🏠 > [[Interviews]] > Sept 17 2025 **Insider**: [[Peter Beck]], [[Adam Spice]], [[Shaun D'Mello]] **Source**: [Sharesies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-Ww4RV1CaM) **Date**: Sept 17 2025 ![](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-Ww4RV1CaM) 🔗 Backup Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-Ww4RV1CaM ## Transcript ### Introduction and Launch Complex 3 Unveiling (0:00) **Interviewer:** Today we have a very special Shared Lunch episode. I'm literally at NASA and a very hot Virginia Wallops Island. Behind me is Complex 3, the brand new launchpad for the Neutron rocket that is expected to go to space by the end of this year. Today we're catching up with Sir Peter Beck on Rocket Lab's progress. **Sir Peter Beck:** I'm a conservative engineer where, you know, when Rocket Lab says we're going to do something, it's going to happen. **Interviewer:** As well as Rocket Lab CFO, Adam Spice. **Adam Spice:** And I love growth. That's kind of what attracted me to Rocket Lab is like there's no question that the growth opportunities here are staggering. **Interviewer:** And then also Shaun D'Mello, head of the Neutron program. **Shaun D'Mello:** You have to be in this constant sense of paranoia and you constantly have to be on edge. Very complex machine, you know, and it doesn't take much for it to go wrong. **Interviewer:** Before we get started, here's some important information. Investing involves risk. You might lose the money you start with. We recommend talking to a licensed financial adviser. We also recommend reading product disclosure documents before deciding to invest. Everything you're about to see and hear is current at the time of recording. **(1:04)** This is the furthest we've ever traveled for an episode. Rocket Lab very kindly invited Sharesies along with a select group of NASA officials, senators, and even the governor of Virginia. **Governor of Virginia:** The most vibrant space industry complex in America. That is what we are building. **Interviewer:** To Wallops Island to give investors an inside look at the LC-3 launchpad. After 15 hours in the air and 4 hours on the road as the day verged, we made it just in time for the official opening. **Sir Peter Beck:** Welcome everybody to LC-3. Today marks an extraordinary milestone not just for Rocket Lab, but for the future of space access in America. **(1:49)** *[Countdown: 3, 2, 1]* With the opening of Launch Complex 3, we take a major step forward in ensuring resilient and assured space access for the nation. ### Sir Peter Beck on Site Strategy and Infrastructure (1:58) **Interviewer:** And what better place to chat to Sir Peter Beck than from the top of the pad that Neutron will launch from? Let's start with the location cuz it's, you know, sort of [a] difficult place to get to, but well known at the NASA site. So, what makes this a great site for the Neutron launch pad? **Sir Peter Beck:** In America, you've got really two launch sites on the east coast. You've got Cape Canaveral, which everybody is aware of, is [a] super famous place. And then you have Wallops Island, Virginia, where we are now. You know, the Cape is an incredible launch site, but it's very busy. And we're trying to stand up a high cadence launch vehicle. So, it's much more difficult to come here because, as you can see, we've had to build so much infrastructure. Whereas the Cape there's so much existing infrastructure there. But the advantage with that is that we're *it* and we're really pushing for a high cadence. So we don't have to wait in line for anybody. **Interviewer:** And we're pretty close to Washington DC here. Is that important? Is it being close to the Pentagon, that sort of thing? **Sir Peter Beck:** It certainly helps. I mean, you have great access to all the senators, you know, all of the folks that help the wheels go around. **Interviewer:** Can you talk us through some of what goes into developing a launch site? **Sir Peter Beck:** Like I say, it's a huge infrastructure program. You can see the diameters and the size of the tanks and the pipes and everything. It's just huge scale. And when we were pouring all the foundations for this, we had all the concrete trucks in the wider region just lined up all down the freeway just delivering load after load after load for a couple of days. So, you know, these are tremendous scale projects. **Interviewer:** Launch pads. They're expensive clearly, massive projects. Presumably, you don't want a whole lot of them. Is there more in the pipeline or? **Sir Peter Beck:** Oh, not for now. I mean, this site is really cool because it gives us all that sort of mid-inclination stuff. We can do a dog leg which is a maneuver to do a sun-synchronous launch. But you know at some point in time we'll need to expand into other inclinations but right now we can service a tremendous portion of the market out of this pad. ### The Race for a 2024 Launch (3:50) **Interviewer:** One of the things that was announced by the governor was that we're expecting a launch by Christmas. **Governor of Virginia:** Before the end of this year. We will all gather and we will watch the first Neutron rocket lift off from pad 0-D right here together. **Interviewer:** And the governor... I think he said that he would bring the Christmas presents if it was on Christmas day. How are you feeling about that? **Sir Peter Beck:** Yeah, look I mean we're pushing to get one down and out by the end of the year. That's been the goal. It's a green light program schedule and we're going to try as hard as we can. But you know at the end of the day we always caveat with: it's a rocket program, right? So, we got a couple of really big tests to go. If they go well, then we'll be in good shape. If they don't, then it'll be less good shape. But the reality is like for a 30-40 year launch vehicle program, a few months here and there is totally irrelevant. So, obviously we're all shooting for a date, but if we're not going to put something on the pad that's not perfect, and we're not going to put something on the pad that's not ready to fly for some arbitrary date. In the life cycle of a program, it's irrelevant. **Interviewer:** And the pace of delivery so far has been immense. Right. **Sir Peter Beck:** It's insane. It's totally insane. I mean, if you look at the most recent rocket developed, it was $7 billion in like 10 years or something like that. And like, the whole program for Neutron, including all this launch site, is $350 million and we're 4 years. So, it's crazy. ### Shaun D'Mello on Neutron Development (5:15) **Interviewer:** We'll head back to Sir Peter to talk Mars plans shortly, but first VP of Neutron Shaun D'Mello tells us about the time frame and how he wound up leading Neutron. **Shaun D'Mello:** I've been with the company for a while. Started around 11 years ago. I was working on the previous program which is called Electron and was really responsible for standing up that whole launch organization. Right from selecting the early launch sites, building those out, building the teams that operate the launches, and then really yeah, got Electron running from an operational and test and mission operation standpoint in the last 3 years. Got asked by Pete to lead the Neutron development program. Another opportunity to go build a rocket taking all the lessons learned from the past. So, couldn't pass that up. **Interviewer:** Right from the start, the hype around this project has been very, very large. The ambition for the timeline probably equally as large. Like what's your true feeling on that? Like when do you get confident that this is actually going into space and how far away do you think that is from being quite solid on that timeline? **Shaun D'Mello:** Yeah, I think the confidence building for a rocket program is just continuous. There's never one specific thing and then you're, you know, at least from my point of view, there isn't just one thing you do and you say it's going to be good. You have to be in this constant sense of paranoia and you constantly have to be on edge to just keep building confidence and retiring risk. Very complex machine, you know, and it doesn't take much for it to go wrong. So every part of the way, every test we do, every integration activity, just raises that confidence and you just have to constantly keep doing that till you're flying. Till the second you're flying. And then once you start flying too, this confidence built in flying over and over again... there are some things you can never detect on the ground as much as you try to test. So it's equally important that once we're flying, we're learning from every flight and moving that forward as well. **Interviewer:** How many Neutrons are there in progress at the moment? **Shaun D'Mello:** So right now we're already building flight two. So build number two has started and in some cases we even have parts on the floor for the third Neutron being built. You know our goal is to build three next year. So we're going from one this year, three next year, five the year after that. So it's a pretty steep curve but we've invested in all the production infrastructure we need. So, they'll just keep producing. And you know, while the first one's being built, I expect the second one to be halfway built. **Interviewer:** And if you were an investor in Rocket Lab, how would you be thinking about this opportunity? **Shaun D'Mello:** Immense potential, right? I think we're just about to get started. So we've seen a lot of growth already and then we're about to embark on this really next big phase of the company with this multi-ton rocket capable to go to orbit, our own space applications. There's a lot of exciting future ahead of us. ### Adam Spice on Financials and Acquisitions (7:56) **Interviewer:** Even while the rockets are taking off, the business has to stay grounded. So to go over the numbers, we are talking to Rocket Lab CFO Adam Spice. **Adam Spice:** Ultimately, even if you go back seven or eight years ago when Pete and I were talking, our goal was to have a mix of 30% from launch, 70% from Space Systems. And of course, Space Systems is representative of selling subsystems, full platforms, software, ultimately having our own applications down the road. So, I think if we can maintain the current mix we're at, I think that's a comfortable spot because launch is great. It's very enabling. It's very sexy. People love launch. But it's volatile. It's lumpy. And, you know, unlike space systems where we can largely control our own destiny because we're so vertically integrated, at the end of the day, we can't launch a rocket until somebody shows up with a payload. So, you can do all this great work, have a rocket ready on the pad, it's frosty, ready to go, and then all of a sudden, the customer might say, "Oh, we got a problem with our radio. We got to demate." And we don't get to recognize revenue in launch for the most part until you actually hit the button. **Interviewer:** Right. So launch is great but it's less predictable, it's fickle. **Adam Spice:** Exactly. It's [a] great term. And as we know businesses love these recurring revenues and that's very, very exciting. **Interviewer:** Hey, we just touched earlier on different growth and obviously there's growth in these core businesses still but one thing you mentioned was an acquisition in Munich. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about that and also how much you expect acquisition to make up a part of the growth story going forward. **Adam Spice:** Yeah. So in general, Pete and I... you can never count on acquisitions to drive your growth because acquisitions are just a culmination of really fortunate events coming together. And you can't plan for that. So we just, we're always looking well. We know we want this capability or this functionality or this exposure to a market. And so your baseline plan is always just do it yourself. And very fortunately, because Pete is such an engineer, like he's the engineer's engineer, we don't have to buy stuff. So, it becomes a much more liberating thing and you can be much more choosy when you basically say, "Hey, okay, well, we need the technology, but there's probably it'll take us maybe 6 months longer and maybe be 10 million more of P&L burn to do it organically, but then we don't have to spend $200 million and give to a bunch of VCs and founders." So, we tend to kind of do a mix. If you look at Space Systems, some of the initial pieces were inorganic through acquisitions, but we've grown those in a lot of organic ways as well. Like we've added radios for example and batteries and all these composite [technologies]. A lot of these different things were developed in-house. The whole satellite manufacturing business was grown in-house. We didn't buy a company to do that. So, I think we find that balance. So, I'd say will M&A be a continuing focus for us? Absolutely. I think when you talk about recent deals, so Geost is a deal that we just closed. And in fact, we were there earlier this week meeting with a team, great team. And then we're hoping to close by the end of the year this Mynaric acquisition, which does optical terminals to allow constellation satellites to communicate with each other on orbit. That's got a team of around 300 people in Munich [and] will give us a really, really helpful footprint in Europe. **Interviewer:** Would that be the first European business? **Adam Spice:** First European business for us which actually opens up a lot of opportunities because if you don't have a European kind of development and manufacturing presence you get boxed out of a lot of ESA program opportunities. In fact, if they have any choice they're going to use European content. So now we're considered European to a certain extent because of that footprint there which means we can not only sell the Mynaric stuff but all the other Rocket Lab suite of stuff as quasi-European. ### Profitability, Cash Flow, and Talent (11:24) **Interviewer:** Revenue is growing at a pretty incredible pace, again at 36% this year I think. So when do you expect to clear a profit? Is that in the conversations now? **Adam Spice:** Well, there's profit and then there's cash flow. And I think in our case, they're kind of detached at least for now. Neutron getting Neutron's first launch off is really key to driving to getting to just a bit of positive. So what people kind of look at as P&L positivity, it's going to take a little bit longer because we've been having this huge bubble of R&D spend that's been pushing us in a loss position for the last several years because of Neutron. Once it goes into production, then it becomes cost of sales and there's revenue associated with it. So your P&L looks much, much better. Cash flow will be a little bit different because we continue to invest in... like right now as we speak we're ordering the long lead parts for tails 2, 3. We're building out the barge which isn't required for the first flight. So that scaling infrastructure is going to continue to be a demand on cash through 2026. So I'd expect cash flow positivity no earlier than I would say early '27. But then that's when P&L and cash flows start to merge more together because you will have passed that infrastructure investment bubble. **Interviewer:** At the moment we've got SpaceX sort of quite publicly burning billions I think in cash to achieve dominance. You seem to be taking a different approach. Moving towards this profitable path faster... with smaller losses. Is this how intentional is this and do you think it's something that will set yourselves apart ultimately? **Adam Spice:** It's very intentional. We don't have the luxury of having access to the kind of money that Elon can bring to the table, obviously. So we have to have a model that gets us to profitability and cash flow positivity. I mean, we're a living breathing organism that needs to become self-sustaining, right? So, we're kind of moving from that youngster phase to now kind of becoming a self-sustaining entity. That's one of the commitments that you make when you go public is that you're going to make returns for your shareholders... ultimately to build an enduring solid kind of financial base, you got to become profitable. But we're also making sure that we make the right kind of initial investments so that we're teed up for that long-term growth. Yet, you endure some relatively intense short-term pain for the long-term gain. And I think we've endured quite a bit of pain certainly over the last four years as being a public company to make sure that we are positioned to grow. **Interviewer:** One thing that Sir Peter said in 2024 was the one thing that has always been a throttle on this business is talent. We can never get enough engineers. So we're just interested what you're thinking about staff growth. Also for our specific [audience], anything like Australasian versus US? **Adam Spice:** Well, actually, New Zealand's been a bit of a secret weapon for us because unlike in the US... to work on US programs like Neutron, you got to be a US person. Right. Whereas because of ITAR, but New Zealand's not bound by ITAR. So actually in New Zealand, we can bring talented engineers from Canada, from the UK, all over Europe and most of the rest of the world, that we can't do that here in the US. So actually New Zealand's been actually a blessing for us in a lot of ways. We went from competing with the likes of Virgin and Astra and Relativity and [ABL] and those all got wiped out. So that's become less of a thing and now you've got some other disruptive defense tech companies like Anduril for example are super hot and so there's a constant tug of war for talent but so far we're growing very fast. Just to put in context when I joined in May of 2018 I think there were 25 employees in Huntington Beach. Now we have over 800 in Long Beach. I think we had about 100 people in New Zealand. Now we have about 900 people in New Zealand. So I don't think talent acquisition is our biggest challenge. ### Constellations and Competition (15:23) **Interviewer:** So you're moving into satellite constellations. You know this is another place you'll be competing with SpaceX. So you know how much room you think there is for that? **Adam Spice:** So constellations, it's a broad umbrella, right? It's basically we think of it in applications. So what are the functions that are going to be done from space... delivering services and data? So you can think it'll range from things that are very well known like Starlink now delivering broadband to consumers; you have direct to mobile; you have earth observation like taking images for various purposes whether that's for weather or for national security or for commercial applications. So there are many, many dozens of these vertical applications from space. And so, competing with SpaceX, the question would be, well, are we really going to develop a constellation to do fixed broadband to the consumer masses? I don't know. Hard to say. I think we're not going to get into an application where we're going to be at such a huge capital disadvantage. And if you look at right now, that fixed broadband is really... you've got Elon and you've got Kuiper coming in, right? So, you got Starlink and Kuiper. So, we got to be careful. Will we have an application? I believe we'll have an application in focus in the not too distant future, but we're gonna have to be very cognizant of what's real practical because back to your point of profitability. Pete and I always have this little bit of a tug-of-war from time to time about healthy tension about leaning forward to invest for the future versus how do we get to profitability sooner. Clearly embarking on an application, unless you acquire somebody who's already got that momentum, if you do it organically, that can be a fairly expensive proposition. **Interviewer:** What was your background before? You have a space background? **Adam Spice:** I come from a semiconductor background. **Interviewer:** It sounds like you've had a some good choice of industry. **Adam Spice:** Not been lacking growth and I love growth. That's kind of what attracted me to Rocket Lab. There's no question that the growth opportunities here are staggering. I mean when I think about having been at Intel when the internet was just taking off, Broadcom when that was proliferating and all the different connectivity technologies... I have never been at a company with more opportunities coming. It's a target-rich environment. I mean some of the places you're hunting for "hey where can we go to find that next little bit of growth"—that's not our problem. We have opportunities coming in everywhere. ### Peter Beck on Public Markets and Defense (17:58) **Interviewer:** Lots of opportunity means lots of keen investors watching closely. As a public company, Rocket Lab faces constant scrutiny from shareholders and the market. We asked Sir Peter what that pressure feels like behind the scenes. **Sir Peter Beck:** Look, the pressure is real. There's so many people that own the stock and I know both Adam and I feel a deep sense of responsibility to do right by the shareholders and create value. And we've been lucky to date to create some value and people are just so nice. But it all comes down to execution and every person in this company understands that. A lot of the company are stockholders themselves. So we all feel it and we all push and work super hard. Funny enough it wasn't that hard for us to move from being a private company to a public company because you'll notice that a lot of space companies are extremely aspirational and they make really wild and outlandish claims. Maybe it's the kind of Kiwi element, but we've always been very kind of reserved. Yeah. And we're, you know, I'm a conservative engineer. We're conservative people. So, when Rocket Lab says we're going to do something, it's going to happen. So we don't get out in front of our skis. And I think that's where a lot of public companies can get in trouble is making these forward-looking statements that are aspirational rather than realistic. **Interviewer:** Once you have rockets, you need customers. So, you got some customers lined up. And what's a customer profile for a rocket of the size of [Neutron]? **Sir Peter Beck:** Well, so tremendous different type of customer profile. So we have customers that are looking to put up constellations. Obviously, Neutron is an ideal vehicle for national security. Where this year we're onboarded onto the NSSL program. That's the National Space Launch program. That program is exquisite in the fact that there's only five launch providers onboarded onto that and they launched the most important national security missions for the government. So it's a real feather in your cap to be onboarded onto that. So we have a good range of both commercial and government customers for the product. **Interviewer:** So just touch on the defense sector a little bit. I mean you'd have to have your head completely in the sand to not appreciate that that's a very growing and active part of the market. **Sir Peter Beck:** Yeah. It's always been about half of our business. On the launch side it's about 50% commercial, 50% government. And then of that government it's about 30% defense and 20% civil. Civil being like NASA and those kind of organizations. **Interviewer:** And you've... some of the talk going on at the moment is about Golden Dome. And I was just wondering like, is Rocket Lab got a front seat in this? **Sir Peter Beck:** Yeah, absolutely. I mean so the Golden Dome [sic] is a missile defense system. So if another country launches a missile attack, this is supposed to detect it and eliminate the threat. That's a very difficult thing to do if you got a missile being launched from the other side of the world and coming in. It's a very difficult thing to try and first detect and then neutralize. So a lot of that capability, especially the sensing capability, is in space. So yeah, we think we're well positioned to be a really good contractor and provider to that. **Interviewer:** And is Neutron likely to be a big part of that? **Sir Peter Beck:** Yeah, I mean there's a lot of launch that needs a lot of spacecraft and satellites that need to be launched. So Neutron [will] be a part of that. We have a HASTE launch vehicle that's doing hypersonic suborbital tests. So, yeah. ### Mars Ambitions and Human Spaceflight (21:25) **Interviewer:** I think we heard Mars about five times today. We heard Venus, I think you touched on, came up another couple of times, but with regards to Mars... firstly, their ambition. Interesting how you feel about that and how realistic that is and what's the time frame. Um, but the other thing that came up was the idea of people in this rocket and that's something that I don't think's been hugely on Rocket Lab's radar, but like how do you feel about that at the moment? **Sir Peter Beck:** Yeah. Well, Mars is obviously the planet of destination and there's a number of really, really important missions. The Mars Sample Return mission previously, now there's the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter program. And look, we're great at building Martian spacecraft. We've got two ESCAPADE spacecraft that are about to go to Mars here shortly. So we really know Mars well and we were able to build things that operate in Mars, no problems at all. Just about everything on the surface of Mars right now has some Rocket Lab technology on it. So Mars is a friendly place to us. The administration and the president has made his aspirations clear that we're going to Mars and Neutron is a perfect vehicle to go and do that. Um, and then on the human space flight element... we've always intended to be for Neutron to be human space flight ratable. So when you fly humans you have to have different safety factors on tanks and different kind of levels of redundancy in the vehicle and we designed that in from day one. Right now we don't have any human spaceflight programs currently or anything like that. But if the opportunity arose that was required... that there was additional capabilities or services required for human space flight, then we weren't going to build a vehicle that wasn't able to do it. So we we baked it in from day one for the future. ### Conclusion (23:09) **Interviewer:** Rocket Lab has no shortage of big goals, but the multi-billion dollar question now: will Neutron make it to the pad before the end of 2025? We put that to Shaun D'Mello. How did you feel about the December deadline that the governor put out there? **Shaun D'Mello:** It's a deadline. All right. But no, it's good. We're aggressively marching towards it. And if there's any team that can do it, it's Rocket Lab, so we'll get it done. **Interviewer:** And that's us from Virginia. Thanks to Sir Peter Beck, Adam Spice, Shaun D'Mello, and the Rocket Lab team for having us. You can watch Shared Lunch on YouTube or follow the podcast on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.