[[Home|🏠]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> [[Interviews]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> September 22 2021 **Insider**: [[Peter Beck]] **Source**: [Sharesies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hW_df95t1jc) **Date**: September 22 2021  🔗 Backup Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hW_df95t1jc ## 🎙️ Transcript >[!hint] Transcript may contain errors or inaccuracies. **Leighton:** Everyone, welcome to another week of Lunch Money brought to you by Sharesies. At Sharesies, our purpose is to create the most financially empowered generation. For those of you who are new to Lunch Money, we do these every Thursday at lunch time, and this is a place where you as investors can come and hear from people leading some of the companies available on the Sharesies platform and other investing experts. Lunch Money is also available as a podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts. Please, if you're listening to the podcast, take a moment to leave a rating and comment on Apple Podcasts—we really appreciate it. My name's Leighton, I'm one of the co-founders and co-CEOs of Sharesies. **Brooke:** Kia ora, I'm Brooke, also one of the co-founders and co-CEOs here at Sharesies. Before we get into today's discussion, I just need to give a quick small legal disclaimer: investing involves risk, you aren't guaranteed to make money, and you might lose the money you start with. Any information we provide is general only and current at this time. If you're looking for some help with investment choices, we recommend talking to a licensed financial advice provider. We won't be providing any personalized advice as part of this webinar. Also just a quick reminder that if you have any questions for us or our guest, you can submit them through the "ask a question" button down below. Don't leave questions in the discussion area as they are likely to get missed. And please be kind and respectful towards our speakers and your fellow viewers, otherwise we'll have to take steps to remove you from the webinar, and we obviously really don't want to do that. **Leighton:** Definitely do not want to do that because today we are super stoked to be joined by Peter Beck, who is the founder and CEO of Rocket Lab. Peter's here today to chat about the year that has been for Rocket Lab and how it plans to navigate its way into the future. Welcome Peter, and thank you so much for joining us. **Peter Beck:** Thanks very much guys, thanks very much. Real pleasure. ### Peter's Background **Brooke:** So great to have you here, and thanks heaps for joining us. It would be really cool to kick off with you telling us a bit about yourself and your career. **Peter Beck:** The earliest memory I have, in fact it's almost the earliest memory I have, is standing outside on a cold night in Invercargill with my father in the backyard and looking up at the stars. He pointed out to me that all the stars that are in the sky were suns, and around those suns were planets, and there could be somebody looking back at me from one of those planets, asking the same questions. That was really the moment it's like, "Wow, this space thing is pretty big," and that was really the beginning. I would say right throughout my career, it's always been about the rocket. I had a fairly non-traditional path. I think most CEOs and tech companies one way or the other end up with slightly unconventional paths, it seems. But for me, I knew exactly what I wanted to do at a very young age, and I loved engineering and I loved space. So you put those two things together, it's not surprising you end up with a rocket company. My plan originally was to go and work for like a NASA or a Boeing or one of those guys, and everything I did during my career was targeted at trying to get into the space industry. So when I finished high school, I had an option of either going to university or going and doing a trade, and I went and did tool and die making, which is a precision trade. The purpose was nobody could teach me how to build a rocket, so the only way to learn how to build a rocket is to build a rocket. In order to build a rocket, you need really good machining and good hand skills, so I went and did a precision trade. The opportunities kept presenting themselves and I ended up in the design office and so on, and ultimately ended up at a government research lab, Industrial Research or Callaghan Innovation as it's now called. Then I went on a rocket pilgrimage. I thought, "Right, time to go to the US and let's see what we can do over there." So I went over on a bit of a rocket pilgrimage and went and visited all the places that I had been corresponding with for years and all the places I've dreamed about, did lots of tours at NASA facilities. It was awesome, and really it was both the most inspirational and depressing time all at the same time. It was inspirational to see all the history there; it was depressing to see the things that I thought actually needed to happen were not happening. So I got back on the plane and doodled a logo and then landed, quit my job, and started Rocket Lab. Then we started building little sounding rockets to start with. In 2009, we kind of became the first private company in the southern hemisphere to send something to space—not to orbit, just up into space. Then we cut ourselves out of this little advanced technology shop and did lots of little contracts for folks all around the planet in space. It kind of reached a point where I felt we had the credibility and the capability to go and raise real capital. There's really two things I do: one is Rocket Lab, the other is helping New Zealand entrepreneurs. When I was on my journey, I suffered the same thing that a lot of New Zealand entrepreneurs did with really dilutive capital and putting yourself into situations where it's impossible to raise from large institutional investors. So I jumped on a plane and went to Silicon Valley and gave myself three weeks to come home with a check or be run out of town. Everybody warned me going to Silicon Valley that it would be full of sharks and I'd come home and it'll be terrible, but actually it was quite the opposite. We only actually pitched to three investors in Silicon Valley, and they're the three biggest that I could find and the three that were aligned with what we wanted to do. We did indeed come home with a term sheet after three weeks. Then the rest is kind of history—did lots of other rounds, well, a relatively small number of rounds, like four rounds, and brought on larger and larger investors until ultimately we've reached this point here, which is the next part of our exciting journey. I know that's a big long answer, but it's like I'm trying to compress 15 years into five minutes. ### What is Rocket Lab? **Leighton:** You did well there, and I think you've got me thinking about how we're inspiring our children—need to be looking up at the stars and seeing what the future could hold for them. Can you tell us a little bit more about Rocket Lab, like what your purpose is, what are the different business divisions, and dive into that? **Peter Beck:** Rocket Lab is an interesting company in the fact that we don't just build rockets. I think we're most well known for the Electron launch vehicle, but that was always intended to be the first product from the start. In fact, the very second Electron that we ever flew, the kick stage on that Electron had flat recesses in it for the express purposes of later on putting solar panels in to make that a satellite. So really from very early on, we were thinking about building an end-to-end space company. If you look at the space industry, the way to think about it is kind of three pillars of value: - You have launch, which is about a $10 billion total addressable market - You have satellites or space systems, that's about $20 billion - And then you have applications—that's all the things that we use from space, and that's about $320 billion So you can see if you can get yourself into that application space in a very competitive way, then that's a very great place to be. Whoever holds the key to space has a tremendous amount of ability to be very competitive in all those other areas. So as a company, yes, we do launch, we also build satellites, and ultimately we'll be moving into applications where we actually provide services from space. ### Neutron Rocket **Brooke:** We've had quite a few questions about the Neutron rocket too. Can you tell us a bit about that and how it works? I think Jack specifically asked, "Will Rocket Lab launch Neutron from New Zealand in the future too?" **Peter Beck:** Neutron is kind of the next evolution. Electron is an amazing product—it serves a really important market in dedicated small launch, and that will never ever go away. Neutron really takes the next step into much larger payloads and even into human spaceflight. I tell the team that most people never get the chance to design a rocket from scratch once in their lifetime. We get the chance to do it twice, and we get the chance to take all the learnings of actually operating a launch vehicle and start with a clean sheet of paper. Neutron is really about providing an alternative solution in that medium to large space of launch. With respect to the question "Will it be launched out of New Zealand?"—to give you a sense of scale of the vehicle, if you took all of the liquid oxygen in New Zealand, we'd half fill the tank. So there's some real challenges of launching a vehicle that scale out of New Zealand. The industrial base is just not set up to support such a magnitude. So we'll start by launching that out of the US to begin with, and who knows in the future, but it's big—it's really big. ### Customers **Leighton:** You are anything but boring. But obviously, Peter, today I know probably most people listening, or many of them anyway, will be shareholders now, which is really exciting. We certainly saw a lot of talk and had a lot of interest through the Sharesies platform for that. But we might just ask some questions that they specifically want to know. So the first one is: who are your customers? And to get two birds with one stone here, there's a little bit of interest around the military contracts and stuff, and potential investor view on that as well. So if you could just touch on customers and the military specifically, that would be great. **Peter Beck:** Customers are basically 50/50 government to commercial. Of the 50% that are government, it's roughly 30% defense-related and 20% government civil, like NASA or NOAA and those kinds of customers. We really like that customer mix because it gives us a lot of diversity in our portfolio. Managing our manifest is very tricky because most of the time we're waiting on a customer rather than a customer waiting on us. When you're integrating a satellite or developing a satellite and going through all of its testing, quite often there'll be issues, and then we get the call, "Hey look, we can't deliver our satellite on this day." So we have to reschedule and juggle the manifest. Having a good, healthy commercial customer base is super helpful for that because the commercial customers tend to be a lot faster moving than the government customers. On the defense payloads, we've been super clear about this from day one and super transparent. You can go onto our website and see every single defense-related payload that we've ever launched. I would say that New Zealand has the most, if not one of the most, robust payload permitting processes. It's the only country that I know, at least, that requires a minister to personally sign off on every single payload that goes to space. So every single payload that we launch goes through the New Zealand Space Agency and all of the appropriate agencies, testing it for national interest and making sure that it meets all of New Zealand's obligations and all the rest of it. Then ultimately it's signed off by a minister. As a company, we have our own view on this as well. We don't fly weapons or anything contentious like that. But military payloads are woven into our everyday lives. GPS is always the example that's very obvious—we all use GPS. If you want to order a pizza, your pizza turns up because it's been GPS fitted into it, and that's a defense constellation owned, operated, and run by the US military. So within space, there is a lot of crossover between defense and commercial and infrastructure. But like I say, all the rules and regulations about what we can and can't launch from the government's perspective are available on the government's website, and we've always been super upfront and transparent about all the payloads. ### Competitors **Brooke:** The next one is competitors. Very high profile industry that you're in, and only becoming more so. So maybe you could share a little bit of your view of where your competitors are and what differentiates you. **Peter Beck:** I would say there's a lot of emerging or potential competitors in this market. There's a bunch of companies, one even that's gone public from the launch side of it. I think the reality is that there's only been the first private company to ever put a satellite into orbit, that was SpaceX; the second private company to ever put a satellite in orbit was Rocket Lab. So although there's a bunch of people trying, this is tough—this is a really tough thing to do. Even in the last few weeks, there's been two companies that have blown up rockets trying to get there. One company in particular, it's six times in a row and still haven't got to orbit yet. So it is really, really hard. Getting your first rocket to orbit is hard; getting your 10th or your 20th rocket to orbit is like hard squared. This needs to be like an exponential term on the hardness—it's very, very difficult. So we're not naive to think that there aren't going to be competitors that come along in the future. But if you look at where we are and where everybody else is, there's just quite a large gap, and we continue to move out with new launch vehicles, reusability, satellites, and there's a long tail there. As kind of pure competitors go, I would say that we're in a really unique spot right now. From the spacecraft side as well, we have a really fairly unique offering, and what we're trying to do here is build a truly end-to-end space company, perhaps one of the first. We do see a lot of competitors trying to copy what we do. Other competitors are now trying to move into also building spacecraft, but you've got to get your rocket working before you can build a spacecraft. And other competitors are now talking about building big rockets too before they haven't even built their little rocket. This industry is tremendously exciting. There's a lot of people promising a lot of stuff, but what people should be looking for is execution: how many contracts are signed, how many payloads go to orbit, how many satellites work—those kinds of things. Because it is an industry, as you mentioned, that is very high profile, very exciting, but you kind of have to filter through some of that to see actually who's delivering. ### Evolution of the Business **Leighton:** I'm really interested in some of those points, like if you could just talk us through the evolution of the business. I'm particularly interested if there's any moments where you're like, "Well, this is actually going to work," because of the sheer risk that's involved and the challenge around that. Or were you always confident? How does that play out? **Peter Beck:** I mean, look, if you didn't think it was going to work, then you wouldn't go into it. This is way too painful to not go into it thinking it's going to work. There's certainly massive evolutionary points in the company's history, that's for sure. Like raising money out of Silicon Valley—massive evolutionary point. Getting a vehicle on the pad and a successful launch—major evolutionary point that unlocked large investment rounds. Putting our first satellite on orbit, winning a NASA mission to the Moon—each of those is another big milestone or evolutionary point in the company. I learned very publicly that never say something... never say never to anything. That cost me a hat. So these days, we certainly take a much wider view on what is possible and what is not, because I've had to redefine what I thought was possible several times. So now everything's possible. ### Listing on the Nasdaq **Brooke:** And talking about everything being possible, you launched or you listed on the Nasdaq—Rocket Lab, RKLB—and that was just last month, right? So could you tell us a bit about why you chose to go down that path to list and why you used a SPAC? **Peter Beck:** At the highest level, why did we list? We have never had any issues raising private capital. There's heaps of private capital out there, and we could have remained private. The thing is that there's a couple of things that we're trying to do here: we're trying to build a large, intergenerational space company, and that's hard to do as a private entity. Also, we have a fairly active M&A pipeline, and having a public currency is super important for doing those larger M&A deals. We think that the space industry is ripe for a little bit of consolidation, so we want to make sure that we're in a great position to do some of that consolidation, and having that public currency is super important. Now, over a SPAC versus a traditional IPO, we were going down a traditional IPO path. We probably would have IPO'd in a traditional sense maybe the end of this year or early next year, something like that. Pretty much all of the SPACs that came to our door, we just said, "No thanks very much, we're on our own trajectory here." But there was one that really stood out amongst all the others, so we took a meeting and talked to the team there. It's always a good sign from my perspective when investors are asking lots of questions and really hard questions because they're very engaged. At the end of a couple of weeks of conversations, their investment team were digging deep into orbital mechanics and trying to understand trajectories of kick stages. It's like, "Right, these guys aren't here to just flick a dollar; these guys are here to also help us grow the business." They brought over 40 professionals in M&A, so we have a large team at our disposal now to do some of that consolidation. ### What is a SPAC? [*Connection issues, Leighton explains SPACs while Peter reconnects*] **Leighton:** A SPAC is a Special Purpose Acquisition Company. It's effectively large pools of capital, in this case I think it was like three or four hundred million in the US one, and when the company emerges, it's sort of like an opportunity to raise capital. It's like some sort of reverse process type happening. So many probably held VACQ, which was the SPAC that was used for Rocket Lab, and they made an acquisition of Rocket Lab, and then Rocket Lab reverse-listed onto the Nasdaq and picked up that capital as part of the process. In addition, they raised some more. So that's basically what a SPAC is. ### Public Company Experience **Brooke:** Peter, what was the process of listing like? **Peter Beck:** It was in some respects awesome to be locked down in New Zealand because it was impossible to travel to the US. In that respect, it was great—we did a whole road show in like 10 days as opposed to going from business to business and firm to firm. So that was super exciting. But the downside, of course, is I wasn't able to get up there to ring the bell. **Brooke:** How has it changed, being a public company now? Does it feel different at Rocket Lab? **Peter Beck:** I've noticed it a little bit. The reality is that we were already gearing up to become public; we were starting to really run the company like a public company. So some things have changed, but in general, the company was fairly well down the path of operating as a public company anyway. ### Team Culture **Leighton:** You've got a team just over 600, and you've got a majority based here in Aotearoa, rest in the States. What's it like, what's the culture like at Rocket Lab, and how do you manage there, obviously being here and not being able to travel at the moment too? **Peter Beck:** That really comes down to what is the magic of Rocket Lab. How is it that SpaceX and Rocket Lab have really been the two companies that have been able to blow through and successfully deliver a reliable service to orbit? The answer to that is the team. We have the best team in the world. The typical Rocket Labber is incredibly passionate, incredibly smart, and incredibly hardworking. One of the greatest things is we gave out equity from day one. So when the company listed, there was a tremendous number of the staff that were able to realize all of their hard work over all of these years. Early on, we really struggled with trying to get people to see the value in equity because New Zealand equity is not that highly valued. I think mainly that's because in the US, if you go and talk to anybody, somebody knows somebody who's done really well out of equity in a startup company. In New Zealand, nobody knows anybody that's done really well out of a start-up using equity. So very happy to see that change, where people can actually go and work for a startup, realize you're not going to get paid a huge salary, take some risk on some equity, and if it pans out, it really pans out. **Brooke:** We have similar conversations, and we're an investment firm. Everyone at Sharesies is a shareholder as well, and it is interesting that value. I think what's great, and I'm sure you don't have the problem selling that as part of the proposition anymore—it's the early days that are the hardest. But it is like what we really like now is designers or people who have come from an industry that's not the finance industry starting to see the benefits of that. I think that's going to be great. Obviously, the Xero stuff—there's a lot of people in Wellington who are aware of it because of that, but more success stories will definitely... I mean, it is a great way of sharing that wealth development with people. ### Competition in the Small Launch Market **Leighton:** So just looking at the time, we might get on to some of the questions that have been asked from the people listening today. We'll kick off with one from Barry: "There is a lot of competition in the small launch market space now. Acknowledging that Rocket Lab is developing Neutron, are there any other ideas in the pipeline to make the Electron/Photon system stand out more against the competition?" He suggests perhaps a second stage that can grab some space junk on the way down. **Peter Beck:** Depending on what you want to call competition—we don't classify anything as competition unless they're actually delivering stuff to orbit. So until then, it's kind of emerging competition. Look, there is a lot of people in the small launch space that are trying, but for as long as I can remember, that has been the case. We've tracked 140 small launch startups since 2015. There's still 140-something small launch startups, but as of yet, it's only been one, which has been Virgin Orbit, that has made it to orbit other than Rocket Lab. I don't want to sound arrogant thinking that nobody else will make it, but I think there is a massive difference between trying to get there, getting there, and then an even bigger difference between getting there and doing it reliably and regularly. I think the Electron has really got a strong foothold in this market. It gets to a point where heritage is everything. It takes a lot for a customer to move off a vehicle that has a lot of flight heritage onto something that's completely unproven. Even as Rocket Lab, what you've seen from us recently is multiple back-to-back bulk buys of Electron, and that only happens because of the heritage of the vehicle past 20-odd flights. That's what enables that. It is a long, painful road, I can imagine. ### Financial Results **Brooke:** Could you touch on your financial results? Because I know they just recently came out—bit of the highlights, challenges, just a bit of an overview there. **Peter Beck:** One of the things we're proud of is that the backlog has grown enormously. Backlog to us is not kind of fluffy mousse or rubbish—it is solid launch contracts, spacecraft contracts, signed, deposits down, like real backlog. The backlog grew from $60 to $140 million in the first half, and then even in the last quarter, we took it from $140 to $170 million in signed backlog and orders. So huge growth there. The revenue growth year-on-year is over 200%, so we're really starting to hit our strides. What's exciting is also seeing the diversification of the space systems component of that. Launch is great, but layering in that space systems is really important for diversifying, because with launches, we're completely at the mercy of our customer delivering their spacecraft on time. So launch is always a lumpy business—we're constantly managing and moving the manifest and changing things to allow for all of that. The space systems revenue is just really nice to smooth all that out. ### Valuation **Leighton:** It's interesting, the valuation thing. I don't know how you've had those conversations, but the whole art and science feels like it's true for every startup, but probably none more so than something in such an emerging technology. How did you go about those conversations? Or was it more sort of like just back-engineered from what you think you might need? **Peter Beck:** It's a bit of both, but it's looking at projected revenues and also the nearest comp to us in the market is SpaceX at a $74 billion valuation. So when you look at Rocket Lab's whatever it is now, seven or eight billion, it really stands up well. Obviously SpaceX have gone further ahead than us in many respects, but with bringing on Neutron and a bunch of other projects, the gap starts to close pretty quick. So if you look at it on that metric, we think it's good value. The reality is that, as we've seen in the last few weeks, launch is hard. There's a premium to actually get a launch vehicle and a successful launch company that works, so that's reflected in the valuation. ### Future Missions **Brooke:** I've got a question from Rob here: "Will Rocket Lab be aspiring to join the future efforts on the Moon and Mars?" **Peter Beck:** We already have two missions. We have the CAPSTONE mission to the Moon, which is launching out of New Zealand actually. That's a really important mission—we're putting a spacecraft in cislunar orbit for NASA, and this mission is to test out a very interesting orbit that will be the staging for Gateway. Gateway is the safe return of humans to the Moon and on to Mars. So this spacecraft and this mission actually provides the critical data to be able to make decisions around the position of that Gateway project—a huge project that we're lucky to be involved in. We also have two missions that we run for NASA, once again for orbiting spacecraft around Mars. These use our Photon platform—these are two spacecraft that are measuring the atmosphere or the ionosphere of Mars, launching in 2024. So we're already pushing out into the further parts of the solar system with our products. ### Advice for Entrepreneurs and Investors **Leighton:** I've got another question—moving away, slightly more personal question, Peter. This one's from George: "You're obviously extremely successful. What would be your main tip for entrepreneurs or investors?" **Peter Beck:** For an entrepreneur, it's go after a big idea because it's the same amount of pain for a small idea as a big idea—same amount of lost sleep, same amount of stress. So you may as well just go after a really big idea, the biggest idea that you can. Then surround yourself with really great investors. I think one of the follies that I see New Zealand entrepreneurs making all the time is just taking money. The least valuable thing an investor will ever give you is their money. So being really strategic and bringing the right investors on board with the right contacts and the right networks is really important. From an investor, I would say look for execution, especially in the space industry. Look for execution within Rocket Lab especially. Look for stuff we're doing in space systems and growth in space systems. I think that has a lot of growth potential for us. ### Future Rocket Lab Growth **Brooke:** I'm definitely up for hearing your views on entrepreneurialism and being an entrepreneur. Talking about big ideas—Jordan asks, "What is the Rocket Lab's future growth look like in the next five to ten years? What are you going to be really focusing on?" **Peter Beck:** We're really focusing on a couple of things. One is the space systems group, the other is obviously Neutron and the larger launch vehicle. Then more that we haven't really laid out the roadmap too clearly yet publicly is our applications—ultimately owning infrastructure in orbit and providing services from orbit. Those are the big growth areas. I think at the start I mentioned that the applications part of this market is order of magnitude larger than everything else. If you have your own rocket, your own launch site, your own satellite, your own satellite components, everything you need to build that infrastructure, then it's a very competitive place to be. ### End-to-End Space Company **Leighton:** You've made the comment a few times, and one of the people listening has commented on it: "Rocket Lab is now an end-to-end space company which is diversified away from rockets only." So the question is, "Does end-to-end mean you concentrate on supporting payload and orbit management for Rocket Lab launches only, or are you supporting other space launch programs, satellites for delivery by SpaceX, NASA, or other nations?" **Peter Beck:** If you look at our manifest, we have a huge number of customers across all spectrums. Ultimately, end-to-end for us will be building our own infrastructure, but we always envisage flying everybody else's stuff as well. The best example of that is if you look at some of our satellite components businesses. We recently just put in a new production line, a large-scale production line for reaction wheels. Those reaction wheels support our own internal products, they support a lot of other people's products, and we weren't going to build a reaction wheel production line that's capable of 2,000 reaction wheels a year on a promise. We have customers consuming large volumes of those. So it's definitely part of our strategy to be providing components and solutions across the whole industry. I said to the team, "I want everything that goes to space, whether it's a satellite that we built or we didn't build, whether it's a rocket that we launched or we didn't launch, it should have a Rocket Lab logo somewhere." ### Orbital Debris Mitigation **Brooke:** We've got a question here from Piripi around, "When you wrote your orbital debris mitigation plan, did you consider the special relationship Māori have with heavens, or did you consult Māori?" I believe for Mahia Peninsula, it's— **Peter Beck:** We've had a super great relationship with all the local community down there, including the local iwi. With respect to orbital debris mitigation plans, that's a very specific regulatory thing that we have to submit. But more as an ethos as a company, we started off and said, "Look, if we're going to launch a bunch of things to orbit, then we absolutely need to be responsible in the way we do that." I think we're probably the largest or loudest industry voice around regulation of orbital debris. I went up to the UN in Geneva and spoke about this. Even from day one, the way we designed Electron was never to leave any large parts of the launch vehicle behind. The whole reason, one of the reasons the kick stage is up there, is to ensure that our second stage de-orbits. It's one of the things I worry about because as we look at some of these emerging competitors, some of them are talking about launching 300 times a year and all these crazy numbers, and not one of them have a good answer for how they're going to do that sustainably. Whereas for us, we designed that into the vehicle—hard designed it into the vehicle from day one. ### Dedicated Viewing Area **Leighton:** Anthony said, "Would love to see a rocket launch in person. Are there any plans for a dedicated viewing area?" **Peter Beck:** We're hoping that somebody in the community or some entrepreneurial person will do that. For us, it would be another thing that we'd have to try and manage. Obviously, our priority is to get our customers into orbit. There are some great viewing spots though. The dawn launches are just spectacular. The photography that we've seen from some supporters has just been phenomenal. You see the really cool "jellyfish" as it's called in the stage separation. So there are some good viewing spots, but there isn't a dedicated close-up spot. ### COVID Impact **Brooke:** We ask this question of every business at the moment, but it's come through from one of our listeners: how has COVID impacted you, in particular the latest lockdown, and when you expect that you'll be launching again? **Peter Beck:** We talked about this in our last quarterly results, and the guidance that we gave is we've revised down the number of launches that we expect to do this year simply because of this. We've been hit like everybody else—I'm in my house like everybody else in Auckland. We're unable to launch in Level 4. We are able to launch in Level 3. So we're working hard to manage the manifest and manage the rest of the year. Like everybody else, we're very happy to see the reduction in levels. It has a big effect on our business, just like everybody else's. ### Sustainability **Leighton:** I think we spurred on some interest around sustainability, and we've got one from Wayne on, "What is Rocket Lab doing to ensure it meets social and environmental responsibilities?" **Peter Beck:** Like I say, we've been very vocal on this from day one, and we actually designed the vehicle around this. If you look at all the junk that's in orbit, a large portion of that junk is actually dead rockets, not dead satellites—spent upper stages and things like that. We just didn't think that was something we could stand on a podium and say we were going to launch a lot and not have a solution. So the way we go to orbit is quite different to any of our emerging competitors, that is for sure. We've always taken a very proactive view on that, a very public view on that. Even down to the missions that we fly—we just announced yesterday another mission that was signed with Astroscale, which is a spacecraft that goes up there and it's going to rendezvous with an old spent stage of a European rocket. It's a testing program to see if they can rendezvous with this stage, and then ultimately I think they have plans to de-orbit that. So it is something that we're very vocal about within the industry. We're advocating for more regulation, which most people in industry don't want more regulation. We think it's critical, especially as more and more constellations are being built. ### Final Question: Kiwi Emblems **Brooke:** Just looking at time, the questions are coming in faster than we can ask them—that's for sure. But we might as well ask the highest voted one left: "Will you consider putting the laser Kiwi on the next rocket?" **Peter Beck:** You would be amazed at the number of Kiwis that are on the rocket. We have some very patriotic designers. If you ever see inside a launch vehicle, there's a large number of laser-cut aluminum components that instead of a circular round hole to reduce weight, there's a shape of a Kiwi because the analyst team signed it off. So there are more Kiwi emblems on it than you can imagine, and obviously the flag flies on a launch as well. So I think people would be surprised what's inside that vehicle. ### Conclusion **Brooke:** Oh well, kia ora Peter. Thanks so much for joining us today. We really, really appreciate it, and thanks so much to everyone who tuned in. **Peter Beck:** No, my pleasure. **Leighton:** Yeah, it's been great. Please check out our new daily financial news podcast Recap. It's around 10 minutes long and published at 5 PM Monday to Friday on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts. Next Thursday we'll be joined by Michael Bennett. Michael is the CEO of Z Energy, who will talk about the company, how it's navigating the pandemic, and its new Z Electric venture. You can register for that through the link in the chat below. So we'll see you next Thursday. Enjoy the rest of your week and stay safe.