[[Home|🏠]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> [[Interviews]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> November 11 2023 **Insider**: [[Peter Beck]] **Source**: [iRoc Space Radio](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPq_YC5ZVos) **Date**: November 11 2023  🔗 Backup Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPq_YC5ZVos ## 🎙️ Transcript >[!hint] Transcript may contain errors or inaccuracies. **Rick Tumlinson:** Hey there spacers, welcome to another episode of the Space Revolution. My name is Rick Tumlinson, you're listening to iro space radio, we're part of the iHeart Radio network, and I am really excited today. I talk a lot about pioneering and opening up the frontier and the space revolution, and we have somebody here today who is like truly one of the heroes of the revolution. He would probably blush and shrug and say no I'm not, but he is. What I also like is that he made this happen, and as you know, I work with startups a lot. Having somebody on board who made it happen—not a billionaire, started from the ground up and built something great—is fantastic. And that is Mr. Peter Beck. He is the CEO and founder of a little company called Rocket Lab. You may have heard of Rocket Lab. They've launched a lot of rockets, I think more than 38, up near 40 probably if you count the first couple. I'm going to just let Peter tell his story, so Peter, hey, welcome man. **Peter Beck:** Thanks very much. That's the kindest introduction I think anybody has ever given me, so thanks very much. **Rick Tumlinson:** It gets worse from here, dude. Seriously though, you are a pioneer, and look, we live in an age, Peter, where a lot of people are looking at space and saying, "Oh, it's the billionaires." It's so cool, so refreshing, and brings it down to earth for people to show that regular Joes like you and I can get in there and do some stuff. We're going to come back around to that, but let's start with Rocket Lab itself. In a broad window of time, roughly what are you guys doing right now? Your elevator—not a pitch but a conversation—if somebody walked up who hadn't heard of you, which means they're obviously not in our field, what is Rocket Lab? ### Rocket Lab's Vision and Services **Peter Beck:** That's a great question. We started off in small launch, but we always had much grander ambitions than just small launch. I guess the way I look at what a large successful space company looks like in the future is a company that does launch, but also builds satellites and may even own and operate their own satellites. I think the unique thing about Rocket Lab is that yes, we have the Electron launch vehicle, we do lots of small launch, we're developing Neutron which is a much larger Falcon 9 kind of class of rocket, but we also build spacecraft and lots of components for them. You can think of us as a one-stop space shop where a customer comes to us and they want us to design a spacecraft all the way through to launching it all the way through to operating it on orbit. We can really cover the full spectrum. **Rick Tumlinson:** So you're basically soup to nuts. One of the great things—and I harp on this in my other life—I'm all about the environment and reusability. I have the litany I call the four Rs or five Rs: reuse, recycle, replace, repurpose, and resources. That's kind of the frontier mantra. But you're moving towards reusability with your rocket. Is that from day one, if I understand correctly? **Peter Beck:** Not quite from day one—I had to eat a hat over that one! Originally, I felt that for a small launch vehicle it wouldn't be possible to eat all the margins and performance you have to sacrifice to be able to do reusability. But we were able to prove ourselves wrong and follow a different approach for the Electron launch vehicle. Of course, Neutron is reusable from day one, so it's a ground-up reusable design. It looks a little bit different to a normal rocket because it's purposely designed to go up just as efficiently and safely as it is designed to go down, so that drives some interesting design choices and changes. Not only that, the way we go to orbit with Electron, we always park the second stage in an elliptical transfer orbit, basically meaning that it generally doesn't spend more than 12 days in orbit before it de-orbits and burns back up. When everybody talks about space junk, the natural conclusion people draw is that it's dead spacecraft, but actually almost half of everything that's floating around in orbit is dead rockets, not dead spacecraft. I think it's the industry's little secret that people don't know how many interstages, fairings, and second stages are floating around in orbit that aren't spacecraft at all. We take that a little bit seriously and make sure we try and leave the minimum footprint possible. **Rick Tumlinson:** I want to make that clear for some of the listeners that didn't catch that part. The difference between spacecraft, which is the payload in a sense that's being carried up there, is what Peter's making, and the actual vehicle or the fairings, the stages, the parts of the vehicle that delivered it—very different things. So very cool that you guys are focused on that, because it's very important to me personally to make sure that Sandra Bullock doesn't get hit by bits of spacecraft or upper stages. [Reference to a movie] ### Peter's Background and Journey **Rick Tumlinson:** So you started very, very small. How did you—I'm going to talk about your earlier life a little bit in a minute here—but what was it that clicked and you said, "You know what, I'm going to go build me a rocket"? **Peter Beck:** I've always been interested in space. One of my youngest childhood memories is standing outside with my father looking at the night sky and him pointing out that all of those stars in the night sky have planets around them most likely, and there could be somebody looking back at me. For a young kid, that was just a mind-blowing kind of thing. Also, I've always come from a long line of engineers, so engineering was in the blood. Naturally, if you combine space and engineering, you go for the hardest thing possible, which is the rocket. Even at school, I was building rocket engines. It wasn't until I started my engineering career that I was really able to build lots of stuff. I've always kind of run two shifts in my life—the day shift and the night shift. During the day, I would work for either a government research lab at the time or an appliance manufacturer, and then I was just super lucky that during the night shift, they would let me use their tools and equipment and facilities, and I'd just be building rockets flat out. **Rick Tumlinson:** So it kind of goes back to your dad and stuff. By the way, it's interesting because we have a project in Earth Light, it's called Dream Scopes, and we're putting a telescope in every middle school on the planet because we believe that at that age—you go a little older and all they're trying to do is run off into the bushes—but right about that age, we can get them. I've seen people see the rings of Saturn or mountains on the moon for the first time. You recall that, right? **Peter Beck:** 100%, 100%. **Rick Tumlinson:** And suddenly, by the way, it's not just about space. The Earth becomes really relevant to you at the same time. It's like the context. We'll come back to that later, but so it was your dad basically that kind of helped you expand your world like that. You and I were talking just before you came on—you and I both have sort of a non-traditional trajectory here in that we didn't go, you know, we can't rattle off our degrees from Harvard or Yale. Heck, I don't even know if either of us set foot on them, maybe as a lecturer now, which is ironic. But you kind of came up middle class, so your dad was basically an engineer, right? **Peter Beck:** My father was a director of the local museum and a geologist, and my mother was a teacher. I was born in a little town called Invercargill, where if you look at a map of New Zealand, it's the very, very bottom of the South Island—the smallest town you can imagine and the coldest place you can imagine. But great for viewing the night sky. My plan was always to go to university. It's just there's no university in New Zealand that offered any aerospace courses or anything that was remotely relevant. There's engineering courses, of course, so I chose a more practical career and started off as a tool and die maker, an apprentice. Basically, I wanted the hand skills to build the engines and build the rockets that I wanted to. The plan was to go and get a trade so that I could physically build the thing, and then I'd go to university. But opportunities kept presenting themselves that I never really got there. It sounds a little bit like you ultimately—kind of ironically ended up as a professor at Auckland University, but it was just a different path. **Rick Tumlinson:** So you actually ended up as a professor? What kind of department would that have been in? **Peter Beck:** Mechanical engineering. **Rick Tumlinson:** Right, so you were coming at it though from a practical, pragmatic approach, and I guess the school had the flexibility to say, "We need a professor who comes through that path rather than a bunch of degrees." Like, you can actually speak it and talk it, right? **Peter Beck:** Yeah, so I ended up having a lot to do with Auckland University, and it was kind of ironic—I would be supervising final-year PhD students but still not having a degree myself. So the university kindly made me an associate professor. **Rick Tumlinson:** I love the irony of that. That just makes me smile. But if I worked for you in Rocket Lab and I was an engineer, the fact that you are a builder yourself, you know the tools they're working on—so do you actually get to walk the floor, do you hang out with the guys, do you actually pull out and play around with the parts and do that kind of thing? Are you very hands-on in the company? **Peter Beck:** Yeah, I'm still the chief engineer, so when the engineers can't agree on a path forward, then I'm the moderator. Certainly, especially with Neutron, it's a big development project, I'm deeply involved in that as well as other key development areas of the company. I think it's really important for a space company, and if you look at the successful ones, generally it has very strong engineering leadership. Rocket Lab is an engineering company first and foremost, and if you look through all the ranks of the senior folks within the company, they're all very deep tech backgrounds or engineers. **Rick Tumlinson:** I think that's interesting. It's probably something you and that guy with the X, whatever it's called, that guy—kind of have in common. You're down there in the trenches and you're actually hands-on versus so many of the other companies that are layers and layers and layers of corporate structure between them and the leadership. I think that makes probably a huge difference as to the fact that basically you and Elon have driven so far, so fast, right? You know it, you speak it, you live it. You and I've met you both, and you are completely different personalities—like you couldn't be more opposite—but you're in there and you're part of the team, you're driving it, and you're a designer yourself. So that's pretty cool. ### Electron and Neutron Rockets **Rick Tumlinson:** So real quick on... you're flying the Electron right now. The Neutron is coming. It's like a factor of 10 gross, right? **Peter Beck:** Oh yeah, so Electron lifts 300 kgs to low Earth orbit. Neutron lifts 13,000 kgs to low Earth orbit, so yeah, it is significantly larger. But I have to say, I'm—apart from the infrastructure piece—I'm very much enjoying working on a larger rocket. Small rockets are incredibly difficult because every gram matters. On a small rocket, you end up making crazy trades like "I'm going to have two pressure transducers instead of three because you can't afford the weight of the third pressure transducer," whereas on the big rocket, the weight of a pressure transducer is just totally irrelevant. So in a lot of respects, it's much easier to build a bigger rocket. The challenge is, of course, just all the infrastructure is much larger, and the handling is much larger, but actually, fundamentally, the design of it is far more forgiving. **Rick Tumlinson:** Cool. Well, I'm going to come back in, and we're going to talk a little bit about Electron and some of the other projects you're taking on. All right, so listeners, you are listening to iRock Space Radio, part of the iHeart Radio Network. I am Rick Tumlinson, or Rocket Rick on—I was going to say the Twitter—the X, the whatever you want to call it. That's where I am, Rocket Rick, and you're listening to the Space Revolution, and we will be right back. ### From Car Enthusiast to Rocket Builder **Rick Tumlinson:** Okay spacers, we are back with the Space Revolution. I am talking to the founder of Rocket Lab, Peter Beck, who's speaking to me live from the land of the Kiwis. By the way, it's a place that's on my list—I haven't made it yet, but I intend to get there. I know it's very cliché, but I saw Lord of the Rings, and I wanted to see that. That is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. So again, you were a gearhead, and I have to ask you about this because I am myself, I'm a car guy. When you were younger, I was reading in your resume that you somehow—what was it, you put a big engine or something in a Mini Cooper? What was that story? I have to hear that story before we get back to the Electron. **Peter Beck:** I've always kind of had a passion for speed and, of course, engineering as well. The most I could afford was a clapped-out old Mini, and I set forth to rebuilding it. If you're going to rebuild it, you may as well rebuild it a little bit better, so I ended up turbocharging and injecting it, and for a little Mini, it went pretty good. **Rick Tumlinson:** I mean, there's not much—I'm looking at my closet, I could probably keep one in there. I mean the real Mini, not the thing we see now that they call the Mini. It's not—you could actually probably put an original Mini in the current Mini. Very, very cool. So look, I just want to ask a couple more questions about the Electron and your growth as a company. As you've been growing up, and I know the scaling and everything is pretty large, you actually with the Electron, you're using like a cluster of motors, right? You're not depending on one or two big motors. How many is it, nine or...? **Peter Beck:** The magic ratio is nine on the first stage and one on the second if you want to keep the same engine on the first stage as the second stage. That's pretty much the magic number. **Rick Tumlinson:** Very cool. So you're launching fairly large payloads. You're also now—and it started with the one you're flying now, but as you're moving up into the Neutron, the upper stage stuff, the stuff that happens in space—I've had a couple of friends comment on how brilliant they thought you guys were in terms of the acquisitions of other companies that you brought on board. You brought on Saol Aerospace and Sinclair. What did you see in them? Why did you go for them in terms of extending your reach and your capability? ### Strategic Acquisitions and End-to-End Capabilities **Peter Beck:** We felt it was really important to be able to build satellites and spacecraft as well. We set out to build our first satellite and rang up Doug Sinclair and said, "Look, we need some reaction wheels." And Doug said, "That's great. Come back in 9 months, and we'll have some reaction wheels for you." We're like, "Well, we don't have 9 months—9 months is a crazy amount of time!" So we were lucky enough to be able to acquire Doug and his company and grow that as well. Then basically, if you lay a satellite out on a table, all of the long lead time, expensive items—we kind of systematically went about securing for a vertical supply chain. Solar is a great example. Solar is probably the most expensive, longest lead time item of a satellite bus. There's only three companies in the world that produce the space-grade solar cells: Boeing Spectrolab, a company in Germany, and SolAero. So that's an incredibly unique capability and asset, and we were able to acquire those guys. We acquired ASI which builds satellite software, which was great, and then we were lucky enough to acquire PSC. They are a separation systems company—once again, one of the longest lead times and hardest items to procure, being the separation systems between the rocket and the spacecraft. It was really as simple as that—what are all the bits that have long lead times, that are really expensive, and how can we bring those in-house? We went on a bit of an acquisition strategy. And then in parallel to that, we built a whole lot of stuff organically: spacecraft propulsion systems, spacecraft radios, spacecraft batteries. So really now, when it comes to building a spacecraft, we pretty much have everything we need under one roof. **Rick Tumlinson:** You had started the company—what was it, 2006 or '07, I think, right? And you were going through the various growth stages, and then you went into the SPAC world. Now again, my daytime job has recently changed, but has been to be an evil venture capitalist—well, hopefully not one of the evil ones! The joke for a couple of years there with my friends and I was, you know, you're doing a SPAC, which is sort of moving into the shell of another corporation, putting yourself in there and sort of eating it from within and becoming that company in a sense, and then using that legal framework to raise new capital by being able to become a publicly held company. It's sort of a shortcut. The joke was that you're either doing that because you've got an incredible company idea that needs funding, or your idea completely sucks and it's an easy way to get a lot of money—it's one of the two, right? There's nobody in the middle there. Obviously, your idea was great, but when did you decide and what made you decide to go for that sort of path? **Peter Beck:** That's a great question. Our intention was always to take the company public for a couple of reasons. One reason was obviously access to capital as a publicly traded company, but a strong personal reason for me is that I'm trying to build a long-term, enduring, profitable space company that well and truly outlives me. I think one of the challenges with some of the space companies that are owned by billionaires is you have to ask yourself the question: when the billionaire ultimately leaves this Earth, what happens to those companies? It's really important to me that the mission of Rocket Lab is far longer than one person's lifetime. One way to make a company enduring is to make it public, and that creates an enduring forcing function for a number of reasons. One, you have to be focused on actually being profitable rather than just doing cool stuff. There are a lot of people in the space industry who do cool stuff and then try and invent a company around cool stuff, and then the company fails. If you actually have to be profitable, it doesn't mean you can't do cool stuff, but you have to do cool stuff that's profitable. That's personally the strongest way to make an enduring space company—to make a public one. But like I said, we actually had the revenues and everything to become a publicly traded company, and that was the original plan for the longest time. We saw the rise of the SPAC craze, and we just said, "Talk to the hand, we're not interested in following down that path." It wasn't until we actually sat down and met with the guys at Vector Capital that our mind was slightly changed on it, because Alex and his team there were very different in what they wanted to try and do with their SPAC vehicle. When the SPAC team is quoting you back orbital elements, they really understand the company that you built and what you're trying to achieve. I'd tell you the one positive about a SPAC is we were able to raise a quantum of capital that if you went through the traditional IPO process, you wouldn't have been able to raise. Why that's important is it gave us the funding runway and funding opportunities to take on a really big project like Neutron. It also gave us the ability to make acquisitions. We did three acquisitions within four months, within six months of becoming public, and we felt that was really important to be aggressive there. I mean, that is the definition of not fun—newly publicly traded company, three acquisitions, rolling them all up—that's a lot of work. But we felt that those acquisitions were going to be critical for our future, and that's proven to be true and where we want to go. So I agree with your summary perfectly. I think either you have a great company or a really bad company, and for us, we were already in the processes of getting ready to go public, so the SPAC opportunity gave us a larger quantum of capital to do more things and be more aggressive, and that has worked out well for us. **Rick Tumlinson:** I mean, you already—I'm presuming when you did the SPAC thing, you already had your, for lack of a better word, trajectory lined out, right? You knew that you were going to be going for the Neutron. You probably already had your eyes on these acquisitions and were dealing with the supply chain. **Peter Beck:** We actually acquired Sinclair before we went public, so we'd already started down that road. **Rick Tumlinson:** Right, right. So you were basically already going for the end-to-end service model and then needed the financing for it. ### US Operations and Launch Sites **Rick Tumlinson:** So you opened—then I guess before that or in that range, you became a US-based company and started working a little bit with the Defense Department. I work a little bit with Space Force on this and that and the other, but you're doing some things in that realm. Tell us how that fits into what is your focus on. **Peter Beck:** We actually became a US company in 2013 when I raised the very first piece of capital out of Silicon Valley, so we've been a US company since 2013. We have New Zealand as a subsidiary. Fast forward today, we have around about 1,700 staff, of which 1,100 of them are in the US. New Zealand is pretty much primarily focused around the Electron launch vehicle, primarily because of the private orbital launch site that we operate down here. I think a lot of people think we have operations in New Zealand because Peter's a Kiwi—that's not the case at all. We've been a US company for a decade. The only reason we have any operations in New Zealand is because we saw the challenges with launching frequently out of the historical US launch sites. For a small launch vehicle, we wanted our own control of our own destiny there. Look, there's a lot of things when you launch a rocket that just doesn't matter the size of the rocket. For example, if you go to a launch range in the US, it doesn't matter if you're launching a Falcon 9 or an Electron—the cost to do it is about the same because you need the same flight safety team, you need the same tracking trajectories, and you need the same mission control folks. The only way that we could bring a small launch vehicle to market that would be competitive from a price perspective was to also own the launch range. Because you can't sell a rocket for $7.5 million and have $3 million or $4 million of range fees. So we had to find a way to bring a small dedicated vehicle to market affordably, and the way to do that was to own your own range. Hence, that's really the only reason we have any operations in New Zealand at all—because of that launch range. **Rick Tumlinson:** And from what I recall, your Electron rocket is primarily going for like sun-synchronous type orbits and things like that. Is that correct? **Peter Beck:** We tend to do the weird orbits—the orbits that you can't get on like a rideshare. People come to us for a dedicated ride because they have specific timing like LTAN timing that they need to be at or specific trajectories and orbits, or they have a timeline that they need to meet. Those are generally the majority of our customers. ### Human Spaceflight Aspirations **Rick Tumlinson:** Cool. So as you move into the Neutron, you're going to be going big, and like you—you're the one who mentioned it—Falcon, you're moving into that world. You're going to be launching a lot of different kinds of payloads—obviously satellites and stuff like that. Is there any plan—is there some little drawing in the back room of your own little human-capable capsule for the top of that? **Peter Beck:** There is. We are designing Neutron to be human ratable. It won't be human-rated straight out of the shoot, but we're certainly designing it to be human ratable. That comes down to things like what are the safety factors of your tanks and stuff like that, which are big deals to go back and change. Yep, we'd be remiss not to have a vehicle that would be capable of it and go to all that trouble to make a rocket that wasn't capable of it, for sure. **Rick Tumlinson:** So that's cool. So you've got it—you've designed it out of the gate so that you can move in that direction after you get your heritage, your flight heritage, and all of that under your belt. I guess you can kind of move in that direction. That's awesome. So you are going to become one of these human movers, human lifters. Well, look, we're going to wrap up this section. We'll be back in a minute, spacers, talking to Peter Beck. You're listening to iRock Space Radio, part of the iHeart Radio Network. I'm Rick Tumlinson, and you are listening to the Space Revolution. We'll be right back. ### Mars, Venus, and Beyond **Rick Tumlinson:** All right, spacers, you are back with Rocket Rick on the X, Twitter, whatever you want to call it. This is the Space Revolution. I've got a leader of the revolution, although he's a very humble guy and he would shrug and say "I'm not," but he is, as one of our guests today, and that's Peter Beck, founder of Rocket Lab. So Peter, in the last section, we're kind of working our way up, and right at the end, I hit you with the idea of human capable. We're going to come back to that in a minute, but one of the things you're already capable of and you're moving into is beyond cislunar space. You're actually moving into mission profiles—from what I understand, you're working on one right now for moving in the direction of Mars for NASA. Can you tell us a little about that? **Peter Beck:** I mean, look, going back to some of my youngest childhood memories, I've always been fascinated with other planets and the question about life. So naturally, when opportunities present themselves for us to play in that world, we jump at them. So we have two missions for NASA called ESCAPADE. These are two spacecraft that will be operating around Mars, launching next year, and they'll be measuring the ionosphere of Mars. It's a really fascinating mission actually. Those spacecraft are coming together as we speak, and like I said, they'll be launched in 2024. Then we have the CAPSTONE mission that we launched to the Moon last year, which was our first foray outside the Earth's gravity well. That was a really difficult mission to do, but quite cool because what we ended up creating there was a spacecraft that launched on Electron that can basically go anywhere in the near solar system. So we can go to Mars, we can go to the Moon, we can go to Venus, all by using a small rocket. It's a pretty unique capability—for some tens of millions of dollars, you can actually go and visit another planet. It's pretty cool. **Rick Tumlinson:** I love that. Then there's this whisper, this Venus whisper thing—do you care to touch on that a little bit? I know it's kind of something in your head. **Peter Beck:** Well, look, I think we'll completely blow out the rest of your time if we go too deep, but I have a real passion for Venus. I think Venus is a very close analog to Earth, but also it's one of the few planets in our solar system where there is a probability that there could be life. For me personally, that's one of the biggest questions to answer—are we the only life in the universe or not? If you want to take a purely scientific approach, right now there is no evidence to conclude that there is any other life other than us in the universe. I think if you can go to Venus and in the atmosphere—there's this interesting region—if you can prove that there is life there, then I think that answers two very important questions. One, yes, there is other life in the universe other than us humans, so that's interesting in its own right. But I think also if you found it in the clouds of Venus, you can pretty much surmise that actually life is quite prolific. Because if life can survive in those kind of circumstances, then chances are life is prolific throughout the universe. I think as a human species, that's an important question to answer, and hopefully in my lifetime, it will be answered. Better if we can have a small role in answering that—that would be a useful use of time on the planet, in my perspective. **Rick Tumlinson:** And just to be clear, we are not talking about the surface of Venus. I mean, the acid-bathed surface where the Soviet spacecraft that landed there lasted, I think, a few hours. **Peter Beck:** Yeah, yeah, yeah. **Rick Tumlinson:** We're talking about the upper atmosphere where there could be potential sort of floating clouds of bacteria or whatever that could be up in there. **Peter Beck:** Yes. **Rick Tumlinson:** There are a lot of advocates looking at that as a potential place to go. Then we have people looking at Mars. I share your point of view. I mean, what we do with my Earth Light, the nonprofit that I have—our perspective is basically that you have to bet on the cards you can see, and the cards I can see say we're it for now. Not talking about UAPs and UFOs—whole different gig, and we're gonna stay away from that one, even though I get asked every time I speak about it. But one of the great—there's this, you know, Area 51 people talking about, and I tell people, you know, it's not Area 51 you have to watch out for, it's Area 29, and then you just walk away. [laughs] But anyway, I love what you're doing. You're growing outward. Do you have any aspirations yourself to go, or is it enough for you to be a person who is helping this happen? What do you want your personal Peter Beck legacy to be in space? **Peter Beck:** Well, I mean, personally, I have all of the knowledge of the systems but none of the courage to be able to ever climb aboard a rocket. So I have immense admiration for astronauts. I think that is a very special quality to have—also have the knowledge and then also the courage—because space flight is incredibly, incredibly challenging. I have no intention nor desire to leave this planet. I think it's a perfectly fine planet. And for the future, for me, it's not really about creating legacies. I want to create an entity, a company, an organism if you will, that goes on and continues the work and advances the art and advances humans' ability to explore the universe. I think that would be a worthy use of your time on the planet. But I'm not really trying to build legacies other than—I guess I was always taught as a child to be useful and to make sure that when you leave the planet, you create a small increment forward for others to keep pushing. So that's really the goal, and I just think I'm incredibly lucky to get to do the stuff that I find incredibly enjoyable and I'm incredibly passionate about. It's rare that you get to do those things in such a way. **Rick Tumlinson:** Absolutely. I mean, I think you and I show that. I wake up sometimes like, "What the hell?" Like this morning, I'm gonna be talking to Peter Beck who's building rockets with Rocket Lab, or dealing with Space Force or NASA or whatever. Just growing up as an average kid, to be able to be a part of this—my inner 12-year-old flips out every once in a while. ### International Cooperation and Space Traffic Management **Rick Tumlinson:** So you've done the DoD stuff. What are your feelings in terms of the international competitions that we're seeing in space? What would you like to see? What would you think is pragmatic that we can do out there in terms of people working together, that kind of thing? Where do you go on that? **Peter Beck:** It's kind of an interesting question. If we take China for example, they are really moving fast, and they are pushing hard. I think when there's a Chinese flag planted on the Moon, which will inevitably happen, I think we're going to see a new space race. It sounds a little bit pessimistic, but humans are motivated fundamentally by pretty basic things, and resource utilization and land ownership and things like that are key to that. So I think we're on the verge of an interesting time when one nation is making huge advances into our solar system, and I just can't see a world in which the US gets left behind in that. Don't get me wrong, the US is making huge advances into space and is unquestionably the leader in the space community, but you see a lot of emerging nations and emerging space programs really starting to gain traction and momentum. I think it's important for everybody on the planet—for the safety and fairness of everybody on the planet—that it's done with respect to each other and fairness. I think the immediate or midterm challenge is going to be traffic management in orbit because we are not going to stop putting stuff into orbit because it creates huge values and prosperity and opportunity down here on Earth. To think that we're just going to not put the internet into space, I just think is not a reasonable thing to think. The US will do it, then China will do it, then other countries will do it. I think space traffic management is something that we're all going to have to come together with as a planet to sort out because there's no—the trajectory of a spacecraft is set. It's going over that country no matter what. The ability to manage that traffic is going to become fundamental to the safety of all of the infrastructure up there. I just hope that everybody can get together around a table and agree on a set of rules, and then those rules are followed. Because as a human species, we're not particularly good at planning forward. We generally wait until things get into a terrible mess and then retrospectively fix it—it's kind of the human way of doing things. So I just hope we don't get into that scenario where we create a huge mess up there and then have to go and fix it, because the cost of that fixing is really, really hard. That would be my hope—the number one thing is, let's come together as everybody, as all countries, and utilize the resource well. **Rick Tumlinson:** It's interesting. One of my things I'm pushing on constantly is this idea—with Earth Light, we have these principles about protecting the mother world, expanding the domain of life, and evolving humanity, these kinds of things. It's like we're at that moment right now—right now, with people like yourself in our community, that we have a moment to sort of stop and... I watched—I forgot, History Channel, whatever—they have this series of like "The Men Who Made America," and it's about the Carnegies and Morgan and all of these people who kind of stood out there and put their arms on their hips and like, "I want to own it all." We're going to go—and it was very cutthroat. God forbid you were indigenous. Luckily, we so far don't have to deal with that one out there. But it was all about take, take, take. "Let's go. I must dominate. I must control." And this gets into the orbital debris type thing—use it and throw it away, use it and throw it away, use it and throw it away, let's just trash the place, it's all ours, just use it. So we have that moment right now where people like yourself can be leaders in this, where you can say, "Hold it," and I love what you just said, and I'm just responding to it because it was so perfect—that we just need to sit down and say, "Hold it, we got a new chance here to try and do something right, to do something different, to take this frontier on in a different way than we ever have in the past." I think it's people like you, Peter, because you're very well respected in the field, who can kind of push for that and have the opportunity to be that voice that says—and by the way, starting with reusability, which is green. So I'm just encouraging you, I guess, to keep working that one. What are your thoughts on that? **Peter Beck:** Look, I certainly hope that's the trajectory. I was lucky enough to speak at the UN on this, and I think everybody accepts it, but also is realistic that the last thing that everybody in the world agreed on, I think, was in 1972—the Outer Space Treaty. So it doesn't happen very often. But look, it's not for a lack of knowledge. Sometimes these things happen just purely through ignorance, but I don't think there's a lack of knowledge in this area. It just needs to be the will, and unfortunately, it needs to be the will of governments. Individuals can, of course, promote it and all the rest of it, but I think one government is just going to have to take a leadership position and try and corral all the other governments and all the other countries into just a basic set of rules. Because it's not actually as hard as it sounds—a relatively basic set of rules would solve most of the problem. It's really just about information sharing. Knowing where everybody else's spacecraft is is fundamental to avoiding any issues. At the moment, the way it works is someone will call up someone else at 2 o'clock in the morning going, "Hey, I think there might be a conjunction here. We've got no propulsion, you need to move your spacecraft, otherwise both lose their stuff." That just doesn't seem right. With AI and so much computing power on the planet, and so much—the planet is the smallest it's ever been with respect to ability to communicate—it just doesn't seem like that should be where we're at. **Rick Tumlinson:** I agree. I totally agree, and this is a good point to stop right now. We're going to come back in a minute, move into the last section. I am with Peter Beck. You are listening to the Space Revolution. I am Rick Tumlinson, your host, and we will be right back. ### Reflections and Advice **Rick Tumlinson:** Hey there, spacers. Rick Tumlinson here. You're listening to Space Revolution. I've got Peter Beck, founder of Rocket Lab. In the last few months, I actually even said on—I think it was Yahoo News—that Mr. Musk needs to pay attention because a certain Rocket Lab is nipping at his heels. I heard quite a few comments on that one. It's amazing that somebody like yourself, Peter, can roll in with sort of just this determination, this force of will, this vision that you had in your head. Did you as a kid ever think you were going to be flying rockets to Venus? **Peter Beck:** Not to sound arrogant, but it seemed like—you have to believe that it is possible, otherwise you never try. So I was determined to work in the field. Now, whether that specific thing probably didn't cross my mind, but I was determined to work in the field. The original plan was to go and work for NASA or one of the larger space companies. So probably the bit that is the slight deviation is starting my own company. That's probably the largest deviation from the plan. **Rick Tumlinson:** And in this last section here, we're going to—I've got a couple of fun questions to ask you in a minute, but kind of aimed at this bigger picture. To perhaps some young people, some others out there in the world who are like—they're trying to decide how to get into the field. Part of the turnoff of these superhero billionaire types is it doesn't look like anything that relates to somebody sitting at home staring at their homework or something and thinking, "How do I make that happen?" Again, that's one of the great things about you—that you just worked your way in and you went for it. So basically, you navigated—you knew you wanted to do something, you had these skills, mechanical engineering skills, and you just kind of navigated. It's like, "Okay, I want to build a rocket. I've got to start my own company," and then off you go. What would you be telling today if you were talking to yourself who's sitting out there—there is a Peter Beck or an Amy Beck or Muhammad Beck or whatever sitting out there in the world—what would you tell them right now? **Peter Beck:** Just go and do it. You can substitute a lot of deficiencies for hard work, so implement multiple shifts in your life and go and do it. Whether it's in space or outside space, find the thing that you're really, really passionate about because it never feels like work if you're really, really passionate about it. Make a plan and also be cognizant that plan might turn 90 degrees on you several times. That certainly was in my case, but I knew where I wanted to be and I knew where I wanted to get. I look at Rocket Lab very much like a game of chess. You move all the pieces around the chessboard to try and create the outcome you want to create. Sometimes you take some real risky moves, and sometimes it pays off, and sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes you'll just literally grind on something for years and years and years and feel like you've gone nowhere, but that's just the way it is. So I would just say find the thing that you're passionate about and implement two shifts in your life as a minimum and just go for it. ### Launch Day Challenges and the Thrill of Success **Rick Tumlinson:** One of the things that happens with rocket ships—by the way, I use the word "rocket ships" when we're starting to talk about reusables because you don't throw ships away, right? So there's ordinance, then there's launchers, then there's rockets—launchers could be anything like one of these slingshot things or whatever—then there's a rocket which uses the rocket equation, and then there's a rocket ship, and then there's a spaceship which stays in space. But you're flying your rocket, and it's got to be one of the heaviest, hardest moments in a person's life when you've worked so hard and you've got that thing on the pad. My God, you've given it a logo, you know, it's got an identity, it's a creature, it's a living thing, and it doesn't work—it blows up, it doesn't run, you know, "rapid unscheduled disassembly"—and it's just gone. You have to walk into your shop the next moment with all these people who have poured their blood and soul into it too. I'm sure there are tears and all of that. What does that feel like for you when you do that, and what do you say? **Peter Beck:** I mean, that's happened to us a few times now, and it is devastating. I hate launch day. I absolutely hate it. I know some people get super excited, and they're standing there full of excitement. I just do not enjoy launch day because at the end of the day, you're flying someone's really valuable things. They've spent equally on their side—they've poured through a tremendous amount. Whether it's a defense payload, it could be a national security asset—people's lives matter—or a startup company, and this is their one shot. The responsibility is huge, and the responsibility is not just felt by me, it's felt by every single person on the shop floor doing every little job. We make sure that every person doing their role understands the magnitude of what they need to achieve and what the customer is trying to achieve. The best moment of a launch is one little squiggly line that comes when we separate the payload. That's an accelerometer response, and that little squiggly line is what every single person in this company lives to see. Everything else prior to that is terrifying. That one little squiggly line is the moment that you get a big smile, and that's the satisfying moment. I think the adrenaline and the commitment is so huge that if you didn't have a launch at the end of all of this work, nobody would do the work. Because to your point, it is so demanding, it is so stressful, but you see that squiggly line, and you get the adrenaline hit, and it's like, "Right, let's do another one! That was awesome!" Everybody lives for that adrenaline hit. No matter what anybody says, it's freaking hard, and there is no such thing as a commodity launch. We watch our friends over at SpaceX, and they're launching just flawlessly and frequently, so much—that is not easy, that is not normal. That is extraordinarily difficult to do. As we increase launch frequency and cadence, it just gets harder and harder to achieve. It doesn't get easier and easier. So I hear folks talking about launch being a commodity soon, and like, man, every day you're battling physics with a margin of 1.2. I can't see that being a commodity anytime soon. **Rick Tumlinson:** Very well said. That squiggly line—I love that—"We've had a successful separation," and off we go. So I'm gonna change the pace here real quick at the end. I have a set of crazy, silly questions I ask people at the end, and you're no different—you're not going to escape this one. So in your case, you're flying over Venus, several thousand clicks, you're just rocketing over Venus, and you're looking through the colors of the mists and this and that and the other. What would you be listening to? **Peter Beck:** Ooh, that's a good question. At that point, given that I would be terrified, probably a bit of Smashing Pumpkins. **Rick Tumlinson:** All right! I love it. Was there a favorite science fiction book or something that helped propel you into this? What would your favorite science fiction book be, or author? **Peter Beck:** Well, not really a book, but "2001: A Space Odyssey"—I think that was a movie, and I guess it was originally a book, but that was a huge movie for me because I think it was a space film or book that was actually scientifically accurate—the no sound in space and a lot of movies... I'm kind of one of those guys that's a stickler for accuracy. When I see an engine running in space and it's roaring, it's like the whole movie's ruined for me. So "2001: A Space Odyssey," I think, was a well-made film. **Rick Tumlinson:** I am personally an easy lay when it comes to film. I just let myself go. But you can't see it on the podcast, but I have my [shows book]—signed by "my Uncle Arthur," we used to call him—actually was a friend of mine. It has a little arrow going to one of the rooms in the rotating—it says, "Rick, meet me here. Arthur." Absolute treasure—I would grab that if this place burned, you know? I'm right there with you, and people who watch it today don't get it because they're jaded—they've seen so much stuff. But at the time, nobody had done anything like it, and Stanley Kubrick... By the way, I do tell people this—it's one of the only—usually when people have science fiction, I say, "See the movie first. It acts as a trailer for the book," because you can never put the content that you would have in a book, except for "2001." It's the only exception I know of, because there's so much where they're just playing music. If you read the book first, you kind of know what they're thinking and what they're talking about. So just a little side note there. But I love that we are simpatico over there, my friend. A non-fiction book—is there a major non-fiction book you would recommend? **Peter Beck:** Look, I just consumed all I could of the NASA NTRS server growing up, but probably "Rocket Propulsion Elements" is definitely—I think everybody should have a copy of that on their bookshelf. **Rick Tumlinson:** There you go. That's one probably more obscure to a lot of people and yet central to space engineers, who are going "Of course, of course, of course." Is there a TV series show that you like currently in science fiction? **Peter Beck:** To be honest with you, I don't really watch much TV. I don't really have time. It's kind of a standing joke here at Rocket Lab—I'm kind of a semi-social outcast because everybody will be talking about various shows and stuff that are going on, and I have no clue. **Rick Tumlinson:** That's valid. I really watch almost no television, no movies at all simply because—no time. Totally get it. I'm bathed in it, you know, all the time when I'm writing and working and stuff, but that's just—it's like background noise for me because I have no other life, no family. So look, again, we touched on this a little before, but we are at this moment in time where humanity is—I like to make the point to people when I do my lectures that the same technology, the same engineering mindsets, the same sort of technical culture that has put us in this place of being able to destroy ourselves is the one that can lift us out there. Right now, it's people like you that are making that difference. I'll just ask you—what are your thoughts about that? **Peter Beck:** I think your point is exactly right. I think we're at a really, really interesting time in human history where the planet is completely connected, and we've identified threats to our existence more accurately than ever in history. But yet we're still incredibly different, and when resources become scarce, we divert to the caveman almost instantaneously. So although we've come really, really far, we've got a long, long way to go yet. **Rick Tumlinson:** Absolutely. A little bit of a grim thought, a bit of a grim way to end, but that's the honest truth. **Peter Beck:** No, we have a long way to go, and Rocket Lab is going to take us there. **Rick Tumlinson:** There you go. See, we just flip it around, man. You guys are doing amazing work, Peter. I think you're an inspiration, and again, we've hung out a little bit. I find you to be a very humble, very real person with a very—how would I put it—cheeky sense of humor, as my mom would have called it. I love that too, and I just want to say thank you for coming. **Peter Beck:** Thank you. **Rick Tumlinson:** Spacers, we are out the airlock!