** Yeah, you started about different revenue streams, and I think Rocket Lab is always hinting at the desire to develop their own space infrastructure. I think that will be the next step. What is your current vision, and is it in the works? And maybe, is there a planning of a mega constellation regarding Photons which will orbit space junk? **Peter Beck:** Yeah, if you look at - if you break up the space industry market, like it's about a $20 billion TAM of launch, call it $30 to $40 billion TAM of spacecraft, $320 billion of TAM in space services and all the things that basically are delivered from space. So you can see the magnitude of the market is in actually delivering the services. And if you own the launch vehicle and you have the ability to build any spacecraft you want, your ability to deliver those services is always going to be better than anybody else who doesn't have their own rocket. It's that fundamental. So yes, that's a fact. We haven't made any announcements around the infrastructure that we intend to build or any of those projects. I would say it's just a little bit early yet. We need the keys to space. We need to get Neutron functioning and flying regularly and reliably. But I would say that we're watching very closely all the different business models that are unraveling themselves in space right now. And is it direct to mobile? Is it consumer internet? What is it? What is that big application in orbit? And we're not making any announcements or any commitments as to what we're going to build just yet. But you can guarantee that we have all the capability, or will have all the capability, to execute on whatever we choose. And sometimes you have to hurry up and wait. And I think most of the time it's best to be the first mover; some of the time it's best to be the second mover. And I think that's where we're sitting right now. **Nico:** When I would like to go on - I'm trying to follow Rocket Lab very closely, and many times I read that one of your goals is that Rocket Lab has to be cash flow stable. Does it mean that your goal is to grow steadily and looking at your balance sheet, or are you planning bigger steps in the future, maybe raise some more capital? **Peter Beck:** Yeah, look, part of the reason I took Rocket Lab public was to ensure that we build a multi-generational, enduring space company. My two biggest competitors are the two wealthiest people on the planet, and that's the reality you have to compete against. But I was determined not to end up in a scenario where, if when they put me in the ground, the company goes with it. And the way you avoid that is making sure you build a profitable company. There's lots of other things - culture and all of that - but at the end of the day, you have to build a profitable company. And space is really - space is a big plus and a big minus. The big plus is it's hugely aspirational. It's very easy to get excited about, and it's awesome and it's exciting. The negative side of it is that there's been way too much aspiration and not enough execution in the industry. And I'm all about execution. And so while a lot of the stuff we do is exciting, at the end of the day, we have a very keen eye on making sure that we build a profitable company that is - like I say - is multi-generational and enduring. Because I want the things that Rocket Lab achieved to go on well after I'm gone. I think that's how you have the biggest impact, ultimately, to society, but also to shareholders. We're a little bit different in the fact that, yes, we're aspirational and we love space, but we also view it through a very keen commercial eye. And part of that is that we've always had to. If you look at the amount of funding that's gone into Rocket Lab as compared to most companies, especially launch companies, it's significantly less. If you compare it to the big ones, it's like ridiculously less. But we've always been ruthlessly efficient with the capital that we've had. And I'm not sure how many people know this, but the Rutherford rocket engine wasn't named Rutherford because he was a famous Kiwi, of course, and split the atom and all the rest of it. The reason why we named the Rutherford rocket engine Rutherford is because he had a very famous saying, and that was, "We have no money, so we have to think." And that is literally the ethos of the company from day one through today now. A lot of the innovations that are born about in our technical solutions are because we had to think. We didn't have the capital to just go and waste willy-nilly and experiment. We had to get it right, and we had to build high-quality stuff that worked. ### Space Economy Consolidation **Host:** Yeah, two - you mentioned it. I'm glad you mentioned it because that's some of the headwind of the early innings of just like - who knows the capacity of the space economy. But I do think that you found like a good middle ground between growing the top line, and you guys are anticipating potentially to be free cash flow positive in 2025. As soon as that - question for you is, unfortunately, other competitors in the space economy have struggled tremendously past two years due to capital markets being extremely dry. Rates potentially could be higher for longer. Do you see more consolidation happening in the space industry? And is there any kind of specific avenues that you are looking to be aggressive on potentially down the line that you guys aren't - don't have exposure to right now? **Peter Beck:** Yeah, yeah. So I challenge the start of the preface is that there hasn't been the capital. There's never been more capital flown into the space industry than there is in the last few years. You're speaking to the guy who, you know, Series A round out of Khosla Ventures to build Electron with $5 million. So when I see people going and raising like a hundred or hundreds of millions of dollars to go and build a rocket, it's - it just explodes my head. It's just the efficiency - the capital efficiency has been extremely low, and the execution has been extremely poor. I would say the capital has been there for sure. There's been endless amounts of capital there. But more directly to your question, we'll keep our eyes open for value opportunities. I think you saw us earlier in the year - we picked up Virgin Orbit's facilities, stunning facilities. And like, we don't need to buy anything for a long time. It was just everything was there. **Host:** Bravo on that fire sale. Wow, I love that. When I read that, I was like - and I saw the cost of - I was like, geez, that's like 75% - Black Friday used to be like 5% for everyone like five years ago. **Peter Beck:** Yeah, yeah. No, it was - there was - you talk about disregard for capital - like, the amount of capital that went in there is staggering. And it's great that it's going to be put to good use, lives on, and it wasn't a waste. But yeah, no, I think there's in a market that is less frothy than it needs to be - there needs to be execution. And I think there was a lot of promises made and very little delivered. And as a result then, this is the wonderful thing about the public markets is they're very efficient in the end. And they're very efficient at working out which companies with a real product and with real customers and what is not. ### Industry Collaboration and Future Outlook **Nico:** I think the last question I'd want to ask here is - you alluded to Elon Musk, SpaceX, and I think Bezos was probably the other one with Blue Origin. So you mentioned you've been super efficient with your money and where other companies may have - they have a lot, so they're a little bit less frugal. How much is there - like, is it a friendly competition, would you say? Or is there any collaboration? With so few competitors in the market, is there collaboration? I'm just curious like how that - how that works. And ultimately, I think the last piggyback to my own question would be like, what are you most excited for in the next two to three years, probably with Rocket Lab? **Peter Beck:** Yes, there is a lot of collaboration, especially as space systems business. We provide components into tremendous amount of stuff. I mean, I set the team a task that 100% of everything that goes to space at some point should have a Rocket Lab logo on it. Don't care if we launched it, don't care if we built it. And I think last year (I haven't got the numbers for this year) but it was something like between 36 and 38% of everything that went to orbit that was addressable (so things not in China and whatnot) - somewhere in the 30% of everything that went to space had a Rocket Lab logo on it somewhere. And I think there is a lot of collaboration, and there's a lot of mutual respect within the industry because in many instances - take our solar, for example. There's three companies worldwide that can produce a space-grade GaAS solar cell. So by necessity, there has to be a lot of kind of collaboration in that respect. And then the thing most excited for - I guess the thing that's most fulfilling in a lot of ways is seeing the business model coming together, seeing us starting to win programs or be involved in programs that I wouldn't have thought that we would have had the ability to have done this soon. We've got two spacecraft that we're building for NASA that are going to Mars next year. And generally you get to build interplanetary spacecraft after you've proven yourself for a couple of decades, not like within the first few years of starting to build spacecraft. And if you look at the depth and technical challenges of the projects and things that we're building, it's super fun. I think that's the best part - is seeing the business model come together, seeing the power of owning your own rocket, owning your own [components], and all of the efficiencies that brings not just to the business but to your customers. I think that is very satisfying. ### Beyond Mars and Future Exploration **Host:** One last one because this is just on the tip of my mind because everyone's talking about Mars over and over again. Do you think in our lifetimes we'll go beyond Mars? And I guess a fun question is, which planet would you like to most visit if it was available for humanity to live on? **Peter Beck:** So I assume you mean actually moving this sack of flesh to a different planetary location. And if that's the question, then I have no desire. I don't even want to go into low Earth orbit. I have no desire. Unfortunately, I understand all the engineering and all the risks and share none of the courage to address them. I have immense respect for any astronaut who is able to both understand the risks and then just seemingly dislodge them from being a concern. But I think it's just a matter of time until there's a footprint on Mars. I think the reason for that is as political as anything else. I think China is making great leaps. There'll be a Chinese footprint on the Moon sometime soon. When that happens, there's going to have to be many more footprints. And I think as much as the Apollo program was just a huge testament to human innovation, it was political and almost controversial in the fact that one superpower had to prove that they were better than the other. And I think that you'll see the same thing with Mars. I think nations that put a footprint on the Moon are not going to stop at the Moon. Yeah, I think it's inevitable. I think it's super exciting. The planet I most want to visit without actually going there is Venus. I think Venus is the most underrated planet in our solar system. We have so much to learn from that planet. So that would be the one - the one I spend my time on. **Host:** Why do you say that just out of curiosity? [I'm] so much to learn about Venus over the summer... **Peter Beck:** Oh man, look, geez - we now we're really - we could really spend the next day on this one. But two reasons, and Rocket Lab has a small private mission to Venus. It's a kind of a nights and weekends project that we're trying to get there. There's a reasonable - not a reasonable - there is some probability that there may be life in the clouds of Venus. And I think answering that question for humanity is a big deal. If we want to take the scientific approach, right now there is - we have no evidence of life off Earth. Therefore, you have no conclusion to draw that we are the only life in the universe. Now, I think that's very cynical and most likely not true, but if we want to be scientific about it, we have no evidence to prove to the contrary. If you could go to Venus today and found some form of life in the clouds of Venus, then everything changes. Firstly, we're not the only life in the universe. Secondly, if it's in the clouds of Venus, it's most likely prolific throughout the universe. And I think that's a totally different spectrum of view or outlook on humanity than the one we have today. **Host:** I'm now - great answer. Compared - I want to know the answer now. That's awesome. Will there be in the future something like an investor day where fans - because Rocket Lab is one of the most sympathetic companies in the world - where fans get the chance to get in contact with the company, with the guys working? Because we have seen it in other companies doing things like that, and it's an awesome event for us. Is a small chance? **Peter Beck:** Oh, let me talk to the team about it. Yeah, yeah, sure. I'll see what the logistics of making something like that happen are. We should just make it like the first launch of Neutron and just everybody should come to the launch site. That would be much more efficient. **Host:** Yeah, that would be awesome. That would be awesome. **Nico:** You're changing the world right now with that question. **Host:** So thank you so much, Peter, for coming on Pounding the Table. I agree, we could have spent another two, three hours asking you questions. Really excited to see the future of what you guys are building over at Rocket Lab. And maybe in a year or so, we can get you back on and see all the advancements you guys have made. I really appreciate it. **Peter Beck:** That'd be great. My pleasure. Thanks, guys. **Host:** Thanks so much.