Rocket Lab Founder Peter Beck reveals his vision for the space industry's future | TC Disrupt 2024

Yeah, well, the purpose of Neutron is really twofold. One, it's to try and break up the kind of medium launch monopoly that it is today. And then the other kind of element is to launch our own stuff. So once you 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, you know, it's all built off work instructions by technicians and all through a production system. Rocket number one is lovingly built by all the engineers, lovingly. But the other ones aren't — no, they're all built lovingly, but you might take an hour to check a bolt rather than 30 seconds.

Yeah, it's funny because the plan was always to be an end-to-end space company. And 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 kick stage, there was recesses all around that kick stage for solar panels to turn that into a satellite. So the plan was always to build this end-to-end space company, and I think if you fast forward five to ten years from now, that's what all large space companies will look like, or the very large ones at least. And that's borne out of the fact that look, 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. And 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. And I think space companies and service companies will really start to blur in the future.

I mean, generally you focus on being a launch company or you focus on being a satellite company. Generally you don't fuse the both. And a rocket is a giant engineering compromise and a satellite is a giant engineering compromise, so when you have the ability to kind of blur those two, you end up with an interesting design point. But in the past, I mean, we've had of course 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.

Probably on the government side. I mean, 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's very government focused. They're government contractors supporting Apollo missions and GPS and a whole bunch of national security. But I think the difference now is it's commercial, and 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.

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, the hits just explode. And 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. And then you have the legacy providers as well that kind of fall in the same camp. So that's one of the things that we've kind of focused on. When we went to go and build our first satellite, I remember the very first thing I went to go and order was some reaction wheels. And 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. And 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. And Doug's team used to build 150 reaction wheels a year and this year alone we'll produce over 2,000 reaction wheels. So what we've kind of done is if you took a satellite and you laid it out on the stage here, we pointed to all of the bits that were subscale or they sucked, and then systematically went after all of those bits and bought the best in class, or we created our own technologies as well, and then scaled them. So SolAero was another good example where 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. And now we're the largest space-grade solar cell manufacturer in the world. So that's kind of systematically what we've been doing to try and create some scale in an industry that really suffers from scale.

Yeah, so it's a good question. Something like solar has a tremendous amount of moat and barrier — these are semiconductors, decades and decades of government funded research, that's not an easy thing to jump in. And then on the other side of the equation, we built some spacecraft for NASA recently called ESCAPADE, and there's one or two legacy titanium sphere manufacturers in the US. And so we went to one of these legacy suppliers and asked them to build these titanium tanks — it's a very thin wall, very bespoke, you got crazy fluid control devices inside them. And anyway, we still haven't got those tanks, and the spacecraft are finished and ready to launch. And there was an example where these legacy suppliers were just terrible, absolutely terrible. And 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. 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 using different approaches, it doesn't cost any money at all.

I mean, 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.

Well, I mean, don't underestimate the importance of kind of not understanding how big a bite you've taken off, because 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 kind of skepticism and arrogance is super helpful.

But I mean, look, CAPSTONE was a great example of that. For us, it was our first deep space mission, and we had a good understanding that theoretically 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 experience and talent. Put a team around something and we can really get stuck in.

Yeah, well, I mean, 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 a whole bunch of radiation and nasty environment to deal with. But at a higher level, there are much more passive, simpler things to do. There was 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, and 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 from the L.A., correct for all the errors. And so the GNC team had 24 hours to redesign a trajectory to the moon, and 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. And 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. Because that was enough to cause this issue. And then that's a relatively small disturbance — you think about engine shutdown transients, where you command the engine to shut down and there's a transient as the engine shuts down, and 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.

Yeah, I mean, the math hasn't changed, but I guess some of the tools around it have.

Yeah, look, there's always been competition for talent for as long as I can remember. And our sales pitch is like, if you actually want to build ships that go to space, come work for us. And 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. So there's always a lot of competition for talent. And 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.

No.

Well, actually it's a mission that's completely unfunded, and it is a small financial drain on the company — very small, very small, it's a nights and weekends project — and that's our life-finding mission to Venus. And for me, I'm personally very passionate about that 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. So this mission is designed to specifically target the clouds of Venus. There's a very interesting sweet zone about 50 kilometers 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. And 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. And 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, and that probe has around about 250 seconds of time to interface with the Venusian atmosphere. And we have a nephometer instrument in there that's basically designed to look for life. So it's kind of like a go/no-go instrument for life, right? 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. And I certainly hope we can get that one away soon.

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 Venus, you're never putting a footprint on the surface of Venus, but I think Venus as a planet is a lot more interesting.

Well seriously though, that is another —