Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck, this time on Planetary Radio Book Club edition.
Hello again, everyone. I'm Matt Kaplan with more of the human adventure across the solar system and beyond. Which nations launch the most rockets? The answer is the US, followed by China, followed by New Zealand. That third-place performance is entirely thanks to a company called Rocket Lab. This amazing organization's birth and success are documented in a wonderful book by Peter Griffin called The Launch of Rocket Lab. It was our February selection in the Planetary Society's member book club, and it's why I welcome the company's leader for the conversation you're about to hear. Sir Peter — yes, he has been knighted — will tell us about his earliest adventures with rockets, including his rocket-powered bicycle, how he and a dedicated team have built and launched more rockets than just about anybody but SpaceX, how Rocket Lab has become much more than a rocket builder, and his dedication to exploration of the solar system. As always, the video of our livestreamed event is available at planetary.org. Are you new to Planetary Radio? You'll open up so much more of the cosmos when you subscribe in your favorite podcast app. In addition to the weekly show with host Sarah Al-Ahmed, you'll catch our monthly space policy edition. I'm here with the book club every third Friday. Okay, let's get started with Sir Peter. My first task was just to hold up the book.
It's hard to pick up with one arm. As I told Peter a moment ago, there it is, The Launch of Rocket Lab. What a gorgeous book and what a fascinating tale it tells. And we will dive into that tale over the next hour or so as we welcome our special guest, Sir Peter Beck, the CEO and founder of Rocket Lab. Peter, thank you so much for joining us. We're honored.
Oh, no, my absolute pleasure.
You are coming to us, I think, from your studio in New Zealand, correct?
Correct. Yep, no, today I'm in New Zealand.
You get around, I'm sure, bouncing back and forth between continents. Here's a quote from the beginning of the book: 'Somewhere between unlikely and impossible is where magic happens.' That's your quote. I think you found the sweet spot there, it appears to me, with Rocket Lab.
Yeah, no, that's — it's true. Yeah, no, it — and I think that sums up the company quite nicely.
So here's another quote, and I think this is from author Peter Griffin, who put the book together in collaboration with you and others at the company. 'Its tale is not just about rockets and satellites; it's a narrative of human ingenuity, perseverance, and the unyielding drive to push beyond the boundaries of what's possible.' I couldn't agree more. I mean, that is very much how the book impressed me. It is absolutely gorgeous. The images, the print quality — and because of the story it tells and those images, I think that space fans who may not even have heard of Rocket Lab — there must be one or two left on the globe — will still enjoy this book. And I know that our members have, because we've been hearing glowing comments about it for the last more than a month now. So are you happy with the way it's turned out?
No, it's great. Yeah, no, that's — it's fantastic. It's true. I mean, it was a project that initially started off as a relatively small thing and an idea where we thought, well, it would be nice to have a coffee table book of just images of beautiful hardware. And then as we started to kind of fill that out, and as you mentioned, Peter Griffin wrote the book, and as Peter interviewed me and other members of the team, the book sort of just grew legs and ended up as that weightlifting ornament that you just proved there. So, you know, it's like any good project, right? It starts off small and then just ends up much bigger than you expected.
Here's an astounding fact from the introduction to the book — your introduction. At the top of rocket-launching nations is the United States, China, and then New Zealand, with that last entirely thanks to your complex on the — am I pronouncing it correctly — the Mahia Peninsula?
That's correct. Yeah, yep, no, that little spit out the side of New Zealand throws up a lot of rockets, that's for sure.
It has to be the most beautiful spot on Earth from which big rockets are launched. I really would love to visit someday. I hope to knock on the gate someday.
Yeah, no, it is truly, truly gorgeous launch site. It's — yeah, even on a rough weather day, it still has a certain magic to it.
I got that from the book. It can only be better in person. I noticed as I was finishing my research, just checking in again on the company yesterday, that Rocket Lab is one of the sponsors of this year's American Astronautical Society Robert Goddard Space Science Symposium, which happens to pretty much coincide with the 100th anniversary of Robert Goddard's first successful launch, the first flight of a liquid-fueled rocket. And I just wonder, do you draw a line between that event a century ago and the work that you do now?
Yeah, no, it's quite funny because, you know, you look back in history, and as all good rocket geeks do, you look back at history and you look at Korolev and von Braun and Goddard and all of those kind of folks. The history of the space industry I find quite fascinating as well. So, no, there's pretty straight lines between it all.
Your passion for this stuff definitely comes across in the book and certainly in the work that you've done. I want to go way, way back because this is also documented in the book. Our members who've read it already know. Do you still have that rocket-powered bike that you built as a kid back in those days?
Yeah, I do. I do. It's hanging up in the rafters of my brother's workshop, actually. But yeah, no, no, I still have that. I'm not sure that I would get on it again, to be honest with you. I think that was a different time. But my son started hounding me to ride it. I'm like, well, I'm not so sure we'll do that. I think you can go on and have your own misadventures, don't relive mine.
I suspect that your board would not be thrilled to see you on a rocket-powered bike.
[laughter] Yeah, probably not.
It's clear though that you had this passion and this dream from very, very early on. And in the book you give a fair amount of credit to your dad. Could you describe him a little bit? He obviously provided inspiration.
My entire childhood upbringing was never constrained by whatever you thought you could or couldn't do. You know, I remember I would come home with something I wanted to build or something I wanted to do, and it was never constrained. Like if I came home and said I want to build a rocket engine, you know, my parents wouldn't go, 'Well, you be careful and maybe that's not a good idea.' They would be like, 'Well, if you're going to build a rocket engine, make sure you build a really good big one.' So, I was surrounded in an environment where no idea was too big, and looking back, we had a lot of trust from our parents, you know, to go and do these kind of things. And you find yourself as a parent these days having to check yourself. It's like, well, you've got to let live a little bit, because the natural propensity is to protect, but the reality is, you know, I was just lucky to have that environment where all of us kids could go and experiment, and the expectation was that you do so.
Thinking about them just from the angle of engineering rather than what you can accomplish with them, why were — and I assume why are — rockets so appealing to you?
It's the conversion of energy, to be honest with you, that I find very attractive. So, if you look at an internal combustion engine and you can convert some energy there and put it to work, that's great. But as a teenager, I sort of putzed around with internal combustion engines and cars and turbocharged stuff and did that kind of thing. And it quickly became very obvious that if you wanted to go really fast or harness really great power, then a rocket engine is really just — you know, skip right to the end. The engineering challenge also, like a rocket engine in particular, is a very challenging thing to build a high-performance and reliable one. So, you know, I really like hard engineering problems to solve, but even today if I go to an engine static fire or something like that, and it's just the raw conversion of energy is just, you know, it's something pretty cool.
Yeah, I'll say. Your first time in the United States, you visit Edwards Air Force Base and you almost get arrested as a suspicious foreign national with a camera. [laughter] But I'm more interested — there's one line on that page. I mean, say whatever you'd like about that, but the line that I was most interested in, because I love going out there to the Mojave, and it used to be there was this collection of startups there, all of whom were hoping to build, get to orbit, some of them single stage to orbit, which we'll come back to. I read that one of the things you discovered as you wandered around there, if you avoided being arrested, is that a lot of these companies weren't that far ahead of what you were doing in your spare time. Really?
No, that's right. I mean, sitting in a small island nation on the other side of the world and you see these amazing things, it's very easy to kind of position yourself as being very far away. There was a couple of major learnings in that trip, and that was indeed one of them. I can remember going to visit one of these startups, and they developed an igniter, a spark igniter engine, and they had an SBIR, and for memory the SBIR was like a million dollars or something like that, and at that point in time that was just the most insane amount of money you could possibly imagine. I remember them showing me this spark torch igniter, and it was this poorly machined thing screwed to a piece of plywood, and I was like, 'Really? For a million dollars, this is what you produced?' You know, at that point it was experiences like that that kind of made me realize, hang on a minute, you know, this beautifully machined spark igniter I've got at home that works nicely actually is better than this thing screwed to a piece of plywood costing a million dollars. So, you know, it was a real aha moment, really a real level up. It's like, 'Hang on a minute, we're not as far away as we thought.'
So, you realized, according to the book, that you're going to have trouble getting hired by NASA as a foreign national. So, you go back home and work starts on that first rocket. Is it Atea?
Your first successful suborbital rocket, which, you know, was very successful. I mean, my goodness, it went above the Kármán line, right? On the first try.
I wonder, beginning with that experience, which was more difficult: designing and building a successful rocket, or finding the team and the backers you needed to have a business that could create such things?
It's funny because at the very beginning I used to worry about engineering problems, and they used to be the peak source of worry. It didn't take that long for me to sort of lose that as the peak source of worry, because actually those engineering problems we could always solve, and even today, like, of course you're always worried about them, but they're always solvable. And maybe it's a — you know, with time comes a bit of arrogance in that respect, that there's just never a problem we can't solve. But you know, building a startup company in a country that had no space industry on the other side of the planet, you know, and to your point, raising funding and building the company, I would say that kept me awake at night much longer and much more often than solving technical issues, because you know, I could always rely on the fact that these technical issues, you can grind all you want, but if you can't raise capital, then all that work goes away. You know, over the years, in reflection, I've equally as enjoyed building the company as well as building the products.
And they're two completely different skill sets, but still both you're creating things. And the company has certainly grown a great deal. We'll come back to that as well, but I have to ask again — I'll come back to where I started with that question. When you saw that first rocket with its hybrid engine — I'm fascinated by hybrid engines, the combination of liquid and solid fuel — when it rose into space, I mean, that must have told you we may be on the right track here.
Yeah, I mean, I was very happy at the time because it had just been, you know, a couple of years of just solid work, and sit back — and there was many times in the company history where it was all on the line, and if something went poorly that would have been it. And you know, that was one of the earliest moments where if that had gone poorly, our ability to go and raise funding and do other work after that probably would have been pretty well diminished.
Probably relieved is the better emotion than happy, because you know, I knew that I could take that win and then go and use that to sell that for other projects and create investment and keep bootstrapping the company along.
This suddenly made me think of something that's not in my notes, but I remember reading that nowadays you don't like to be in mission control during the launch.
I hate it. I hate it. Yeah. [laughter] No, I hate it. I like — the thing is that it's both a superpower and a curse. I've come to learn that I just care so damn much. You know, when a launch is on the pad and I know that there's a customer satellite in the nose and they are 100% and completely reliant on us executing our job perfectly, the weight of that risk is very heavy. There has not been a single launch that I've ever sat there and watched that I've been relaxed about it. I'm always on the edge of my seat, and the night before I'm not sleeping, and it's — yeah, which is a challenge because when you're launching every week it's just like this constant drain of adrenaline out of your body just making sure that all these launches are successful.
It sounds like your body is a victim of your own success.
[laughter] Very much so. Yeah. I have to say though that it has got slightly better because my smart watch would, after a launch, it would warn me that there's been strenuous physical activity and that a resting period was required. So, I don't do that anymore, so maybe there is some relief. But no, like I say, it's just when someone entrusts you, whether it's for a spacecraft or a launch or whatever, I take that incredibly seriously.
All right, you have that initial great success, and then you take on this very ambitious effort to develop the rocket that we now know as the Electron. Very interesting to read that I guess it was at roughly that stage of development you had not even heard of something called SpaceX.
Yeah, no, it's bizarre the timing. I mean, maybe I was in my own little world. That was just about the time that I got to talk to Elon when they were working hard to make the Falcon 9 a working rocket. And little did I know that this amazing company in New Zealand was headed in the same direction.
So, you're looking for the investments you need because this is a big, big project, and somebody gives you this advice that you have to stop being such a nice guy. What about that?
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, it's in the context, I guess. You have to understand in the New Zealand culture, it is — I wouldn't — well, it's a very conservative, self-deprecating culture. So, when I went to Silicon Valley, the one thing that I learned very quickly is a good Silicon Valley entrepreneur is incredibly boisterous and positive, confident, and those are not natural qualities for either me nor, I would say, your typical New Zealander, where we're very kind of — it's a very down-to-earth, slightly pessimistic culture. So, you know, I had to learn to back myself a little bit. That was certainly an early learning, because someone said, 'Well, what happens if an investor said, what happens if this doesn't go well?' I'll naturally default to the worst-case scenario possible, no matter how unlikely it is. And that's not very conducive to inspiring confidence.
I kind of like that you at least started from being maybe the opposite of fake it till you make it.
Yeah, very much so. [laughter] Yeah, very much so. Yeah.
Let's talk about the Electron, this workhorse rocket that you have had such tremendous success with. First of all, there's so much about this and other things that you have developed at Rocket Lab that are just works of art to me. I mean, the book certainly does them justice. But I've seen a fair number of rocket engines in my life, and when I looked at the photo of the Rutherford engine, it just looked so clean and even elegant compared to most rocket engines. I mean, I know for example that you used electric pumps instead of turbo pumps on that engine and so on, but it just — I mean, do you get that, do you have that same kind of sense, and is that something that you strive for as you're building stuff?
