[[Home|🏠]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> [[Interviews]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> August 15 2018 **Insider**: [[Peter Beck]] **Source**: [Techweek NZ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T51pmvmZftk) **Date**: August 15 2018  🔗 Backup Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T51pmvmZftk ## 🎙️ Transcript >[!hint] Transcript may contain errors or inaccuracies. **Peter Beck:** It's a great privilege to be able to be speaking here today. Firstly, what I want to do is give a little bit of a description of what this rocket business is all about. The first picture you see there is a spacecraft that was built in 1990. We can tell it's 1990 because of the trendy powder blue smocks everybody's wearing. But this was a spacecraft that was built in 1990 that would be considered your medium to large-sized spacecraft. This was a spacecraft that was built last year. So you can see Moore's law has appropriated itself to spacecraft. What used to take a school bus or a car sized spacecraft can now be done with a microwave sized or a shoebox sized, or as you can see there, even smaller. But this is the problem within the industry. These are the kind of launch vehicles that are the staples of the industry, and it's very hard to give everybody a sense of scale of that launch vehicle. But what I did is I inserted a picture of myself in my underwear in that picture with complete confidence that you wouldn't be able to see me because it's so big. But that's your average launch vehicle today. It's on the large size, but that should be your average launch vehicle today. And as you can see, that's no good for launching stuff like that. And what's happening in the market is that these small satellites are the fastest growing sector in the market. These satellites here, they're static, they're not growing in market demand at all. In fact, they're slightly declining in market demand. These ones here, this is where all the action's at. The market grew over 200 percent last year, and there's some 2,900 spacecraft required to be put on orbit in the next few years. So that doesn't work. What you need is that—and that's me with my clothes on this time—but that's the Electron launch vehicle. It's a small launch vehicle for lifting small spacecraft, and that's really what you need to do in order to crack this market. ### The Commercial Space Revolution It's a really exciting time in space right now because space used to be completely dominated by governments. It was usually governments that went to space, not commercial companies. So it's a very different time and it's a very exciting time. Right now there are two commercial companies in the world putting spacecraft on orbit: there's Elon Musk and SpaceX, and there's Rocket Lab. Those are the only two commercial companies. But Rocket Lab and what we're trying to do here is not all about the rocket. It's about a third the rocket, a third infrastructure, and a third regulatory. ### Why New Zealand? A lot of people ask me, "Why are you in New Zealand? You're a US company, US-backed, most of your customers are US, why are you in New Zealand?" And most people think it's because I'm a Kiwi and I love New Zealand, which is true, but there's a much more important reason than just that. When I first started Rocket Lab and this project, I went to America and went to all the launch sites in America and rocked on up and said, "Hi, I'm Pete. I want to launch out of your launch site at least every 24 hours." And they said, "That's great, but you can ring up all the airlines in America and tell them you're going to delay flights every day. You can also ring up all the shipping firms in America and tell them that you're going to delay all the shipping routes every day as well." So ironically, launch is something that doesn't scale in America. Just about everything scales in America except launch. So that was a bit of a problem at that point because the key to what we're trying to do here is launch frequency. That is what is going to unlock the industry. So what we needed to do is we needed to find another launch site. And when you think about it, when you launch a rocket, you cannot launch over people for obvious reasons. You can't launch over land, and you can't launch over infrastructure. So the ideal launch site would be something like a small island nation in the middle of nowhere. That would be perfect. There just happened to be New Zealand. ### Building a Space Industry From Scratch It took a bit of work to get this far. America had a 40-year policy of denial. Basically, any country that didn't have space launch capability was, before the signing of the MTCR treaty, not able to get it. It's the whole non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction treaties. So it's up there with respect to big deals. So we had to find a way to convince the US government and the New Zealand government that this would be a great thing for the industry and for humanity, and we were able to do that. It took a bilateral treaty between New Zealand and America, and it's one of those treaties I think that most people in New Zealand don't know about, but it's an incredibly significant treaty. Under that treaty, New Zealand had the obligation of creating a regulatory environment for us to operate under and a Space Agency. If you wrote down on a piece of paper all the things that we needed to do to succeed, it would look largely ridiculous: - We had to convince two countries to sign bilateral treaties - We had to convince a country to create a space agency - We had to convince a country to create a whole regulatory framework for us to operate under - And by the way, we had to build the rocket, which has probably been pretty tricky too And then also with that, because we are building our launch site, we needed to build a launch site. If anybody in the room is contemplating building a launch site, I highly advise against it because it is a significant piece of work: - We had to upgrade the backhaul Internet to Gisborne - We put remote tracking stations on little islands in the Pacific for telemetry - We had to upgrade 32 kilometers of road, build four kilometers of new road - I know more about gravel than I ever anticipated knowing about gravel when I started this project I thought I was just building a rocket, but no—it's a massive infrastructure project as well. So the rocket is about one-third of the effort. But what we ended up with here is the most beautiful and the only private orbital launch site in the entire world. There is no other. We own and operate the only private orbital launch site in the world, and it's licensed to launch every 72 hours from that one little site. So we actually have more launch availability and more launch frequency than America does as a country. And that's what was required for us to be successful in our ambitions. Because as you can see, in order for small satellites to be really dominant, you need a lot of them on orbit, and they cover a whole wide sector of services, whether it be internet from space, weather, communications—you name it. But you need large numbers of them. ### First Successful Launch Achievements [Video shown of launch] So what you saw there was: - The world's first fully carbon composite rocket to reach orbit - The world's first electric turbopump - The world's first 3D printed rocket engine - The world's first private launch from a private orbital launch site - The second private company ever in history to reach orbit - And New Zealand becoming the eleventh nation to ever reach orbit It was a good day. It really was a good day. ### The Why Behind Rocket Lab A lot of people think we're building rockets and we're launching satellites and that's the reason why, and that's absolutely not what gets me up in the morning. Satellites are very unusual pieces of infrastructure. When you think about a satellite, if we put a weather satellite on orbit—when we launched the last one, you put the satellite in an orbit. That satellite was providing weather to New Zealand, 19 minutes later it's providing weather to Australia, 45 minutes later it's providing weather to America, and on and on it goes round and round and round for five years. If you think about it, that one little shoebox-sized piece of electronics is touching not tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands, but billions of people. There is no other piece of infrastructure that a human can make that touches that many people around the planet. And that's really what it's all about. What we're trying to do is democratize space, to build infrastructure on orbit to have huge effect for us down on earth. That's what it's all about. ### New Zealand's Innovation Culture New Zealand is a fantastic place. It's an incredible place with incredible people, and I want to give you an example of the kind of people that New Zealanders are. Many years ago, we had a rocket engine program. It was a very innovative engine program that had a lot of attention from the industry. We built this engine and we proved that it worked, and then we had the largest rocket propulsion company's chief engineers down to New Zealand for a month to work with us. During that month, we hot-fired engines and we tried different propellants and we put this engine really through its paces. It came to the very end of the testing campaign, and the one test that they wanted to do—they just sort of pulled it out of the hat—was, "Boy, it would be really great if we could chill this engine right down to like zero degrees or close to it and let's see how the propellant in the engine behaves at those temperatures." So my American friends from this giant global space company sat down and started drawing some sketches about how we could chill this engine down with refrigeration plants, liquid nitrogen, and heat exchangers and all of that. Meanwhile, I just sent one of our guys down to the service station, and he came back with a boot full of party ice. We just iced the engine down with party ice, got it down to the temperature we needed, and hot-fired that day. That's the difference between Kiwis and the rest of the world. Kiwis have the ability to look through the problem to the solution. Don't get too wound up in all the tech and everything around it, but being able to actually look through the problem and come up with innovative solutions. Within Rocket Lab, we have a large New Zealand contingent, and they probably punch above their weight with respect to innovative ideas and new processes. So we love employing Kiwis. ### Hard Work and Entrepreneurial Lessons The next point is no myth, but you can have the best idea and the most amount of capital and everything in the world, but over the years, I've realized that it comes down to this: it's just hard work—huge amounts of hard work. This is what I always say when someone is looking to start a business, and I do quite a lot with young entrepreneurs in New Zealand. You may as well just go after the big problems, because if you go after a little problem, it's actually the same amount of work as going after the really big problem. I think that's one thing in New Zealand that we don't challenge ourselves enough with. We're very good at going after the small to medium problems. We get to Australia, we call it success. But what we need to really do, I believe, is go after the really massive problems which have the big payoffs. And it's gonna be just stinking hard work, it really is. It is tough, but hard is really good. The reason why hard is so good is it's a barrier to entry of the market. So if you think about Rocket Lab, if someone wants to compete with Rocket Lab, they're gonna have to find another country, then they're gonna have to go and get another bilateral treaty, then they're going to have to convince other countries to build space agencies, then they're going to have to deal with gravel as well. So the barriers to entry of the market are enormous for us and for competitors, but that is really, really good. So never be afraid of hard work. I think that's the one thing that I've learned over the last couple of decades—hard work is where it's all at. ### Lessons Learned So what I want to do is jot down some of my lessons learned. I'll caveat this with: this is the view of the world as I see it. So I've been told that could be warped sometimes, so take from it as you will. 1. **Tech is important, but so is everything else** - You might have the best technology in the world, but if your team is rubbish, it doesn't matter. - Your company is the people you hire, so people are incredibly important, and looking after your people is incredibly important. - The regulatory bits and other parts that aren't the tech can be more important. In Rocket Lab's case, two-thirds of Rocket Lab isn't even the rocket. 2. **Kiwis are problem solvers** - They really are, and I think some of the best in the world. - It always amazes me when I go to organizations all around the world—I was at the UN last week and also a lot of large space companies and tech companies—I always bump into a Kiwi in some managerial leadership role. - That's because the world knows New Zealanders as being great problem solvers. 3. **Only hire the best** - This is really important. Sometimes my managers and senior leadership gets really annoyed with me because sometimes they just want to hire a pulse, but I refuse to hire a pulse. - Every single person at Rocket Lab is the best in their field—absolutely the top of their class, the most experienced, or just generally the best in the field. - We have about 800 CVs every couple of months, but we probably only hire a small section of the CVs that we get. - Your company is who you hire, so you must hire the absolute best. 4. **Get on a plane** - This is kind of contrary to popular belief. One of the things in New Zealand: when an entrepreneur comes up with a great idea, we shouldn't lament the fact that they get on a plane and go overseas and go global. We should celebrate that. - Often I hear the statement, "Oh, we lost another one, another one's gone overseas." Well, all that says to me is actually that company has been so successful that they've had to go global, and that's something we should really celebrate. - If you are starting a company or you're in a company and you want to grow the company, there's no substitute for just getting on a plane. - There has to be a strong geographical reason for you to be in New Zealand. If you're an app company trying to penetrate into Facebook, New Zealand's probably not the place you need to be—it's probably Silicon Valley. - We shouldn't get too precious about that. If your business needs to be where it needs to be, then it needs to be there. 5. **Fail fast** - It's a very famous saying within Rocket Lab: don't study forever, don't mess around with it and procrastinate. Just get on with it. - Quite often we will just pick a direction for a piece of technology and just go with it, and if it's wrong, we'll stop and not get too sad about it and change direction and go again. - The worst thing you can do is sit on it and study it and procrastinate and use time unwisely. - Pick a direction—it might be the wrong direction, but just go and go as hard as you can and fail fast. 6. **Sometimes "no" is just "yes" but on a different day** - If I just stopped when everybody said no to me, then I'd still be in my garage. - The reality is that when you're trying to do something new and you're trying to push the boundaries, you'll get a lot of nos, and it's important to just walk past the nos. - Sometimes those nos are just wrong, and they should be yeses, and it just takes a bit of work to turn them into yeses. 7. **Go after the really big problems and really big opportunities** - The work and the effort and the stress and the time away from your wife and children is exactly the same if you're building a hundred-billion-dollar business versus building a billion-dollar business. - One of the things that I always chuckle about in New Zealand is I'll go to an event like this or an entrepreneur event, and I'll hear the entrepreneurs saying, "I can't wait to make my first million." And then I'll go to the same event in Silicon Valley in America, and the entrepreneurs say, "I can't wait to make my first billion." - That's kind of the order of magnitude of thinking that we need to change here. ### Q&A Session with Moderator **Moderator:** Thank you hugely for being this sporting of fabulous insights. Great to celebrate what you've all achieved so far, and I know this is only the start of an awful lot more. So a very big hand for Peter, please. Thanks very much indeed. **Peter:** Thanks very much. [Applause] ### Conclusion This presentation and Q&A session by Peter Beck, founder and CEO of Rocket Lab, provides valuable insights into the company's journey, the challenges of creating a space industry from scratch, and entrepreneurial lessons learned along the way. Key takeaways include: 1. The importance of identifying market gaps - seeing the opportunity for small satellite launches when most of the industry was focused on large vehicles 2. Creating your own path - establishing a launch site in New Zealand to overcome the limitations of US launch facilities 3. The value of persistence - navigating complex regulatory and infrastructure challenges alongside the technical aspects of rocket development 4. The power of Kiwi innovation - embracing practical, straightforward problem-solving approaches 5. The importance of high standards - only hiring the best talent and maintaining quality in all aspects of the business 6. The vision beyond the rockets - focusing on democratizing access to space to create infrastructure that impacts billions of people Peter Beck's journey with Rocket Lab demonstrates that with sufficient vision, determination, and hard work, even the most ambitious goals can be achieved - including creating an entirely new space industry for New Zealand. very much indeed, Peter. Now this is my Elon Musk moment because I've got to make a SpaceX segway here—I've got to bring the rocket man down to earth and land him on the couch. You've achieved so much, you and your colleagues, so quickly, but the absolute essence I think of your story is that really important point you make: don't try and do something the Americans can do at scale, do something the Americans or the Europeans or anybody else can't scale up. When did that insight hit you? When you went around obviously trying to get multiple launches, but was it an instantaneous moment for you that you realized that? **Peter:** Well, I mean a couple of points there. Rocket Lab is one of these 10-year overnight successes. It all comes in a hiss and roar at the end, but there's actually 10 years of hard slog behind it. For me, I always knew that small spacecraft were going to be it. It was a very obvious trajectory. I went to America in 2006 on a bit of a rocket pilgrimage, and I went there and talked to everybody about how spacecraft were going to shrink. Batteries were gonna get better, processing power was gonna get better, solar panels were gonna get better, and all these spacecraft were going to shrink. And people said, "Yeah, possibly feasible, yep." But I'd already had the Electron launch vehicle half-designed at that point. So it was always very clear to me that Moore's law was going to appropriate itself to spacecraft, and it had, and that's why we're years ahead of the competitors. I mean, there are 70 companies going after this space right now globally. **Moderator:** I just love the launch site itself. It's not only very scenic but right up there high on those cliffs, and you certainly got Cape Canaveral beat when it comes to sea level rises. So you'll be alright, I think. **Peter:** I think we'll be good. It's funny because whenever we fly in VIPs and customers, they're used to going into deserts and Cape Canaveral. It's a beautiful launch site, but it hasn't got a patch on Mahia. And then you take them to dinner at a Hawke's Bay vineyard afterwards. **Moderator:** New Zealand sells rockets—there's no argument. Lovely wine, lovely people, lovely environment. And the other option is a Siberian desert. **Peter:** Yeah. **Moderator:** But I have to ask about the weather though, because it's pretty windy here quite often. So what are the parameters for you for a launch, and therefore, roughly speaking, how many days of a year do you reckon that you'll be out of bounds weather-wise? **Peter:** The reason why we chose that site was we actually have the largest amount of launch inclination or launch angles that we can shoot from than any other launch site in the world. And we have about a 92% launch availability. These last test flights, we were kind of easing our way through it. We wanted ideal conditions for conducting experiments and tests. But as you'll see, as we get more and more comfortable, we'll start to launch in worse and worse weather. It's actually not the ground weather that gives us the issue—it's the upper atmospheric weather that is the issue. **Moderator:** That's quite fascinating because we think of this being the Roaring Forties and all the rest, and that's a broad window you have for launches in terms of ground weather. **Peter:** I mean, we can shoot sun-synchronous or we can go into cargo to the space station out of that one site. And it can be roaring on the ground and we're just fine, but like I said, it's the upper atmospheric stuff that causes the issue. When you're traveling at about eight times the speed of sound and you go through a shear band that's going 150 kilometers one way and zero the other, it's like hitting the rocket with an ax. So that's the harder constraint for us. **Moderator:** The other enormous achievement is the way you worked with the government to create the whole regulatory framework here and did the bilateral agreement with the United States. Is that something that's caught people's attention overseas about the ability to derive such a big regulatory framework so fast here in New Zealand? **Peter:** It's a hugely impressive feat for the country, that's for sure. We often joke within Rocket Lab that we created two space agencies because about a couple of months after the New Zealand Space Agency was announced, the Australians announced one—except with no charter whatsoever. They don't know what they're doing. They were one of the last countries to ever create a space agency. It's definitely created the template for the world. The UK are trying to create a space agency and a space launch site in the UK. They've got rubbish trajectories, so we don't need to worry about that. You can only shoot one trajectory, which is sun-synchronous. But I mean, it's a cool thing to do right now—is build a launch site, that's for sure. **Moderator:** As you sort of cast your eye over the other places in the economy and indeed new technologies, do you think there might be some other opportunities for New Zealand to be a regulatory leader? Something like blockchain is an obvious example, but do others spring to mind for you? **Peter:** Absolutely. Autonomous aircraft—some of their friends have come down and set up shop down here, which has been really great. I think New Zealand has a really unique, rigorous regulatory environment. New Zealand regulates for safety obviously and for regulatory purposes, but it wants to be innovative. And it's such a small community that you can do that. I mean, anybody in this room, if they really wanted to, could get a hold of Jacinda. If you're an American, you try getting hold of Donald Trump. So it's that really great advantage of having a relatively small population, a very open culture, and a very forward-thinking regulatory regime. **Moderator:** If you're in Chicago, population sort of 3 times the size of New Zealand, you wouldn't even get to see the mayor very often. **Peter:** Yes. **Moderator:** But once you had that regulatory framework well-established and you were going to American investors and saying, "Look, here's the idea..." Obviously, very articulate about the miniaturization of rockets and the ability to build them and launch them with some very innovative technology—was there still a real resistance from them about "Ah, it's outside America, it's a long way away." How did you overcome that? **Peter:** Well, I mean, firstly, we didn't have the regulatory framework. That had to come later. So they were investing in a company that had to somehow get a bilateral treaty and create a whole regulatory framework. So it was much more difficult than that. But we had a strong track record. We had eight years prior to raising the first amount of capital of execution, and we built a pretty strong reputation in the industry of "We do what we say we're going to do, and we do it well." I'm not going to say it was easy to raise capital. I mean, literally, I joke with our investors: "I'm taking your cash, I'm literally setting fire to your money." We've only ever raised at Tier 1. These are the venture capitalists in Silicon Valley; they look for the next Facebook, the next Google. Unless you can show a clear path to a billion-dollar business that's totally disruptive, they're just not interested. **Moderator:** We've got some great questions coming in, so I'll ask this one if I may from Courtney: What's your strategy for staying ahead of the competition with so many companies trying to press on in space? **Peter:** It's just not looking back, just working, just keeping one step ahead, keep innovating, and just keep pushing. **Moderator:** And a question here from David. You've got lots of big things you've surmounted, so he's asking: if you could think of one particularly insurmountable problem, or where it seemed insurmountable, and how you cracked it, and how you maintained your resolve through that. **Peter:** I'll answer the question in a bit of a slightly different way. I can remember when I first started out, and we had an engine that just exploded. And I had no idea why it exploded, and I built it again, and it just exploded. It just kept on basically exploding. Now that would be okay, other than I had a contingent of Americans coming over literally in weeks of time and to come and see this engine run. To be fair, there was no guarantee I was going to run because it was an incredibly different approach. I remember sitting there thinking, "Ah, gee, I just—I think I'm breaking some laws of physics here. I don't think this is gonna work." And just not sleeping for weeks and just working away, working, working, working until it finally worked. And then it worked really, really well, and life was good. These days, these problems come up every day. These things come in front of you and just seem seemingly insurmountable. And I get less worried about them because you always find a way. As long as you realize that you can always find a way, then it's not too bad. Doesn't mean you don't stress about it and you don't work—you work just as hard, but it's less devastating to your life. **Moderator:** How did the breakthrough finally come when you and your colleagues realized what was going wrong with those exploding engines? **Peter:** It's just work. We just keep building them and systematically understanding the physics and the chemistry of what was going on. I mean, the worst thing you could do is sit in the corner and cry. You just need to get on with it and just build another one. **Moderator:** Because they weren't coming for Guy Fawkes night. **Peter:** No, no. **Moderator:** Can I just urge you please to use the app because I've got some great questions here, but I'm keen for some more. So please keep them coming. Another question here is: what kind of impact does a launch—a successful launch... Actually, let me ask this question two ways: What sort of impact does an unsuccessful launch have? And then what impact does a successful launch have? **Peter:** An unsuccessful launch is a really bad day. And unfortunately, it happens to the best of us in this industry. SpaceX and Ariane had a number of launches on their belt, and they just blow up a whole launch pad and rocket in one fell swoop. This is what happens in this industry. So it's an industry that really tests your mettle. The impact is, depending on what the cause of the failure was, if it's an easy failure, we go back and fix it and find root cause and go again. If it's a more difficult failure, we don't fly until we understand root cause. So that can be a month, it can be three months, it can be six months. SpaceX was grounded six months until they found root cause. So it's not a great time, but it happens. And all these things just happen, and that's just part of the industry. It's part of life. A good launch—a good launch is a good launch. When we did that last launch earlier this year, not only did we go to orbit and put some spacecraft on orbit, but we exceeded all the commercial specs of the launch vehicle. So we inserted the spacecraft to a one-kilometer accuracy and a point-oh-nine degree of inclination. And when you're wrestling with just under a million horsepower and you've got to insert to within one kilometer traveling at 28 times the speed of sound, it's kind of tricky. So it was a really good launch. Right now, we're in a very good position because we're the only show in town, and there's a huge backlog of payload. So for us, it's all about scaling up to meet the demand. **Moderator:** My mind kind of boggles at trying to turn that space data about how accurately you place the satellite into a terrestrial equivalent. I mean, it'd be kind of nano-scale precision to have put the satellite right there. **Peter:** I mean, we measure in grams and milliseconds on a 16-ton vehicle. **Moderator:** That's an extraordinary juxtaposition of size and scale. **Peter:** I mean, that's why rockets are so hard. It usually takes a government and massive teams to do it. One to one and a half percent of the total rocket's mass is actually the satellite. So if you're a fraction of a percent out on performance or a fraction of a percent over weight, you just create a giant firework. You get nothing to orbit—it just falls straight out of orbit. **Moderator:** Six Sigma doesn't even come into it in terms of quality control. **Peter:** And unfortunately, it's not just quality control in one region. It's absolutely every piece of it. It's a machine with 10,000 parts with a safety factor of 1.2, and they've all got to work. **Moderator:** Peter's asking a question here about how happy were you with the Humanity Star and the response to it? How did that track? **Peter:** That was a weird one. Boy, that caught me off guard. The whole point of the Humanity Star—the origins of that is what got me into space. When I was a little boy, my father took me outside, and he showed me a shooting star. And he said, "Well, that's actually a satellite built by humans." And I'm like, "Okay, so all these other stars up here, are they also built by humans?" He says, "No, no, those are suns, and they have planets around them just like our planet." I said, "Okay, so is somebody looking back at me?" And the jury's still out on that one. That blew my mind. That was kind of the overview effect for me. And the overview effect is when astronauts go into space and they look down on the earth, they realize how fragile the earth actually is. And that was the overview effect for me. So what I was trying to create with the Humanity Star was an overview effect that more people could have. If you could take all the world leaders and put them on orbit and give them the overview effect so they realized that the atmosphere is just a tiny layer and we're all just one species on this rock, the world would be a very, very different place. I really, really pissed off the astronomers. That's—ironically, it didn't really affect any astronomy. Nevertheless, certainly not everybody loved it. But we did get tens and hundreds of thousands of emails from people who really did—people that actually went outside and had their overview effect. And the deal was you were supposed to take your children. So the way I look at it is, who knows? Maybe one of those children or one of those people that saw it are going to be the next world leader. So I call it a net success at the end. **Moderator:** And how old were you when you had that experience? **Peter:** Very, very young. **Moderator:** Obviously hugely shaped your life. **Peter:** Mmm. **Moderator:** That's jolly scary actually as a parent. **Peter:** It's the most complex programming algorithm—and then they set them loose. **Moderator:** Look, a couple of very brief questions to end with, and you have a wonderful line about only hiring the best, but there is actually a very special person on your 200-plus team—many of them actually. Sorry. **Peter:** Yes, exactly. **Moderator:** Tell us about the smallest member of your team. **Peter:** So we had a pretty unusual requirement. We built the liquid oxygen tanks for the launch vehicle, and we sized the hatch. It's actually a funny story about the hatch because we cut a hatch in a piece of plywood, and I threaded myself through this hatch in the plywood and got myself stuck. And I was wandering around the office with this plywood hatch, and we took photos thinking it was a great laugh. So we increased the hatch just a little bit more, but there was a hard limit on the diameter of the hatch we could increase before we started losing structural integrity. So we made the hatch as big as we could, and we thought, "Gee, I hope we never have to get inside the liquid oxygen tank." We needed to get inside the liquid oxygen tank. So we had to find somebody who was an engineer, very good with their hands, that was small enough to fit inside an oxygen tank. And we tried everywhere—we tried circuses, we tried everywhere trying to find somebody that would fit inside the liquid oxygen tank. In fact, we even advertised, and part of the requirement for their position was to be able to fit inside liquid oxygen tanks. So we had this plywood—same plywood disc—a simple selection process. **Moderator:** A go/no-go gauge! **Peter:** We try and limit his time in the tank. **Moderator:** But as you miniaturize the rocket, this is gonna get harder, isn't it? **Peter:** But the other thing, just very briefly—and it's again at the personal level—and I know you're off to Los Angeles today. Any tips about jet lag? I think we're all junkies for tips on jet lag. **Peter:** Get on a plane, have your dinner, and try and go to sleep. Don't drink—never drink. And get up in the morning and just funny, stage yourself with the days and the times that you're there. So even if you arrive and it's middle afternoon, you're really, really tired, just stay awake and keep going. But for me, it's don't have a glass of wine for at least a couple of days, and you're good as gold. **Moderator:** And you reckon you can make some pretty big decisions the morning after an overnight flight? Or conversely, when you come back? **Peter:** The flight to America is a piece of cake. I mean, it's just like a commute because you get on the plane at night. New Zealand's got it down pat—you get on the plane at night, you get off the plane in the morning. It's just time to go to work. So it's absolutely fine. It's just a flying bed. **Moderator:** That's a sort of great message for our overseas visitors. I mean, we're the same distance from Los Angeles as Paris is from Los Angeles. So in all honesty, I find the flight from LA to Washington DC far more devastating. **Peter:** I'm ruined for transatlantic flights too short. I never sleep. **Moderator:** Also, you're in those planes, there's no seat, no TV, and there's these terrible hostesses don't want to be there. **Peter:** No, no, it's all wrong. But transpacific, that's okay. **Moderator:** Thank you