[[Home|🏠]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> [[Interviews]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> September 22 2024 **Insider**: [[Peter Beck]] **Source**: [Stories from Space Podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoENf5q4PmU) **Date**: September 22 2024  🔗 Backup Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoENf5q4PmU ## 🎙️ Transcript >[!hint] Transcript may contain errors or inaccuracies. **Host (Matthew Williams):** Welcome to the intersection of Technology, cyber security and Society. Welcome to ITSP Magazine. You're listening to a new episode of Stories from Space podcast where your host Matthew Williams examines the history of human space flight, the breakthroughs that revolutionized our understanding of the universe and our place in it, and the brave individuals who work tirelessly to advance the frontiers of our understanding. Knowledge is power now more than ever. *The authors acknowledged that this podcast was recorded on the traditional unseated land of the Lungan peoples.* **Host:** Hello and welcome back to Stories from Space. I'm your host Matt Williams. Joining me today is Sir Peter Beck, founder and CEO of Rocket Lab. Sir Peter, thank you for joining us. **Sir Peter Beck:** Thanks very much Matthew, great to be here. ### The Journey to Founding Rocket Lab **Host:** Naturally, in any interview I imagine the most common question that people start off with is to explain their journey, how they came to be basically the CEO of a major commercial space company. I've heard it said, and I will repeat it, that you are the company that is poised to challenge SpaceX's near monopoly, and this is obviously a very big accomplishment. So what can you tell us about the road that got you here? **Sir Peter Beck:** I would say the road is quite a bit different to more traditional paths, if there is such thing, to a rocket company. But for as long as I could remember, I was always really passionate about two things: one was space and one was engineering. I was born in a little town at the very bottom of the South Island of New Zealand, some 50,000 people in it. You couldn't pick a place that was more removed from the space industry than you could possibly imagine, really. I'd always had aspirations to go and work for NASA because that was the place to be in space. So I kind of traveled through my career in New Zealand, and I originally started off doing a tool and die making apprenticeship and became a tool and die maker. Really, the impetus for that was there were no university courses even remotely close to anything to do with rockets or propulsion. I was building rocket engines when I was still at school, and really needed the hand skills to be able to build their ever-increasingly complex engines and pumps and everything that I was trying to do. So kind of a long story short, I ended up at a government research lab, kind of similar to the American National Labs, and was doing Advanced Materials and structures, mainly composite structures supporting things like wind turbines and the America's Cup boats and all of those kinds of things. But I went on a bit of a rocket pilgrimage to the United States. I spent a month over there and visited all the NASA centers that they would let me into and all of the large typical aerospace primes. After that trip, I realized two things: a non-degreed New Zealand foreign national trying to bust into the US space industry is pretty much impossible. So I did the only logical thing that could be done at that point - I went back to New Zealand and just started my own rocket company and started Rocket Lab way back in 2006. ### Early Challenges of Starting a Rocket Company **Host:** From what I've read, just biographical information and the history of the company, there was obviously a very steep learning curve at first that began with the Ātea sounding rocket and test launching—obviously a very challenging time for a virgin company. Is it fair to say that there's a lot of failures or mishaps on the road to successful launches? **Sir Peter Beck:** No doubt, certainly a lot to learn, that's for real. But I've always had the philosophy that by the time it's on the pad, you should be highly confident that it's going to work. We certainly learned a lot and we had to take a lot of things back to first principles. We didn't have an aerospace industry here to call upon or experts to call upon about certain things. When we were developing Electron, for example, we had to go back to very first principles on various things, which in some respects was pretty painful. But in other respects, what it did is it built that knowledge within the company and the people within the company. When it came to really complicated problems, we had that first principle kind of knowledge base to draw from and really understood things well. There was nothing in the rocket that just magically happened that we didn't know why it happened. That was super important for the success of the projects and the programs as we went through. So yeah, plenty of learnings and plenty of failures, but not too many because in this industry, you're one major failure away from extermination. I think that's one of the things that Rocket Lab has been able to do well—to take large technology risks especially, but mitigate them such that they never really occur. ### Innovations in Rocket Technology **Host:** I remember the first time I ever reported on a story involving Rocket Lab, I believe it was back in 2018, and this was shortly before the launch of the Humanity Star mission. I remember reading with interest that the Electron rocket at the time—you were leveraging that experience you had in smart materials and composites, and the cost-saving measures were that the Electron rocket was built out of carbon fiber. It's manufactured in-house and also had a plug-in payload design. These were what essentially made it a cost-effective way for launching small satellites, and now your company has since turned to retrieval. I remember covering that too with some excitement. It started with catching it with a helicopter, but nowadays you're relying on parachutes to retrieve the first stage? **Sir Peter Beck:** Correct. The Electron vehicle, as you pointed out, was unique and innovative in a number of ways. Being all carbon composite was certainly a huge advantage. We were the first to 3D print a rocket engine and send it to orbit, so we really pioneered some of the early 3D printing of super alloy metallics in combustion devices and pumps. So yeah, there was a lot of firsts. Of course, we created the launch range down here in New Zealand, the first private orbital launch range in the world. There was a lot of firsts, and we didn't do that because we had some obsession with getting Wikipedia pages. It was really about solving the problem objectively and figuring out how we can build something that is both the lowest cost and enduring. For the Electron product, at one point we were tracking some 140-odd companies looking to try and build a product competing with Electron. We were not ordained the preeminent winner for sure—like Virgin Orbit had a total of $1.2 billion of funding from Richard Branson, which was exactly $1.1 billion more than we had. So it wasn't a predetermined outcome by any stretch of the imagination, but we brought a vehicle to market that really served the niche well and was really innovative, and of course met all the cost objectives that were required to be successful. ### Launch Success Rate **Host:** To date, you've made 50 launches, I think? **Sir Peter Beck:** 52, I think. **Host:** That's a sign of success when even I can't remember what number we're up to! The statistics on the overall success rate was also very high. Of the 52, I'm going to guess that 48 were successful? **Sir Peter Beck:** The very first flight where we had a failure, not due to the launch vehicle, was actually some third-party telemetry that caused that. And throughout the life of the vehicle, there's been a few other failures, but generally it's a very reliable vehicle. ### The Neutron Rocket Development **Host:** The next phase for your company's development is expansion, right? If the Electron rocket is for small satellites, what the Neutron rocket is going to be for constellations. I remember hearing about that a few years back with some excitement, and I recall there was a video of you eating your hat. **Sir Peter Beck:** For the longest time, I said a number of things that at the point in time I was resolute over. One is I will never do human spaceflight, and I will never build a bigger rocket. Both those things I had to repeal, and I felt the only fair thing to do was to eat my hat. So I ate my hat. **Host:** That sounds quite uncomfortable. **Sir Peter Beck:** It was terrible, it was one of the most unpleasant things that I can remember. When we put it in the blender, it released all of the gases, no doubt from the manufacturing process. When I pulled the top of the blender off, there was just like this toxic cloud that came out. I was like, "Oh God, I'm going to have to eat this." **Host:** What sets apart the Neutron rocket is it's a two-stage, and the payload fairing is non-expendable—it doesn't shed. I've heard the analogy it's like a Hungry Hungry Hippo kind of thing. It opens and releases the payload and then closes. So this will be a fully reusable rocket? **Sir Peter Beck:** First stage fully reusable, second stage is expendable. I guess in designing Neutron, we had the distinct advantage of two major things: One, we'd already mastered the re-entry of Electron through the Earth's atmosphere, and that's actually one of the most challenging things to do for re-entry—can you make the rocket survive re-entry and can you put it on a trajectory and a course such that it's useful to land in a particular point on Earth? We really mastered that with Electron. We were able to passively reenter the vehicle, meaning no stable aerodynamic devices, and land it within 400 meters of our splashdown target. We really got that good. The other advantage we had for Neutron is we kind of stand on the shoulders of giants with others who have really mastered that propulsive landing technology. So if you look at Neutron, it looks like a vastly different rocket to what you would see on the pad today. That's because we had all of the advantage to learn all the lessons from flying a rocket heaps and heaps, and also on other past efforts to put something on the pad that is designed to go down just as well as it's designed to go up. One of those things, as you rightly point out, is that fishing the fairings out of the ocean and having a separate boat to go and do that is suboptimal. The most optimal thing is to hold the fairings on the rocket and just bring them back home. You'll also notice that the second stage is deep within the first stage, so the second stage doesn't hang out in the wind, if you will. It's contained within the entirety of the first stage. The reason we did that is because the second stage is the only disposable element of the vehicle, so that needs to be, ironically, the highest performing stage, also the cheapest and the lightest. By putting it inside the rocket, we can take all the aerodynamic loads out, but also most of the structural bending modes out, and just have it kind of hung in the stage and make that tank super thin, which ultimately makes it super high performance and also really cheap. So everything about Neutron has been learning the lessons from what it takes to run a rocket company and also what it takes to do reusability, and putting it all together in one giant do-over. Not many times in your life do you get to build one rocket—that's a very rarified era as it is. But to get a do-over and take all the lessons you've learned over the last 20 years and put them back into the next iteration, that's something pretty special. ### Major Developments in Commercial Space **Host:** Going back to what you were saying about standing on the shoulders of giants, getting started, your company—you guys really did get in pretty much on the ground floor of things. You were around to see so many major developments in commercial space. From that privileged perspective, what would you say have been some of the greatest developments in commercial space and what they've brought to space exploration? Maybe give us a little teaser on what could be coming? **Sir Peter Beck:** I think I've been lucky to see a couple of things. I think reusable rockets, commercial reusable rockets have certainly been one. People forget that the Space Shuttle was actually an incredibly innovative vehicle—it landed back at the launch site under wings and it was a reusable rocket. Now, it wasn't a particularly good one from a reusability standpoint, but nevertheless, it really pioneered reusability. Then you had commercial companies come along and stand on those shoulders of giants and do it commercially. But what I would say that probably one of the biggest impacts or biggest moves in the space industry in my time has been that, for the longest time, there was always this kind of bet on the come that commercial space would solve problems in orbit that would be very valuable for down here on Earth. There was always talk of big constellations and lots of commercial opportunities in orbit, but it was always a bit thin on the ground. There would be a little startup that would raise some money and then put a couple of cubesats in orbit and cough and splutter. Fast forward to today, and you have major, some of the most valuable companies in the world deploying their own space infrastructure. These are not natural owners of space infrastructure, like Apple and Amazon with their Kuiper project. If you asked me 10-20 years ago would Amazon be putting up a mega constellation in low Earth orbit, I think you'd have to squint pretty hard to see that being a reality. But what you're seeing now is large corporations really utilizing space for all the value it can create. We always talked about the democratization of space, turning from a government domain to a commercial domain. Well, I can say that I've witnessed that in my lifetime. I've witnessed space being a government-dominated domain to now being a commercially-dominated domain. To answer your question about things to come, I think we're just getting started. It's literally like we've just dialed up on our dial-up modem and we've just got our first email over the internet—that's where we're at. I strongly believe that the biggest thing to be done isn't even being thought of, let alone being executed. But access to orbit, access to spacecraft, and the ability to build spacecraft has never been like this ever before, so it really is an exciting time. **Host:** Just as a shot in the dark here, would the biggest thing be, say, a rotating space station in orbit? **Sir Peter Beck:** Maybe. I think human spaceflight is certainly incredibly inspirational, incredibly dangerous, but incredibly inspirational. I think that's not an unreasonable projection given that NASA is retiring the International Space Station in 2030, and their favor right now is to procure commercial space station services, not a government space station. The next space station in orbit is not going to be government; it's going to be a commercial platform. That's where you can really open the aperture for things like space stations and orbiting hotels and all that kind of crazy stuff. I think that's where it all starts. ### The Capstone Mission **Host:** 2022 was a pretty banner year for your company. You had the launch of the CAPSTONE mission—the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment—and this was done with an Electron rocket but also your Explorer platform. So you provided the launch deployment services. That was a pretty big mission. **Sir Peter Beck:** It was actually the first Artemis mission, and those spacecraft were to go and try that lunar orbit out for where an orbiting outpost may be based in the future. That was a big mission. I mean, I don't think anybody could have thought that you could go to the moon off a little rocket. It took a lot of effort—it was a big team for many years developing that spacecraft, the rocket, and the capability to do that. I guess the really exciting thing is that now, for some tens of millions of dollars, you can go and visit the moon or asteroids or even other planets. From a planetary science perspective, it's super exciting. We have two Mars missions called ESCAPADE—two spacecraft that we built for NASA that are ready to go to Mars also. It's an exciting time. **Host:** When is that mission expected to launch? **Sir Peter Beck:** Well, unfortunately it was expected to launch in a number of weeks, but the launch vehicle's not quite ready. The provider of that vehicle is not quite ready, so it's been delayed a little bit. But hopefully we can get it there shortly. We built the spacecraft, and NASA procures the launch and operates it. **Host:** Delays do seem to be part of the expectation, isn't it? I mean, space is hard, they say, and it's not just the technical challenges—just getting things to the ground is also hard. ### Future Plans: Neutron Rocket and Venus Mission **Host:** So the Neutron rocket is expected to be unveiled by 2025, and as I understand it, you also have plans in place for sending your own astrobiology mission to Venus. What can you tell us about that? **Sir Peter Beck:** I know we've only got 45 minutes—I think we could use 45 hours if you get me talking about Venus! But fundamentally, I'm very interested in Venus. I think it's a fascinating planet, but I'm also incredibly interested in trying to answer the question: are we the only life in the universe or not? If you take the scientific approach right now, we have no evidence to prove that we are not the only life in the universe. In fact, all the evidence is that we are the only life in the universe. Now, I don't necessarily think that's true, but in the absence of evidence, that is a scientific fact. Venus is very interesting because at sort of an altitude of about 50 km in the Venusian atmosphere, there's an environment there that is hospitable enough for some particular life forms to exist. Sara Seager and her science team a number of years ago made a discovery of phosphine in that particular region, and currently the only known producer of phosphine is life. It's not known to occur naturally as a gas. So really, the Venus Life Finder mission is to send a probe to Venus, and we have about 120 seconds of measurement time in the atmosphere to see if we can actually determine if there is life in that cloud band or not. It's super high risk—it's only the thing that a commercial company could do. But I would feel very sad if I was lying on my deathbed and didn't have a crack at answering that question. Because the flip side to that is, if let's just say hypothetically you go to Venus and you actually did prove there is life in the clouds of Venus, at that point the next logical iteration of that is: well, if life is in the clouds of Venus, it's most probably prolific throughout the universe. I just think that's a really important question for humanity to ask and try to answer. ### ESCAPADE Mars Mission **Host:** The ESCAPADE mission, that's the probes going to Mars. I'm curious about that too. It is going to investigate Mars's magnetosphere? **Sir Peter Beck:** Absolutely. It's to try and determine and understand the planet and all of the magnetic anomalies and fields within the planet, and really understand some of the origins of the planet and what's happened over time, and of course pave the way for future missions. ### Upcoming Launch: "Video Killed the Radio Star" **Host:** I understand you've got a mission launching in just four days, and it is—I'm probably butchering the pronunciation here—but "Video Killed the Radio Star"? **Sir Peter Beck:** Yes, this is a company called KASS. It's a French company, and there's an IoT spacecraft for them. We've launched their first spacecraft not so long ago, and this is the second of I think about five launches that we have for them. The name—you'll note it's a little bit cheeky. At the very beginning of the program, we had to give the launch vehicle a designator, and we learned that designator would be used at Space Command so they could track the vehicle. Most people call them like serial number 1-0 or some acronym. I could just imagine a bunch of people at Space Force watching this thing on a tracking screen, so I thought wouldn't it be funny if we just called it what it is, and we called it "It's a Test." As it was tracking across their radar screens, it would just come up as "It's a Test." We just continued to call our missions—it's such a serious business, you've got to have a little bit of fun somewhere. So you'll notice that all of our launch names have a little bit of humor in them. **Host:** I certainly have noticed that it does seem to be kind of an industry thing. Your first retrieval attempt using a helicopter was called "Return to Sender"? **Sir Peter Beck:** Yes. **Host:** Any other fun and cheeky names that sort of stand out? **Sir Peter Beck:** Well, Flight 3 was named after Flight of the Conchords. There's a song related to that, and we called the vehicle "It's Business Time" because that was really our first commercial flight. So it was business time, and there's been a whole bunch of them along the way for sure. ### The Future of Space Exploration **Host:** Now, this is going to sound maybe a little bit vague because you spoke about the future of spaceflight and so much yet to be accomplished. I imagine it's just the limits of the imagination that are the only real constraint there. But given your position, I'm wondering what you would say you're looking forward to in terms of future developments. What needs to happen? **Sir Peter Beck:** I think that's a great question. As I look out and what we're trying to architect here as a company is an end-to-end space company. We've spoken a bunch about rockets and we've spoken a bunch about spacecraft, but Rocket Lab is quite unusual in the fact that we do both. We're just as comfortable building a satellite and operating a satellite as we are launching a satellite. I think this is where the business and the industry is going. The large successful space companies of the future are not going to just look like launch companies or just look like satellite companies—they're going to be these vertically integrated end-to-end entities. The reason why I have so much confidence around that is you realize the efficiency when you do that. A rocket is a giant engineering compromise, a satellite is a giant engineering compromise, and if you can remove those compromises, then you end up with not only a superior product but a much lower cost product or service. As Rocket Lab stands today, we're deep in that kind of integration, and I think what excites me the most is when Neutron comes online, we have the ability to build just about any satellite at any scale and launch a satellite to just about anywhere at any scale. This is the first time in history that that's all been under one roof, so I think that's a really interesting place to build something really big from. **Host:** Looking at your company's profile over the years and seeing "end-to-end" is the proper term for it, the term that came to mind for me was "one-stop shopping." **Sir Peter Beck:** Yeah. ### Electron First Stage Reuse **Host:** In terms of other things that are expected for the near future, you announced earlier this year that your company was planning on reusing a retrieved Electron first stage, so this would be the first time that a retrieved stage has been relaunched. Any idea when that's happening? **Sir Peter Beck:** We sort of deprioritized that. It became kind of obvious that, although it's a nice goal to tick off a box, and we're all kind of a little bit OCD engineers over here, the reality is that we can either spend the resources of that recovery team on refurbishing and getting an Electron booster ready to refly, with all the certification that goes along with that on an $8 million rocket, or we can apply that team to just getting Neutron to the pad faster on a $55 million rocket. Economically, it just makes far better sense to apply your resources to the bigger prize, which is Neutron, getting that to the pad, and putting those reusable resources on that. That's a far better use of that resource. Not to say—I mean, we have that stage sitting in the factory, so it'll make its way through the production line in due course, but it's just not a priority for the company right now. We don't really need the extra margin that brings in that product line. The more advantageous thing for us to do is to continue to ramp production for Electron and put all those resources on Neutron. ### Launch Sites and Expansion **Host:** Your company is one of several that have emerged over the years that is currently—I do believe there is some hope that they continue to draw focus away from SpaceX and really sort of open up space further, just to say not one major contractor but several. As I also understand, you currently have two launch complexes, one in Virginia and your primary one in New Zealand. Do you envision expanding to have additional launch complexes in the future, or are you pleased with the two? **Sir Peter Beck:** A launch site is a giant cash burner—it's just a hole in a P&L. So I want the least number of launch sites possible. I always chuckle when I see companies proposing their whole business plan is around building a launch site and providing that as a service, because there is no money to be made in launch sites. They are just cash consumers. So no, we want the smallest number of launch sites possible. The Wallops site is really unique because it's away from the busy Cape. The Cape is a great site, but it's just pretty busy. You've got a number of launch companies there increasing their cadence, but also very large launch vehicles that cause you to evacuate large portions of the Cape. So much like we did down in New Zealand, we just kind of built a launch site and minded our own business. We're kind of doing the same at Wallops as well. It is really a jewel in the ranger's crown to have such a site there that is not busy. We're responsible for the vast majority of all launches down there to date at the moment. So that's a real advantage. ### Rocket Bike and Early Experiments **Host:** I'd be remiss if I didn't ask, but looking at your experience growing up and your obvious interest now, there was a mention of a rocket bike, a jetpack, and then a cruise missile engine that you bought and repurposed. So a rocket bike—is that as cool as it sounds? **Sir Peter Beck:** Well, I thought it was pretty cool at the time. I'm not sure I'd put a leg over it these days, but at the time it seemed like a fantastic idea. It was all in the early phase of my career and developing and building rocket engines. Once you build a rocket engine and you fire it a whole bunch of times, it kind of gets a bit boring. So the next logical thing was to see if I could ride it. So yeah, we did rocket bikes and rocket packs and all those kinds of things—always very safe! But I tell you what, there is nothing like a rocket bike. I've ridden a lot of things, but there is nothing like the feeling of acceleration on a rocket bike. If you get on a high-performance motorbike, generally as you go faster, the acceleration decreases because you've got more and more wind resistance. But on a rocket bike, your acceleration increases because you're consuming so much of your fuel that the bike is getting lighter and lighter and lighter. So the acceleration initially is great, but it just keeps on getting better and better and better until you either run out of fuel or chicken out. **Host:** Reminiscent of the rocket equation. **Sir Peter Beck:** Yeah, but you're not fighting against gravity, so it's kind of a positive. ### Competition in the Space Industry **Host:** In terms of the companies that are likely to be challenging SpaceX, which is just to say making their presence felt in space, do you feel there's anyone that people like me should be on the lookout for? **Sir Peter Beck:** It's a funny old industry. There's a tremendous amount of aspirations and promises, but actually execution's a bit thin on the ground. As I mentioned before, on small launch we were tracking over 140 companies at one stage. There were literally billions of dollars that went into vehicles, and yet the Electron vehicle was really the only one that emerged out of that whole group. I think if you laid all the bets on the table and said this little company from New Zealand is going to be the one that breaks through, I think most people would have bet against that. That just goes to say that you can have all the money you want—we had people that were significantly more well-funded than us; in fact, everybody was more well-funded than us. I liken building a rocket to running through a maze at night. You've got to run super quickly, but at every dead end, you can't just turn around and go back. At every dead end, there's a giant cliff, so you have to run really quickly but make sure you don't fall off the cliff to your death. That's what it's like. We've just been able, through the way we develop things and in our approach, to navigate that maze pretty successfully. If I look out in the medium class of launch vehicles, there's a few developments going on there now. They're largely the same players who tried to develop small launch vehicles and who failed at that. If you fail at a small launch vehicle, I'm not convinced that you're going to be successful building a large one—it's just going to consume more capital. So as I look out amongst the launch companies, I think there's very few people that are in a position to actually provide a second alternative to the current providers. More widely in the industry, I would say there's lots of exciting stuff going on for sure. Once again, the industry is littered with amazing ideas where people have got a great idea, they raise a bunch of capital, they do a thing, and then go broke. The industry is full of very passionate people with passionate ideas, but kind of not always grounded in commercial reality—like what does the market really need? There's a lot of instances where people make cool things and then look for a market opportunity with their cool thing, rather than just staring at a giant hole and trying to plug it. But on the flip side, there's a tremendous amount of technologies, a tremendous amount of really successful companies in the space industry and growing. Whenever you flip over from being a government-dominated domain to a commercially-dominated domain, there's going to be successes and there's going to be failures until things kind of shake out—and probably a higher rate of failures of course than successes. **Host:** I'm reminded of asteroid mining, space elevators, and a lot of people building space stations in orbit too. Wonderful ideas, but maybe the timing is not right. **Sir Peter Beck:** I don't want to be too hard on those ideas because I think they're really important to push on. It's very easy to just write something off. But at the end of the day, the way I look at things is you've got two risks that you need to mitigate. There's a market risk and there's a technology risk. I'm more than happy to take technology risks because I'm good at technology, and the team's good at technology—we can solve problems. Not so willing to take market risks because that's not something you can solve with pizza and coffee. If the market doesn't exist, you can build the best product on the planet or off the planet, but if nobody wants it, then there's no amount of engineering going to solve that problem. ### Knighthood and Recognition **Host:** I have to apologize—when we first began corresponding, I had no idea you'd been knighted. That was earlier this year, was it not? **Sir Peter Beck:** Well, actually technically officially like a week ago, but yeah, a very odd experience and thing for sure. There was a ceremony and an award, a pendant. It looked like a bangle, and I was bonked over the head with a sword. All very odd, but obviously very humbling. I really see it as a reflection on the whole New Zealand space industry and all the engineers and technologists that have helped created it. These things are never one person, as I'm sure everybody knows. **Host:** It was part of a ceremony coinciding with King Charles's birthday and conferring honors upon entrepreneurs and innovators from New Zealand. **Sir Peter Beck:** Yes. ### Human Spaceflight Possibilities **Host:** Earlier you mentioned that human spaceflight was something you would never do. Now, is that to say that perhaps—well, you've reconsidered building larger vehicles—have you given any thought to human spaceflight in the future as something your company would do? **Sir Peter Beck:** Absolutely. I mean, it would be pretty silly to build a 13-ton payload capable vehicle and not make provisions for human spaceflight. So the vehicle won't be human-certified out of the shoot, but it will be human-certifiable. That affects things like safety factors in your tanks and stuff like that—hardcore stuff. So absolutely, we want to make sure that it's human-certifiable. Right now, reflecting back on market and market opportunities, there's one destination and one customer—you have the International Space Station and NASA. That one customer is relatively well served. There's kind of one and a half viable ways to get there, and one destination. So it's not clear to me that there's a market opening for another capsule right now. However, in the future, especially when space stations go fully commercial, then I think there will be more destinations and more customers. We just wanted to make sure that we keep the door open for any opportunity that might present itself in the future. And if I'm going to eat a hat, I may as well get all of the things out that I said that I was never going to do and just do it in one instance. **Host:** I wish you luck in that too. Hopefully the next hat, if you are in fact forced to eat another one, would be an organic cotton one. **Sir Peter Beck:** Yeah, I've learned not to be so resolute because the world is a funny place. If you said 20 years ago, or even when I was a young kid in a little town at the bottom of New Zealand, that we would even be having this conversation, I would have laughed in your face. So best not to be too resolute on your ideas. **Host:** That's good advice for us all. Well, Sir Peter, I want to thank you for coming on here and talking to my listeners. I'm really looking forward to seeing further developments from your company, so thank you very much for coming on and speaking to us. **Sir Peter Beck:** Thanks Matthew, great pleasure. **Host:** And to those who joined us here today, thank you for listening, and be sure to tune in next time when we will be talking about the SETI Paradox, which is the final installment in our series about the resolutions to the Fermi Paradox. We'll also be taking a look at China's space program and how it's evolved over time, as well as the Indian Space Program, both of whom have a lot of exciting future missions ahead of them. I'm Matt Williams, and this has been Stories from Space. --- *We hope you enjoyed this episode of Stories from Space podcast with Matthew Williams. If you learned something new and this podcast made you think, then share itsp magazine.com with your friends, family, and colleagues. If you represent a company and wish to associate your brand with our conversations, sponsor one or more of our podcast channels. We hope you will come back for more stories and follow us on our journey. You can always find us at the intersection of Technology cyber security and Society.*