[[Home|🏠]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> [[Interviews]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> October 28 2024 **Insider**: [[Peter Beck]] **Source**: [TechCrunch Disrupt 2024](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiaJA4Zlojw) **Date**: October 28 2024  🔗 Backup Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiaJA4Zlojw ## 🎙️ Transcript >[!hint] Transcript may contain errors or inaccuracies. **Devin Coldewey:** Thank you. No need now, my microphone is on. All right, thank you for joining us, Peter. As usual, we've talked so many times over the years, it's always a pleasure. Can I just, before we really get started though—I think for anybody who is worried about this—what's the over/under on a Neutron launch this year? **Peter Beck:** This year? No. Next year, for sure. **Devin Coldewey:** Just making sure. But let me ask you this though. Let's assume everything goes perfectly well, first trip up and down. What does that open up for you as a company? What do you get the green light on as soon as you make that successful trip? What do you do the next day and you're like, "All right, go on this, go on this"? **Peter Beck:** Well, the purpose of Neutron is really twofold: 1. It's to try and break up the kind of medium launch monopoly that exists today 2. The other element is to launch our own stuff Once we have the first launch, it's a great milestone, but actually that's the easy bit. Rocket number 20 is like 20 times harder than rocket number one, because by the time you get to rocket number 20, it's all built off work instructions by technicians and through a production system. Rocket number one is lovingly built by all the engineers. **Devin Coldewey:** Lovingly, but the other ones aren't? **Peter Beck:** No, they're all built lovingly, but you might take an hour to check a bolt rather than 30 seconds. ### Final Form **Devin Coldewey:** As Kristen mentioned in our little intro, it feels like Rocket Lab has grown into something much bigger. Obviously, it's much bigger than it used to be. What is the final form you're aiming for here? I don't know if we're a quarter of the way there, three-quarters of the way there, 5%... What is the final form, and how do you get there? **Peter Beck:** It's funny because the plan was always to be an end-to-end space company. I think a lot of people think that we built Electron and then we pivoted into building satellites and whatnot. But actually, the second ever Electron that was launched—on the kickstage, there were recesses all around that kickstage for solar panels to turn that into a satellite. So the plan was always to build this end-to-end space company. I think if you fast forward 5 to 10 years from now, that's what all large space companies will look like, or the very large ones at least. That's borne out of the fact that launch is a great business, it's super lumpy, it's super hard, but what launch really is is the enabler for something much, much larger. I think everybody can see it playing out in real time. If you take your friends over at SpaceX, for example, with Starlink—if you want to put a competing platform up with Starlink, you have to be able to build your satellites at scale, which means you need fully vertically integrated component systems and the ability to build satellites at scale. But more importantly, you need to launch at scale. You need to be able to launch at a particular economic point at a particular scale to be successful. I think space companies and service companies will really start to blur in the future. ### Government vs Commercial **Devin Coldewey:** What do you think is the closest we've gotten to a full-stack space company in the past? **Peter Beck:** I think it's relatively new. Generally, you focus on being a launch company or you focus on being a satellite company. You don't usually fuse both. A rocket is a giant engineering compromise, and a satellite is a giant engineering compromise. So when you have the ability to blur those two, you end up with an interesting design point. In the past, we've had very large aerospace companies that have done launch, they do satellites—Boeing or something like that in the 70s or 80s, or the companies that contributed in Apollo and Mercury. **Devin Coldewey:** Did anybody ever come close to really being soup-to-nuts? **Peter Beck:** Probably on the government side. You could argue that Lockheed and Boeing—they all had launch vehicles at one point in time, and they were building satellites at one point in time, but it was very government-focused. They were government contractors supporting Apollo missions and GPS and a whole bunch of National Security. But I think the difference now is it's commercial—a company is just saying literally, "We're going to do whatever we want from start to finish, and that will be we control every aspect of it." ### Legacy and Niche Companies **Devin Coldewey:** I'm actually interested in your experience dealing with the many, many Legacy and niche companies—the specialty rod makers and widget makers of the world that have powered the space industry, quietly as component makers and what have you for decades. I'm curious about your experience with them. Are they the kind of super specialist where you're like, "Wow, these guys really do make the best fasteners"? Or are some of them a little long in the tooth? **Peter Beck:** I think the thing with the space industry is it's all at subscale. There is a tremendous number of small shops that, as you say, build exquisitely beautiful things. But if you turn up and you say, "Look, I need a thousand of something," their heads just explode. The space industry is scaling now at a rate that's never been scaling before, and a lot of these small companies really struggle to scale. Then you have the Legacy providers as well that kind of fall in the same camp. That's one of the things that we've focused on. When we went to build our first satellite, I remember the very first thing we went to order was some reaction wheels. We rang up Doug Sinclair and said, "Doug, we like your reaction wheels. Can we buy some reaction wheels?" And he said, "Yep, sure, Pete, but I've closed my order book, so it's going to be a year until we can supply some reaction wheels." I haven't got a year to do anything—a year in Rocket Lab is like eternity. So we said, "Okay, Doug, that's great. Can we come up with a different kind of deal?" And we ended up buying Sinclair. Doug's team used to build 150 reaction wheels a year, and this year alone we'll produce over 2,000 reaction wheels. What we've done is, if you took a satellite and laid it out on the stage here, we pointed to all of the bits that were subscale or that sucked, and then systematically went after all of those bits. We bought the best in class or created our own technologies as well, and then scaled them. Solar was another good example. SolAero was a legacy solar cell manufacturer—they did the James Webb telescope and all the Mars stuff, so super cool company, but just not really that scaled. So we went in there and painted all the walls black, put some Rocket Lab logos up, some snack machines in the corner, pulled down all the cubicles, and said, "Let's go." Now we're the largest space-grade solar cell manufacturer in the world. That's systematically what we've been doing to try and create some scale in an industry that really suffers from scale. ### When to Buy and When to Build **Devin Coldewey:** That necessarily needs a bit of capital. You meet one of these Legacy companies that have been around for 20 years, and you say, "I'm going to do this myself." But then you're like, "Well, that's going to cost me $30 million." How do you judge when to buy and when to build, and when to sort of thread the needle? **Peter Beck:** That's a good question. Something like solar has a tremendous amount of moat and barrier—these are semiconductors with decades and decades of government-funded research. That's not an easy thing to kind of jump in. On the other side of the equation, we built some spacecraft for NASA recently called ESCAPADE. There's one or two Legacy titanium sphere manufacturers in the US. So we went to one of these Legacy suppliers and asked them to build these titanium tanks—very thin wall, very bespoke, with crazy fluid control devices inside them. Anyway, we still haven't got those tanks, and the spacecraft are finished and ready to launch. That was an example where these Legacy suppliers just were terrible, absolutely terrible. We ended up developing a new 3D printing process for these thin-wall titanium tanks and then EB welding them together and doing all these sorts of things that didn't cost any money at all. That cost no capital at all, but now we can build thin-wall titanium tanks in any shape and size we want. So it's horses for courses. Some things have big technology moats that are super scary, and other things look scary, but with different approaches, it doesn't cost any money at all. **Devin Coldewey:** Is there any upside to being a supplier? For titanium spheres—now you're the leading supplier of spheres or other shapes made of titanium. You could be that guy. **Peter Beck:** I'm not sure that's the most exciting business in the world, but nevertheless, it's super critical. And then for us now, as we look at building interplanetary stuff or big balls of delta-V in orbit, you can just take that whole tank section, which is the longest lead time item and quite often very expensive, and just delete it. ### Building a Team **Devin Coldewey:** Let me ask you about the interplanetary spacecraft type things. When you get a contract, you say, "Okay, we need to build a spacecraft"—maybe it's your first spacecraft—how do you start building up that team? How do you stand that team up, and who's your first hire? **Peter Beck:** Don't underestimate the importance of not understanding how big a bite you've taken off. I think if you sit down and write down everything on a piece of paper that you would have to do to achieve some of these things, then you'd never start. So a good dose of skepticism and arrogance is super helpful. **Devin Coldewey:** Writing this down—skepticism, arrogance, good. Okay. **Peter Beck:** CAPSTONE was a great example of that. It was our first deep space mission, and we had a good theoretical understanding that it was possible, but we had to develop crazy new stuff to be able to execute that. The team at Rocket Lab—there's about 2,000 or just a little over 2,000 of us now—so there's a good cross-section of experiences and talent. Put a team around something, and we can really get stuck in. ### Lessons from CAPSTONE **Devin Coldewey:** Let's talk a little more about the spacecraft style of things and the interplanetary missions, because these are just so fascinating. I know that this is a passion of yours as well—you want to build something to go to any planet. You've already sent over CAPSTONE, and we got ESCAPADE coming. Coming into this fresh—you had not made a spacecraft before you made CAPSTONE—what were some of the lessons you learned along the way? Coming with a totally fresh perspective to this, knowing like, "Oh, well, obviously we built them like this, and this is how you build a spacecraft." Then you get into it and you're like, "Oh my God, why did anyone ever do it this way?" What were some of the experiences you've had like that? **Peter Beck:** I don't want to upset any spacecraft people, but spacecraft are way easier to build than rockets. They really are. Now, deep space stuff is a little bit more challenging because you've got radiation and a nasty environment to deal with, but at a higher level, they are much more passive, simpler things to do. There were a lot of learnings. I remember sitting in a design review for CAPSTONE, and one of the GNC team was doing all of the trajectory calculations. That particular mission was really difficult because we're using a whole bunch of weak boundary effects to get to the moon. We did seven orbit raises around the Earth to finally shoot off to the moon, and each one of those orbit raises, we had to do a complete tidy up of the trajectory—correct for all the errors. The GNC team had 24 hours to redesign a trajectory to the moon. The first trajectory that they designed to the moon took them about a month, and we had to get that down to 24 hours. So every 24 hours, we would iterate on this trajectory. I remember we had to allow for the solar pressure—the photons hitting the side of the spacecraft and altering the trajectory, just from the sunlight. That was enough to cause an issue, and that's a relatively small disturbance. Think about engine shutdown transients, where you command the engine to shut down and there's a transient as the engine shuts down. Characterizing that transient so that you don't end up way out in deep space—because when you're at the Earth and you've got to time it with the moon, that's not trivial. **Devin Coldewey:** Have you found that physics-based simulators have become more useful in the last few years, gotten a little better? **Peter Beck:** The math hasn't changed, but I guess some of the tools around it have. **Devin Coldewey:** On the team thing—I forgot to ask—is there a lot of competition for talent right now, if everybody's thinking about building spacecraft? **Peter Beck:** Look, there's always been competition for talent for as long as I can remember. Our sales pitch is: if you actually want to build stuff that goes to space, come work for us. It's amazing the amount of companies that have core ideas and build core stuff in the lab but don't actually get to fly it. Always a lot of competition for talent. The statistics for Rocket Lab aren't particularly good—it's twice as easy to get into Harvard than it is to get into Rocket Lab. So the threshold is super, super high for anybody to get in. **Devin Coldewey:** Do you have legacy admissions? Just if I know somebody like you, I can get in? **Peter Beck:** No. ### Our Life Finding Mission **Devin Coldewey:** So tell me a little more about the spacecraft that you are most personally excited about, a mission that you're most personally excited about. The elegance of the design, or how complicated the lunar injection process is—obviously you're proud of that and rightly so—but what are you hyped for? **Peter Beck:** Actually, it's a mission that's completely unfunded, and it is a financial drain on the company. **Devin Coldewey:** Small financial drain? **Peter Beck:** Very small, very small. It's a nights and weekends project, and that's our life-finding mission to Venus. For me, that's something I'm personally very passionate about because I think one of the biggest questions that we can ask and answer in the universe is: are we the only life in the universe or not? This mission is designed to specifically target the clouds of Venus. There's a very interesting sweet zone about 50 km off the surface of Venus where it's believed that there could be life. The conditions are just good enough that there could be life there. This mission is designed to go there, and it's a completely private mission. Like I say, it's a nights and weekends kind of project. We're using the basis of the CAPSTONE bus to get us there, and then we separate off a probe once we arrive at Venus. That probe has around about 250 seconds of time to interface with the Venusian atmosphere, and we have a nephelometer instrument in there that's basically designed to look for life. It's kind of like a go/no-go instrument for life—green light, red light. It's very rudimentary because the telemetry stream that we can get back from a little probe entering the clouds of Venus back to Earth is a pretty narrow stream. Super cool project, and the probe is like a Jules Verne looking thing—it's just really neat. I certainly hope we can get that one away soon. **Devin Coldewey:** I know Venus is pretty hairy. It's not a picnic going to Venus, it's nasty out there. **Peter Beck:** It's nasty, yep. But I think it's a much more interesting planet—not to choose favorites or anything—but much more interesting planet than Mars. Mars politically is excellent because you can put a footprint on the surface of Mars, and that wins heaps of votes. But you're never putting a footprint on the surface of Venus. I think Venus as a planet is a lot more interesting. **Devin Coldewey:** Well, since you brought up politics—I wasn't gonna ask... **Peter Beck:** I don't—no, well, seriously though, that that is... **Devin Coldewey:** It's all right, it's done, it's done. Look, I'm just going to ask this—this is a bit of a sensitive topic, but your fellow spaceman Elon Musk has been acting in a sort of partisan way. Do you think that's good business? **Peter Beck:** He can do whatever he wants. I'm just a guy from New Zealand trying to build a rocket. **Devin Coldewey:** Very fair, very fair answer. ### When Do You Do This Project? **Devin Coldewey:** So do you get to go in and actually poke around on this—this weekend and weekend and afternoons—when do you do this project? Do you get to go in there and poke around with the thing and say, "Make this bigger, make this faster"? **Peter Beck:** Absolutely. Probably about 30% of my time—I'd like it to be much more—but 30% of my time is with a wrench. It's super fun to be very hands-on. I'm still the chief engineer of the company, so probably about 50% of the time I'm deeply involved in all the main engineering decisions within the company, and 30% of the time I actually get to get my hands dirty. I think a lot of people worry when I turn up, but I still like to get my hands dirty. And then the other 50% of the time is just useless rocket CEO stuff like this. **Devin Coldewey:** No, this is wonderful, this is a great use of time. ### Space Traffic Management **Devin Coldewey:** One of the consequences, it seems, of building a full-stack rocket company or a space company is that you're free to launch as many things as you want if you can afford it. We've obviously seen that with Starlink. People are concerned that there is going to be a proliferation of many different constellations in various orbits, and this is going to make things more complicated. How do you see this playing out, and do you think the coming verticalization of space companies is going to contribute to that? **Peter Beck:** It is for sure, and it is a real concern. It's something we've been very vocal about. I think everybody, all the nations of this planet, need to come together at some point and come up with a set of rules—some space traffic management, if you will. Unfortunately, as a race, we don't seem to be very good at projecting things forward and then doing something about them before they happen. So I think more likely what will happen is there'll be some kind of incident in orbit, and then we'll all get together and make a set of rules. But you're right. China has a 30,000 satellite constellation. There's a couple of 30,000 satellite constellations here in the US. Europe will have the same. Every emerging space nation will put up their own assets. So it will get busier and busier. I can remember with Electron, we used to have a three-hour launch window. We could have a very sedate, lazy three-hour launch window that we could go and fly in. Then some of these constellations started to get populated, and it got down to three minutes at one point. Then we went back to the FAA and developed some new modeling techniques, and it opened that window back up. But it just shows that if you did nothing, then you'd be down to three-minute launch windows. **Devin Coldewey:** What would such a traffic monitoring system even look like? Do you have any—I mean, you must have thought about this a lot. What would be the basic—if you were the Lord of Space, which maybe you'll get a chance later on—if you were the Lord of Space, what would you set up? Would it be like, "Oh, only 10,000 in this orbit"? **Peter Beck:** It's actually really simple. It's just transparency. But there's a lot of reasons why a lot of people don't want transparency. At the moment, if you think about all the models, if your spacecraft is not creating any maneuvers, then it's very predictable. You know it's here, and then 90 minutes it's back around here, with an orbit possession and so on. So it's actually very predictable. The challenge is when all the computer models start to break when you make a maneuver. If you were here and then you make a maneuver, then in 90 minutes time, you're no longer here—you're over here. And if you're continually moving your spacecraft, it becomes mathematically impossible to predict the conjunctions. So the only way you get around it is complete transparency. All the governments with all of their assets and all the commercial assets would just have to provide all the telemetries and where they are in orbit. The conjunctions could be computed, and you'd also have to add in, "I intend to burn here to get to here." And then it's mathematically computable. **Devin Coldewey:** You're doing an NRO thing, right? Are you doing an NRO project? **Peter Beck:** No. **Devin Coldewey:** What is the—are you sure? **Peter Beck:** Just making sure. **Devin Coldewey:** What is the—there's an 18-satellite constellation that you're about to put up sometime in the next couple years. **Peter Beck:** No, that's SDA. **Devin Coldewey:** Okay, so when you're talking with defense and these people, is there any tension there with the question of like, "Well, if we're going to as a country be doing our own thing because we have our own reasons just like any other country or sovereign nation to not disclose for defense or intelligence purposes"? Is that something that, as the actual creator of the hardware, you need to negotiate with these people? Or is it just it's in the contract or it isn't, or what? **Peter Beck:** We're not operating the spacecraft. We deliver the spacecraft to the customer, and then they're responsible for the operations of it and their orbit and the mission that they intend to carry out with that. So it's not something that we certainly have any kind of responsibility over. But I mean, look, at the end of the day, I don't want to paint the wrong picture. Space is big, and you can take all of the spacecraft that are in orbit right now, and they'd fit in a football paddock. So it's not crazy. The challenge is that the closing speeds or the conjunction speeds are just super high, and the little visualizations we always see are kind of misleading because the dots are so gigantic. **Devin Coldewey:** They're like the size of countries. **Peter Beck:** Yeah. **Devin Coldewey:** But you will be operating more as time goes on. How do you make that operating piece work, building something like that up from scratch? I'm sure SpaceX has something to say about it, Amazon's going to be getting into this, but you're about to have this 18—you're not going to be operating that one, but you will be operating one soon. What does it look like building up that kind of oversight mechanism? **Peter Beck:** It's pretty straightforward, to be honest with you. **Devin Coldewey:** Is that something that hasn't changed so much in the last like 50 years? **Peter Beck:** Not so much. Right now, as I mentioned before, there is no kind of international rules that everybody has to log in and comply by. So there's a lot of panicked 2:00 in the morning calls to other people about conjunctions that still occur. **Devin Coldewey:** So really, we just need better phones? Call each other better? **Peter Beck:** Just better Space Traffic Management. ### Wild Wild Space Documentary **Devin Coldewey:** Do you want to talk about the documentary at all? If you haven't seen this document, "Wild Wild Space," it was a very, very interesting profile view, and our friend Chris C—I'm just trying— **Peter Beck:** Just be clear, I did everything I could to stay away from that documentary. **Devin Coldewey:** Wait, what? **Peter Beck:** So we were—every opportunity with Ashley, we tried to convince him that this was a bad idea. **Devin Coldewey:** That's why you should definitely watch it, because it's very interesting. But did it make you uncomfortable having people like around, or you just disagree with the sort of thesis of the documentary? **Peter Beck:** I mean, look, we're just about building rockets and spacecraft. The amount of access that we gave the team was just a few interviews and bits and pieces now and again. So there wasn't a tremendous amount of access. But to Ashley's credit, he came over to New Zealand and just stalked us for like months on end. He parked outside my mom's house, I think. So he was well-dedicated. **Devin Coldewey:** That's a work ethic, that's great. Well, we'll talk about getting us better access—we'll make a better documentary. ### Reentry **Devin Coldewey:** So you talked about spending a little time with a wrench in your hand. I think that's great. Whenever I think of Rocket Lab, I've been covering you guys for a long time, I think of the very early days and seeing the pictures you guys out in the forest. And forest was a launch stand somewhere, and really just grease-monkeying the things together. Do you miss those days at all? **Peter Beck:** Yeah, I mean, whenever I get the chance, I'm trying to be back on the tools. I was lucky to spend a few weeks at StuTS with the Archimedes team just recently, getting that first hot fire over the line. It was super fun to get back on the tools. **Devin Coldewey:** Was it hard though? I mean, back in those days, was it fun, was it hard, was it both? **Peter Beck:** It's like type three fun—super, super hard, and then you look back on it and you think, "Yeah, that was quite fun." **Devin Coldewey:** But I mean, nobody—I don't know—I'm sure you get in this business to have fun? **Peter Beck:** I think it's rewarding, but at least fun... **Devin Coldewey:** Well, you know, I've got another panel here in just a second, but I'd like to get your thoughts on this whole market that they're pursuing. Stoke Space is going to be doing a full reusable thing. Inversion Space is doing targeted re-entry of assets and cargo. Does that strike you—is this a realistic future where we're dropping cargo on target, or a full re-entry for small rockets and stuff like that? **Peter Beck:** I think there are bound to be some high-value things that it makes good sense to return. It's going to have to be high value because it's going to cost a lot to do. We were lucky to win the HASTE contract where we built a spacecraft that hosted HASTE's capsule. They made some high-value pharmaceuticals in that capsule and then re-entered it and landed it in the Utah desert, and that's super cool. So I think for particularly high-value things, there's going to be a down-mass market. How big that market is, not exactly sure. **Devin Coldewey:** Are there any interesting new markets like that that you would be curious about exploring as a full-stack company when you have a little more freedom to try some interesting new things? **Peter Beck:** We're always looking at crazy stuff. We have people whose job title is like "crazy thinking," so we always are looking at cool stuff. It's amazing the experiments and bits and pieces that quietly fly in Electrons now and again. **Devin Coldewey:** Well, I'm glad to hear you doing crazy. I think that's all the time we have for today. Thanks again for coming out, always a pleasure. **Peter Beck:** Thanks, Devin. Cheers.