[[Home|🏠]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> [[Interviews]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> July 24 2022 **Insider**: [[Peter Beck]] **Source**: [Space Innovation Summit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nwizfzu_NpQ) **Date**: July 24 2022  🔗 Backup Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nwizfzu_NpQ ## 🎙️ Transcript >[!hint] Transcript may contain errors or inaccuracies. **Host (Z):** Welcome everyone to a special edition of Space Talks with Z hosted by the America's Feature Series. We're recording this discussion with Peter Beck, CEO of Rocket Lab - rocket enthusiast turned CEO of an international rocket launch company. This is a special recording for the second day of the Space Innovation Summit. Thanks very much to Viasat and Millennium Space Systems for helping make these discussions possible. Without further ado, I would like to welcome and thank Mr. Peter Beck, CEO of Rocket Lab International, who's come up from working on machines all the way through being the CEO of a rocket startup. Welcome sir, and thank you for taking the time to speak with us. **Peter Beck:** Oh my pleasure, thanks very much. ### The CAPSTONE Mission Success **Host (Z):** I figured we'll just jump right in. I know we've only got about 30 minutes and everybody wants to hear about CAPSTONE. It is just a spectacular success. Congratulations! It's on another level because again, it's a commercial space company as opposed to a government entity. This unlocks things perhaps in terms of access to lunar orbit and the surface itself from a commercial provider. Where do you go from here and what do you envision the use cases of this amazing capability? **Peter Beck:** I mean that's probably the thing that excites me the most. Look, the mission was incredibly hard and it took us a lot of resource to pull it off. But at the end of it, what we've actually created is a very affordable and incredibly powerful but also very accurate deep space probe and bus. We've flown past the moon and already - I haven't caught up with the team how far we are - but 400,000 plus kilometers out. And we can easily get to the moon with this, we've demonstrated that. We can go and visit other planets, we can go to asteroids, and for some tens of millions of dollars. The capability that's been created here is really probably the most exciting thing for me. When we look at our own missions to Venus, the spacecraft that we flew here last week is exactly the same spacecraft that we will fly to Venus. There's almost no changes. So we've really created a new capability for doing not just lunar but interplanetary science at a frequency and cost that has just not been available before. **Host (Z):** This is spectacular. If you could maybe share one particular story throughout this journey that you like - maybe that hasn't been shared before? **Peter Beck:** Look, there's just been so many of those. It's one of those programs that on a piece of paper looks super simple - "oh, we'll just upgrade a Curie engine, we'll make a hypercurie engine, put some tanks on it, a couple of bits and pieces and a good radio, and we're good to go." But just everything is super hard. The mass fraction of the spacecraft is phenomenal. Those carbon composite tanks you can see in the actual picture behind me are just super thin wall - like 0.8 of a millimeter thick in carbon composite. Of course, they have to be gas tight and compatible with propellants and all of those things. Then the hypercurie engine itself - 300 seconds of ISP won't cut it. It's 305, 310 - we saw some firings that were approaching 320 seconds of ISP on that engine. And anybody who knows who's built little non-cryogenic engines knows that 300 seconds of ISP - you can go to Airbus catalog and pick the very best top engine, and it's just 310. So to develop an entirely new propulsion system from scratch... Then just the radio - having a radio that can do deep space, can do ranging for navigation - really complicated tasks. And then the burns themselves. Most new satellites, you get deployed in orbit and you've got hours or days or weeks to commission it. We saw with the CAPSTONE spacecraft itself it took a couple of days just to get everything commissioned and happy before the mission could continue. Well, we don't have that luxury. We have a full 3-axis stabilized deep space spacecraft that gets separated off the rocket, and a few minutes later you have to liven up, light, point, go, and execute those trajectory maneuvers flawlessly. And it's not just one maneuver. As we raise the apogee on every maneuver to reach the TLI, absolutely pinpoint precision timing right back from an instantaneous launch window through to every one of those burns has to be absolutely perfectly timed, perfect amount of total impulse delivered, and really fly that spacecraft. During the mission we actually combined two of those maneuvers together - we called it the "super maneuver." We combined burns six and seven together and put over a kilometer a second of delta V on it in one burn. That was because the propulsion system was performing so well and we could de-risk the mission a little bit by just doing one burn instead of another burn. And then of course the TLI burn - it'll be something that I remember the rest of my life. We unfortunately do all these burns in the dark, so we lose comms, do the burn, and then point the dish where it should be, and it's either there or it's not there. Hence the reason you saw a tremendous amount of eruption if you watch any of the live streams, because the burns are all done in the dark, and you're just waiting for the return signal. So yes, it's just been an incredibly exciting mission that's just two and a half years of just an absolute huge amount of work by the team. ### Innovation Beyond Rockets **Host (Z):** What's amazing about this - just to highlight this for some of our listeners - is the innovation is not just in "rocket go up." The astronautics here are tremendous, and the innovation in the maneuvering. This is all a contribution from Rocket Lab that goes out into the general world. The institutional knowledge and capability and capacity that's being built in the employee workforce is really tremendous. This is what we think about - I think you'd agree, Peter - in terms of what we mean by the future of space being in these companies like yours: that know-how of having been there and done that and made those decisions. But this is not your first success either. Photon is now a success. You've also had an amazing success with Electron - the capture by a helicopter, first time attempted in so many years, executed and demonstrated. That paves the way for another discussion about what recovery means and what reusable means and how that can serve the budding space economy. How do you see the use cases and the things people are doing evolving between the two platforms now that are really just clearly capable and almost routine at this point, the way your team is making it look these days? **Peter Beck:** I'm glad it looks routine. I can assure you with anything but, especially going to the moon! But they're two different kind of product lines in a sense. You've got Electron, which is a very mature product. Every sort of 30 days there's a vehicle rolling off the production line - or every 18 working days. It's a very stable and mature product, but we continue to tweak obviously reusability. We've iterated on that quite significantly. I think a lot of people know us as the rocket company because the rocket steals the show. We saw that with the CAPSTONE launch. When the Electron put the Lunar Photon in orbit, I think 90% of the world thought that mission was done. Where the way we looked at it is like 10% of the mission was just putting it in orbit - we've done that plenty of times before. Now the real trickiness was the spacecraft. Our space systems division is actually larger than our launch division at this point. We've got some exciting missions - we've got ESCAPADE, which is two satellites to orbit Mars, and Lockset, which is a propellant demonstration. So some really, really cool projects coming out of that team. ### The Responsive Space Program **Host (Z):** What's really clear is that it's a big statement to say that the space systems and astronautics side of the house is now larger than the launch side. That tells everyone this is operations and manufacturing, it's low risk, but this is where the work and everything's going - into the space systems. It's a really interesting different type of indicator for the health of all of these applications. Moving forward, your team is driving some amazing space logistics operations. Just a couple days ago on the sixth of July, there was the announcement of the Responsive Space Program. It's truly the postal service of whatever orbit or cislunar you want. Can you talk about that and how you see it evolving and what you think it means for the ecosystem in general? **Peter Beck:** I mean, look, responsive access to space has been talked about for as long as I've been in this industry. From the Electron side, we've executed it a number of times in different formats. At least once a year we have a customer come to us with their hair on fire needing to get on orbit super quick. All sorts of different applications - some commercial and some more defense related. It's something that we've done a lot in the past. Our program R3D2 from DARPA was a responsive launch program. The way we look at responsive launch, it's not just about the rocket - it's also about the spacecraft. Having so much under the one roof with respect to being able to build whatever spacecraft we need to and then launch it and then operate it - that's actually true responsive access to space. Because if you've got a rocket sitting there 24/7 but there's no satellite to go on it, it's totally useless. So there's many more elements to it. On the launch side, we've designed the vehicle from day one with having a segregated and integrated payload and upper stage stack where it's completely agnostic to any booster. You can integrate that, put it in the corner, nitrogen purge it, and leave it for as long as you want, and integrate it to a booster at any point in time. We created all these things - we kind of do them at various levels already in normal business. So we felt it was just about time - how can we provide a solution for customers that they can follow and actually deliver on true responsive access? The long pole is always licensing. There's a process. This program is really about laying out the process such that if you needed to launch in a hurry, here's how you do it. In many respects, we've exercised this a number of times already. Instead of just customers coming to us with their hair on fire, we much prefer to put out a guide about how you do it and then work with customers to achieve those goals that they ultimately have. ### Deep Space Communications **Host (Z):** That's really amazing. What's going to be so interesting about that is the people who are smaller players, mid-smaller players perhaps, for whom that's been an issue - they don't know that process, how do we do this, how do we make this happen. Enabling them with this capability will enable their customers' use cases. It's such a fundamental play that I think we take for granted these capabilities in our modern daily lives. One other thing that's really exciting that you mentioned was about the radio and deep space comms. I would just like to ask about your opinion of where space communication needs to go next and how that might play and interact with your company. **Peter Beck:** We're super lucky - we have a great relationship with APL where we license one of their radios and manufacture it in-house and work with them to create this radio. It's funny - you look at a deep space spacecraft, actually the radio is one of the largest barriers to doing anything. You can have a great propulsion system, but if you can't talk to it, it doesn't matter. We learned very early on this was going to be super critical, and having the ability to range and navigate off a radio is really, really important. We've learned a tremendous amount, not just through the CAPSTONE mission, but even now as the spacecraft is heading out into our solar system. We're still learning about how to do deep space comms and all the idiosyncrasies that go with that. We don't have the DSN dishes. We've got relatively small dishes on a commercial basis doing deep space comms. CAPSTONE obviously has the luxury of the DSN or Deep Space Network - great big dishes and all the rest of it. So we're doing all this on commercial dishes at a commercial level. We're learning a tremendous amount there about how far can you actually go on a small commercial dish. Like I say, I'm not sure where we're at now, but it has to be 400,000 plus kilometers and we're still communicating and uploading commands and doing what we need to do. So we're learning a lot for sure. Deep space comms is going to be really critical for obviously returning men and women to the moon, but also further steps like going beyond. It's just going to be absolutely critical. ### Peter Beck's Personal Journey **Host (Z):** It sounds like you also have a passion for radios. Rockets, radios - these are really exciting times for the space economy, and we're going to the stars on the back of commercial pioneers like yourself. One thing I wanted to ask you about was anything in particular that you think is super relevant about your journey, coming from working in a tool and die shop as a rocket enthusiast, radio enthusiast, all the way to who you are now. For the rocket geek community, you're kind of one of us who made it - not a billionaire coming in. So I think the community really appreciates your journey. I just wanted to invite you to maybe share something that you felt you particularly learned or want to give to the people out there now trying to get into the industry from that journey. **Peter Beck:** I would say that I'm still very much learning a lot about myself and a lot about everything really. I started in a small town at the bottom of New Zealand, in a country with no space industry. I guess I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and to me it was just non-optional that this is an area that I wanted to pursue as a career and a passion. I was lucky to have parents that really put no boundaries on what I could achieve. A lot of parents, it's very easy for them to say "just focus on your grades and do this." I was lucky to grow up in a household where if I had a passion with something, then that passion would be fueled, and there would never be any talk about what's possible and what's not possible. So I think that's important. I guess if you really want to go after something, then everybody has the ability inside them to make it happen. It could be super painful and you have to sacrifice a lot, but if you really, really believe in something you want to do, then you just got to go and make it happen. If you look at Rocket Lab, we were a very, very small company for a number of years just struggling away there. But it came to a point where we actually had enough credibility to raise capital and do all those things. And also go well outside the things that you're comfortable with. It's kind of a juxtaposition because as an engineer, I'm a very conservative engineer. I like margins and I like to understand everything. I'm a fairly conservative guy. But when it comes to creating a rocket company, man, you're gonna take some risk. Because if you're conservative too much, then you'll never advance. CAPSTONE is a great example of that. We had never even really put a satellite in orbit before we'd won the CAPSTONE mission. So we had a lot to learn in a very short time frame. But like I say, if you want it badly enough, then absolutely anything is possible. ### Future Workforce Development **Host (Z):** That's spectacular, thank you. One of the things that's also happening now, and we alluded to it earlier in terms of entrepreneurs but also the general workforce of the future - I myself am professor of space business leadership and policy in a master's program we created at Thunderbird around space. You see a lot of different types of education and discussion about how do we think about that workforce of the future, what do they need. You built this from literally the first nut and bolt all the way to now the moon and beyond. What did that workforce need? What recommendations might you give to academics or government people about what we need in this industry? It's happening, it's the future, you got to get your citizens upskilled to be part of it. **Peter Beck:** I think the most important thing - and let's be clear here, like Rocket Lab's success is a giant team. It's not like I built it all. It's an amazing team here that do these things. I would just say that what we look for in people are people with just passion. Obviously you need to be super sharp, but also super passionate. We would hire a master student who is super passionate over some expert PhD that was kind of boring and not really interested in the field any day of the week. As people start to prepare themselves for a career, we always like to see people who just go out and do stuff. Show us you have the ability to just go out and do the things that you're passionate about. And it doesn't need to be in space. If we're looking at hiring a technician to work on a spacecraft, if they have a great passion in automotive or aviation or whatever, we look to see what do they do in their spare time and what are the key elements that make this person really good at what they do. And it doesn't have to be - you don't have to be in the space industry to work in the space industry. But I think that's the most important thing is providing that catalyst for passion and doing cool stuff so people get excited about it. I think that's really important to continue to inspire the next generation - really do cool stuff. ### Closing Remarks **Host (Z):** Thank you for sharing that and thank you for taking your time. I know we want to be very sensitive to your schedule as well, sir. So thank you for your remarks. Again, just congratulations to you and the entire team on just some spectacular successes. As we talked about today, CAPSTONE demonstrates not just a launch and place capability, it demonstrates so much of the infrastructure being available now in commercial offering - fundamental change from when you and I were kids. To think that we've helped change it is gratifying, I'm sure. Thank you again to everyone in our audience and our sponsors, Millennium Space Systems and Viasat. Thank you Peter and your entire team for your remarks today. Take care everyone. **Peter Beck:** Thanks so much. Cheers, thanks. **Dylan:** Thank you both very much. Peter, that is incredible - some of the information you shared with us. And Z, the trifecta, three in a row, that was outstanding. We can't thank you enough. You did a great, great job. So on behalf of all the Space Talks with Z, you get a 100! **Host (Z):** Thank you Dylan so much, and congrats to you both on just a spectacular event today. And to our hosts, the generals, etc. It's been a real pleasure and honor to be part of such a team. **Dylan:** Well, you were just outstanding. So thank you again. We hope to see you again.