[[Home|🏠]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> [[Interviews]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> December 18 2020 **Insider**: [[Peter Beck]] **Source**: [Scott Manley](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWKLiJu7EtA) **Date**: December 18 2020 ![](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWKLiJu7EtA) 🔗 Backup Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWKLiJu7EtA ## 🎙️ Transcript >[!hint] Transcript may contain errors or inaccuracies. **Scott Manley:** Hello, it's Scott Manley here. Yesterday the developers of Kerbal Space Program released another free update which included the ability to do repairs and maintenance on your spacecraft in flight, but I actually want to focus on a couple of small new additions - new flags. And I want to talk to one of the people that made this possible. So today we have Peter Beck with us from Rocket Lab, and the reason is - obviously I've always wanted to talk to you because you're a very cool rocket person, but I asked you during a Q&A a few weeks ago, months ago, when can we have Rocket Lab logos in Kerbal Space Program? And you delivered! **Peter Beck:** Well, I mean, if you ask, you shall receive. ### Rocket Lab's Electron Rocket in Kerbal Space Program **Scott Manley:** Rocket Lab, you've had a great year. This is my Kerbal version - it's not quite perfect for many technical reasons, but mostly because we can't paint things black in Kerbal. Right, so we've had a lot of approximations, but this should actually fly for you. **Peter Beck:** Awesome! Yeah, you know we do have Rutherford rocket engines on the bottom there, just like the real Electron. **Scott Manley:** And Rocket Lab's Electron, it uses Rutherford engines which, well, they're the first rocket engine I found that had electric-powered turbo pumps, right? How did that come about? ### Rutherford Engine Technology **Peter Beck:** Well, really when we started designing the vehicle, we tried to design for high volume manufacturing and ultra-high... Oh jeez, it's got... that's a bit grim. Your guidance algorithm is not good there! **Scott Manley:** Oh dear! But no... **Peter Beck:** We never want to see that happen! **Scott Manley:** No, but no... **Peter Beck:** The ultimately we're looking for the most reliable, simplest design possible. And the beauty about the Rutherford engine is, you know, because it's an electric turbo pump cycle, you can have ultimate flexibility over throttle, ultimate flexibility over oxygen-fuel ratio. So the vehicle runs in a closed loop control where we're optimizing off, and we actually suck the tanks completely dry. So in a small launch vehicle, that's really important. And the really cool thing is all of the startup and shut down - it's all just controlled in software. So if you look at a Rutherford engine, it's devoid of lots of actuated valves and sensors; it's a pretty clean engine. And that's because all the valves are a kind of passive blow-over valves. We control everything by the turbo pump, or the electric pump I should say. So it's a very, very software-rich solution, which means it's wonderful to manufacture. We've put 170 Rutherfords in space, and it makes them very simple to manufacture. **Scott Manley:** Did you find that it was hard to sell people on an electrically pumped engine back when you were starting Rocket Lab? Or was it, you know, because there hadn't been any history really before that? **Peter Beck:** No, I mean, but let's be honest - there was no history of private orbital launch sites or full carbon composite liquid vehicles. And we did a lot of stuff - fully fiber up the neck worked flight computers, and we did a lot of things in there that were really unique. And we were really here about how do we go about solving this problem in the best way possible. And you probably saw that from first flight through to commercial operations, it's not like we had to do math or block upgrades or reinvent the vehicle. The vehicle was designed for manufacture and designed for reliability from day one, so very little change, which is what we wanted. **Scott Manley:** Yeah, I mean I noticed that you have actually made significant upgrades like due to battery improvements you've managed to up the maximum payload. **Peter Beck:** Oh no, I'm saying the heaviest one we lifted was about 185 kgs for the US Air Force a year or so ago. ### Kerbal Space Program Flight Demonstration **Scott Manley:** Yeah, so anyway, I'm obviously flying this and I've neglected to talk. So this is totally simulated. The only thing about Kerbal is that to make things easy, they shrink down the size of the planets. And you know what, I've actually flattened out my trajectory too much, but we're going to get into orbit. I just... we're maybe a little... **Peter Beck:** We better get into orbit, Scott. We better get into orbit! I'll be very disappointed. **Scott Manley:** I clicked the wrong button, that's why the thing flipped around. I, uh... the point pro-grade button is right next to the point retrograde button. That's why the rocket decided to aim at the ground. **Peter Beck:** It's just like that Proton rocket that failed. **Scott Manley:** Obviously the opposite of the Electron! **Peter Beck:** Exactly. **Scott Manley:** But yeah, we're going to get into space. I'm just having to calm down. Have you got a Photon on the top of that? **Peter Beck:** Yes, this is actually a deep space version of the Photon. It's actually getting enough delta-v to go to the moon, so we could do that if you want. **Scott Manley:** Well, I mean, what else... **Peter Beck:** Well, you know me, Scott. I'm dead set on Venus. So if we can run the Venus mission, then that'll make me very happy. ### Orbital Mechanics and Photon Spacecraft **Scott Manley:** Oh wow, you know I actually have to sit and watch me do some orbital mechanics, which would be kind of difficult. But let's get this one into orbit and we'll see what we can do. [Scott navigates the spacecraft] There we go, we just popped off the second stage, and we're going to need to use the Photon to actually get into orbit, but we'll be fine. So yeah, you have two different variants of the Photon, at least, right? **Peter Beck:** Correct. The little one and the big one, yeah. The kind of the LEO version and then the interplanetary version. **Scott Manley:** There we go, so we got this thing and we can take it to orbit. And so they have basically one has a lot more propellant in it, right? **Peter Beck:** Yeah, yeah. So the high energy version obviously carries more propellant. It also has the HyperCurie engine, which is even a higher performing engine than the Curie engine, which, that propulsion system is really the enabler to do these deep space and planetary missions. So Curie pretty much runs in bi-propellant mode all the time now, but it can run in mono-propellant mode. HyperCurie is a hypergolic version, so we've blended the fuels there for hypergolic use. So it can also be purely hypergolic. **Scott Manley:** And I guess in bi-propellant mode you get better specific impulse overall, and that helps? **Peter Beck:** Yeah, way better. Way better. ### Planning for Venus Mission **Scott Manley:** So we got this thing into orbit. I think we might be in a position to try to take this to the Kerbal version of Venus. As I said, I'd have to do some orbital mechanics, but we have enough delta-v here. So you're aiming about 2023 for that? **Peter Beck:** Yeah, yeah. I mean, we've got the Moon mission sort of midway through next year, and some other exciting missions. So we have a propellant depot mission for NASA where we're putting a big liquid oxygen tank on orbit. So lots of really, really exciting missions, and some that they'll be able to talk a little bit more in detail. But the Venus mission is, of course, really, really close to my heart. May '23 is when it needs to launch for minimum transit time and energy for the trajectory. **Scott Manley:** I'm gonna have to trim my orbit to try and get it close to this, which mostly works by guesswork in this game. So you sort of throw out your orbit and adjust it to try and get it close. I actually, you know, did degrees in physics and astronomy, and I'm still guessworking my way around these. ### Peter Beck's Educational Background **Scott Manley:** But you didn't do any like academic work to get to your expertise with rockets, right? You just started messing around? **Peter Beck:** Yeah, I mean, the plan was always to go to university, but I guess opportunities keep presenting themselves that I never really got there. But you know, you can learn things in the classroom, you can also learn the same things in real life. I started off as a tool and die maker, and then moved into the design office and started designing production machinery and production lines, then products, and then moved into the analyst team doing CFD and FEA. And then went to a government lab where I was doing advanced materials and structures as a test engineer and then a research engineer. And that's where a lot of the composites expertise and experience came from. So you know, you can learn these things in an alternative path, and it probably wasn't the path that I planned, but it all kind of worked out in the end. **Scott Manley:** So I mean, you were always thinking about rockets in your head, but your first rockets you built were like peroxide-based? **Peter Beck:** Yeah, they were. The very first rocket engine was a hydrogen peroxide one. I bought peroxide at 50% concentration and built a bubble reactor column in a wee garden shed out the back and distilled it to 92%. And my first peroxide engine - Gwen was there. It was a long time ago, I just left school and I started mucking around. Peroxide's a great propellant, but you need a tremendous amount of respect with peroxide. **Scott Manley:** Oh yeah. I hear stories of the British Black Arrow plants where anyone working would have somebody standing nearby with a hose with water running. ### Learning About Rockets and Kerbal Space Program **Scott Manley:** I mean, it's fascinating because you basically learned all your stuff by messing around. And one of the things about Kerbal Space Program that has been very powerful - this game, it's been great for people that are interested to mess around with rockets in some form or another. They're obviously virtual rockets, but you know, you can learn a lot about the design, the orbital mechanics, things like that. So I myself, I'm an academic, but I got into a position where this was a good way for me to try teaching and learning about the thing. **Peter Beck:** I'm pretty impressed that you can hold an interview and also do all the orbital mechanic computation at the same time. That's pretty impressive. **Scott Manley:** Well, you know, the computer's doing a lot of the heavy lifting for me. ### Stage Recovery and Re-entry **Peter Beck:** My mind was blown when you said that you were going to do stage recovery. **Scott Manley:** Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was all about trying to find the solutions that would close for this kind of system. And we use the atmosphere to our advantage. We use the atmosphere to our advantage, and it's really a lot of it is about trying to sit in that wake of the shock wave when we have the atmospheric interface. And trying to sit in behind there and with the blunt body of the heat shield, propagate all of that far enough forward that the heating is at manageable loads. That's actually really the hard bit. The parachutes - I mean, we're deploying parachutes at Mach 2 and thereabouts, but I mean, that's been done before. That pair of parachutes is a whole topic we could spend the whole program on itself. But really, the tricky thing here is trying to keep that thing guided and stable, and the heat loads on the stage low enough to make it successful. **Scott Manley:** I remember your presentation - you described the shock interface as a "plasma knife." **Peter Beck:** Yeah, that was a beautiful description. **Scott Manley:** Yeah, we're going through that right now here. **Peter Beck:** Nice. **Scott Manley:** The physics in Kerbal isn't quite as brutal as the real thing, but that's how you're... **Peter Beck:** Oh, obviously! **Scott Manley:** Sorry, dude, that's impressive! **Peter Beck:** Well, you know, it looks nice, and you can actually ruin your spacecraft by hitting the atmosphere too hard. But I have a little drogue shoot on this to stabilize it. **Peter Beck:** Oh, very nice. So, because of course, you have thrusters to stabilize it, to rotate it around, right? **Scott Manley:** Yeah, all right. And then once we get low enough, we can deploy a bigger parachute, and that will eventually bring us down into the water. So you did this on which launch was it? Not the last one, but the one before? **Peter Beck:** Return flight 15. **Scott Manley:** Yeah, actually, I'm going to say I kept on seeing you kept on posting some pictures from it, and they were all amazing pictures. I just kept wondering, why can't you show us the bottom of the rocket? **Peter Beck:** Well, I mean, there's a lot of secret sauce down there. The heat shield - we made almost no modifications to the heat shield. So the heat shield that was on that vehicle was designed for ascent, not descent. And you know, not surprisingly, that heat shield wasn't a lot left of it when we got down. So it exposed a lot of the detail around the engines. And you'll never find a photo of what we call the power pack, which is really all the magic of the engines down the bottom. So if the heat shield was intact with no problems - but we're really not comfortable in showing all of the technology with the batteries and the electric turbo-electric pumps and everything down there. So unfortunately we aren't able to post those, but we keep the heat shield on then, we're going to be absolutely fine. **Scott Manley:** You did show an absolutely marvelous video of the stage separation from inside though, and you had sound. **Peter Beck:** Great, wasn't that? Very, it's great to have sound on these things. **Peter Beck:** Sound is one of those things that is always forgotten. So one of the instruments that we're flying on the Venus probe is a microphone. You know, images are wonderful, but there's so much more context to an image with audio. So for the Venus probe interface and the atmosphere, we're going to carry a microphone. **Scott Manley:** That's great because interplanetary spacecraft - we keep on missing that. ### Rocket-Powered Bike **Scott Manley:** So actually, this is a Kerbal version of something from your history. It's a rocket-powered bike! **Peter Beck:** Oh, it's not. It's a trike technically. It's very hard to steer. That's cheating! Oh dear, oh dear! **Scott Manley:** Well, thankfully that didn't happen to you. **Peter Beck:** Yeah, it is. Rocket bikes are a wonderful sensation because, you know, like on a motorbike, there's always gear changes, so there's a momentary lapse of acceleration as you change the gear. With a rocket bike, the bike is getting lighter and lighter and lighter as you're consuming the fuel. So the acceleration, even though you've got more aerodynamic resistance, the acceleration is just pulling harder and harder and harder. It's by far an incredible sensation. It's hard - I've never had it replicated in anything. ### Rocket Lab's Future Plans **Scott Manley:** So plans for next year for Rocket Lab? **Peter Beck:** Next year is a big year. I mean, the Moon mission is going to be a huge one for us. And we've got a lot - we've got a really full manifest. So we've got to really hold our cadence here, one a month all through next year or even higher. The factory is putting a complete vehicle out every 30 days now, or sometimes even quicker than that. I think the record is 18 days. So we've just got a tremendous amount to get launched. And the Space Systems division has grown enormously. We have a number of new spacecraft that are in various forms of design and manufacturing. So yeah, next year is going to be a huge year. **Scott Manley:** Well, looking forward to that for sure. And you know, it's been amazing. Like, what, 15 years, 14 years since Rocket Lab started? **Peter Beck:** Started the company in 2007, but really the Electron program - I raised the first amount of money to go and build Electron in 2014. So it took us about four years - well, three years to get to first flight, and three and a half years to get to first orbit. But it seems a very, very long time ago now. **Scott Manley:** I'm sure everything is either slowing down or speeding up, one or the other. ### Rocket Lab's Launch Names **Scott Manley:** And you know, one thing I have to ask, by the way, is all their flights have very cool names, fun names. How often do you have a hand in picking those? **Peter Beck:** Well, we want to run a completely democratic process here at Rocket Lab, but generally it does arrive on my desk. So it's democratic to a point. **Scott Manley:** So you have veto power? **Peter Beck:** Yeah, yeah. **Scott Manley:** Have you ever had to use that? **Peter Beck:** Oh yeah, oh yeah. There's been - we have a very active list of names that we would just love to call but know that it's just a step too far. So veto has been exercised on a number of occasions. But look, it's such an incredibly serious business and such a huge investment of people's time and effort and capital. So it just always seemed to us that there needs to be at least something that's a little bit light-hearted, and that was what we chose. **Scott Manley:** I mean, I loved the third launch - was it "It's Business Time"? Because I'm a huge fan of the Flight of the Concordes. Just disappointed it never flew on Wednesday night! **Peter Beck:** I know, I know. ### Conclusion **Scott Manley:** Thanks for making life and rockets fun, and thanks for letting us use your logos in Kerbal Space Program. It's an honor really - you're there in a little other universe. So this is Peter Beck. Thanks everyone for tuning in. I'm Scott Manley. Fly safe.