Main Engine Cut Off - T+138: Peter Beck, Founder of Rocket Lab

Episode Date: October 30, 2019

Peter Beck, Founder, CEO, and CTO of Rocket Lab, joins me to talk about what they’ve been up to with Electron and Photon, as well as some of their new offerings like ground station support through KSAT and Photon missions to the Moon.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 38 executive producers—Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mints, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd the Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Adam, Sam, and six anonymous—and 296 other supporters.Peter Beck (@Peter_J_Beck) | TwitterRocket Lab | Frequent and reliable access launch is now a reality | Rocket LabRocket Lab (@RocketLab) | TwitterRocket Lab - YouTubeRocket Lab | Electron - satellite launch vehicle | Rocket LabPhoton | Rocket LabRocket Lab successfully launches ninth Electron mission, deploys payload to highest orbit yet | Rocket LabRocket Lab partners with Kongsberg Satellite Services for Electron and Photon ground station support | Rocket LabRocket Lab to deliver payloads to the Moon and beyond with Photon | Rocket LabRocket Lab | Become a pioneerLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOListen to MECO HeadlinesJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterBuy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off ShopMusic by Max Justus

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo and we've got the first of the post-IAC extravaganza episodes today. I've met a bunch of great people down at IAC and we're going to be talking with a ton of them over the next weeks or months, depending on how long it takes to get everybody scheduled and in the lineup. But first up, we've got Peter Beck, who is the founder, CEO, and CTO of Rocket Lab. They are the best little launch company out of New Zealand, and I'm really excited to talk to him about a couple of the recent announcements they've made around IAC week, but also some more general updates on Rocket Lab and what they've been up to now that there are nine launches in.

So without further ado, let's get into the interview. Let's give Peter a call. Peter Beck, welcome to Managing Cutoff. Thank you so much for joining me here. Oh, my absolute pleasure. You had a busy week last week, as I was also at IAC and I saw you running around a couple of times. Unfortunately, I didn't get any time to hang out and say hi in person, but I did meet a good chunk of the team, which was a real pleasure. How was that whole week for you? I don't know where you were flying in and out, in from and out to. You got a crazy travel schedule. Was that a little bit nutty? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think my official postal address is somewhere

over the Pacific these days. But no, it was a great conference. And yeah, I'm sorry we didn't get to catch up. It looked busy. Yeah, it was. It was always, always busy. And there's plenty going on. And we made a few announcements there, which made things even more busy. But no, it was a great conference. Yeah, absolutely. I want to get into some of those announcements a little bit later on. I wanted to start first with some general updates on Electron on the kickstage and just, you know, your nine launches in now, is there, how are you feeling about things at this point? You know, your first launch was over what, two years ago at this point. How have things been going from your end now that you're this far into the launch process well i mean i i'm incredibly proud of the team um you know we've

we've um you're getting getting you know 10 on the pad is is um is a great milestone and there's going to be one one heck of a party on flight 10 i can guarantee you that um and you know it's been it's been a wild ride but uh it's, but it's important to get nine flights. That's really, really, really great. But what's more important is that we do them very safely and we deliver the customer's payloads very safely. So, you know, I'm incredibly proud of the team for that. And also, you know, deliver them incredibly accurately.

When we first started flying, we were very happy with the accuracy of the vehicle, and a lot of customers said, oh, that's great. Thanks very much for those state vectors. But when you give those state vectors to the customers, and 20 minutes after deployment, and they turn a dish on their spacecraft and just wham, there it is, it's super awesome to see. And we love to see our customers, you know, get first contact on the first pass. It's just really cool. And the most recent launch went significantly higher than your previous launches. Can you tell

me a little bit about that? Was that something that you kind of had in the back pocket all along, or is this something that a customer approached you and said, you know, can you do this for us? And you went off to work. What was that like? Yeah, I mean, this is the advantage of a dedicated launch vehicle like Electron, right? This is where we really excel. Weird orbits, weird timeframes, short timeframes. This is what we live for. And, you know, the kick stage or the photon is just a really incredible capability. So, you know, increasing the altitude and doing multiple burns, de-orbiting, these are all things that we designed the system to do. So it was great to fly that mission.

We had a lot of fun. We did some really cool stuff on the way up. So there's a radiation anomaly. So the GNC team figured out a trajectory to lower the risk there for us. So we ducked under that, then popped back up, and then circulized, deployed a spacecraft, and then deorbited. So it was just a super cool mission. And it was really good to stretch the legs of not only the vehicle,

but also our internal capability as we look to do much more complicated missions and missions that go way further out now the the most recent mission flew the newer version of your kickstage that has a biprop based uh propellant system so can you tell me about that was that again was that another thing that you knew all along you were moving towards or was this something that uh kind of came about once you got your legs under you? You know, we actually flew in the BIPROP one other time. I have heard that, but I didn't know it was that it was official. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's official.

So this was the second time we'd flown BIPROP. Generally, we fly monoprop for the low-performing missions, performance missions. But when we have missions that have really high performance or particularly demanding trajectories, we'll opt for the bi-propellant. So we sort of have that option to flip forward and back, but the bi-propellant certainly opens the window for doing these kinds of things. I didn't realize that. So you're keeping both of those capabilities along, essentially trading off performance for longer duration missions.

Is that kind of the idea? Yeah, yeah. So if we've got a vehicle or a customer that doesn't require that extra performance out of the vehicle, then we'll always opt to run monopropellant mode because it's just one less thing. And, you know, we have the ability to, you know, to leverage up into a bi-propellant mode, you know, as the mission requires it. How much extra performance, if you're comfortable saying, do you get out of that?

I'm just curious what the difference there is overall for the vehicle. It's pretty significant. From an ISP's perspective, it's about nearly 75% increase in ISP, so almost double in some cases. So it really cooks. That's awesome. I have a few random things that I've noticed while watching launches that I would love to pick your brain on.

Number one, if people listen to the show, they follow me, they'll know there's one thing that I always wonder about with your launch complex down there. It seems, and I wonder if this is a psychological phenomena, so I want you to verify or deny that. I wonder if this is a psychological phenomena. So I want you to verify or deny that. It seems like there are more weather delays out of the launch complex down in New Zealand than other launch sites. But I am willing to believe that we are all collectively more excited to watch Rocket

Lab launches. So we are confirming that in our mind because of our excitement levels. And we've got it on our calendar in the way that we don't for other launch providers. Is that something that you're tracking? does it seem kind of, you know, the same as every other launch site in the world? No, that's a totally fair question. I mean, if you look at the geography of the site, you'll see it's on a peninsula right out on the east coast. So it's a very exposed launch site. And, you know, so it is subject to, you know, much, much harsher weather conditions than say say, Cape Canaveral or other launch sites.

So it's fair to say that we get our fair share of really windy days. That last flight was incredibly windy. But on the other side of it, we're also really conservative. Um, and, uh, but on the other side of it, we're also really conservative. Um, and, uh, the beautiful thing about owning your own launch site is if you want to come back the next day, cause the weather's nicer, you just do like, it's just absolutely no big deal. There's no range that we have to coordinate with. There's no other launch vehicles we have to coordinate, coordinate with.

There's no, you know, government that we have to, you know, government range that we have to coordinate with. We just sort of turn to each other and go, don't like the weather today, guys. No, me neither. Let's just go tomorrow. So for us, it's all about guaranteeing mission success for our customers. So when you own your own launch site, you have all the flexibility in the world to just choose a different day. So instead of pushing to launch on a really windy day and pushing the boundaries up on the vehicle, we'll always opt to just choose a better day because we can. So it's really a couple of those two things.

And I appreciate that it doesn't make for great viewing a launch. It's frustrating. And we try not to move the weather days. But at the end of the day, it's a different paradigm when you're on your own launch site. No, that's a really good point. And you're one of the very rare few that have that kind of flexibility. I'm curious if that influenced your decision at all for when you were finding your US site. You went with Wallops Island, which is not very busy comparatively to Canaveral especially.

Did that influence your decision at all, knowing that you would kind of, you know, it's maybe a little bit more restrictive because it is a government site, but maybe that played into your decision there. Absolutely. I mean, you've hit it in one. We love the Cape. I mean, the Cape's a fantastic, fantastic place. And it was, it's a, you know, I love visiting the Cape. It's just so much history there. But at the end of the day, we needed a minimum of 12 launch slots a year guaranteed. And, and Wallops Island, we're really the only, only folks that could, could, could give us that.

Well, I like it because it's only a four hour drive from me. So it's a lot easier for me to get down to the launch. So I'll be seeing you there hopefully next year. And, and, you know, the team team there um team have been fantastic i think um this this has to go down in history as the fastest launch site built um ever it's it's just incredible to see see the hammers fly yeah and especially when you originally launched i think there was a lot of skepticism that you would get it up in the time that time frame that you uh said back then but damn if you didn't do it yeah yep yeah Yep. Yeah. No, we're pushing hard. All right. So that's my, that's my weather thing that I got off my chest and I appreciate the

answer. Second thing, the second stage seems awful sparky on the way up to orbit. There's a lot of sparks coming out. Is this video artifacting? Is this actually happening? Is it something that you are working on or kind of just a cool phenomena that you're willing to fly with like that? Yeah. Always. It always fascinates me to see the the um the chatter you know isn't it a blade of nozzle is it is it not an ablative nozzle it's not an ablative nozzle um the sparking it's it's you know partly due to the camera angle um but also you know the rutherford engine is an incredibly high performance engine um and we get uh small soot deposits um you know the the combustion efficiency is really high and we get these small soot deposits on the injector face.

And as the soot deposits build up, they build up to like a point and then they dislodge and come off. And what you're seeing is just red hot particles of soot. If you look at the last launch though, the camera angle, we made a lens change and changed a few things. If you look at the last launch, you'll see far less of those kind of artifacts. So partly an optical artifact, partly we've really got that engine tuned and humming. Yeah, you've flown, what, 90 of them now to space.

So at a certain point, you're going to be learning a lot of lessons there for the engine. Yep. All right, so a couple more launch vehicle things before we get into some of your newer offerings. You recently announced the reusability push. And I just was curious about the reasoning behind that. I would love to know if the biggest reason was a cost perspective to be able to lower the cost of actually producing vehicles, or if it was more towards the way of flight rate, being able to increase flight rate because your production is lessened. On the SpaceX side,

that's something that we've seen from them where they were able to start flying a lot more frequently with the help of reuse. Which of those two is bigger in your mind for reusability? It's absolutely production. We've got a vehicle coming off the production line every 30 days now. If you can reuse a booster, you know, a booster represents 80% of the vehicle's, you know, work and effort. If you can reuse a booster, it's kind of like adding another production line. So for us, it was definitely, you know, how can we increase production? And that was really the genesis of the whole kind of rethink of recovery is we looked at a production facility and we're ramping that as fast as we can.

And there's a lot of constraints in ramping a production facility. The machines that you need often have lead times of six months a year. Finding the right people have long lead times. a year, finding the right people have long lead times. So it's a very capital intensive and time intensive thing to double production. That's kind of what led us to rethinking, well, what are the other ways we can double production? And the obvious way to double production is get the booster back. And that was really the genesis for the whole concept. And of course,

if we can save money, then that's great. We can pass it on to our customers. But really, right at this point in time, it's how do we increase production? Yeah. And certainly when you don't have too many competitors that are currently flying, there's not a lot of price pressure there yet. So if you can benefit your own operations, that makes sense as the first thing you know first thing to tackle uh from the rocket lab perspective yeah i mean we're not we're not really i guess like i said it's not it's not not really a cost objective for us at the moment um and um yeah so it's it's it's it's purely production so you've talked about how you're going to kind of work towards reusability in a stepwise fashion.

You're going to fly some additional hardware each flight. One of the first things that you're going to be tackling is first stage re-entry, if you will. And I'm curious if you have, I didn't see this in the animations, maybe I didn't look close enough. If you have any ideas of what your first take on guidance for the stage through the atmosphere, are you going to be adding fins or is there something else that you have in mind for that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, this is a Flight 10. I'm super excited about Flight 10.

And, you know, you'll see a lot of visible changes on the exterior of the launch vehicle. And so Flight 10 has a full, you know, guidance and nav solution on board, you know, full IMU, GPS, and a full telemetry system on board. Also, it has reaction control system on board, you know full IMU, GPS and full telemetry system on board. Also it has reaction control system on board, so it'll be a you know fully guided stage. And you know really the purpose of flight 10 is there's everything on there

except the aerodynamic decelerators and really the purpose of flight 10 is to push as deep as we can into the atmosphere and gather as much data as we can to really feed into our models. You know, it's very difficult to validate your boundary conditions without real data. And generally we've taken a very hardware-rich approach to all of our development and use simulation to kind of back up our hypothesis. But this time we're taking a little bit of a different approach because the problem is so complex that we're trying to run as many simulations and get as much kind of information as we can through, you know, through modeling. So the team's built some really high fidelity models and this is really the last,

the team's built some really high fidelity models and this, this is really the last, um, the last, you know, big bit that we need to, we need to capture. And then, um, you know, from this, we will learn, actually, we're quite close to what we think, or we'll learn we're miles away from what we think. Um, and, um, yeah, so that, that'll, that'll, you know, put us in a good, good position to, to decide, you know, how we move forward. That's cool. It's, it's just fun to watch people work in the open in this way right where you're going to see iterations and you're going to see things that you're trying i love that and i think the companies that really excite people myself and everyone that's listening is are the ones that do that um so that's it's cool to know that there's another that's like hunting down reusability in this way i'm very

excited to watch it personally no it should be good and hopefully um hopefully this flight we can we can get some images down and some data it'll be it'll be really good moving on to the photon announcement you had last week um you announced a partnership with ksat to have ground station services for photon missions so this is kind of the idea to have an end-to-end mission. And stop me if I'm misexplaining this, but a customer could come to you and buy a photon as their satellite bus, a launch on Electron, and then ground station services through KSAT. And then all they have to worry about is their payload. Do you find that that's an interesting mindset for people to jump into? Are you finding that customers are open to that kind of idea, or are they still stuck in the old way of thinking where they have to handle,

you know, every other part except for the launch vehicle? A bit of both. So it's definitely a paradigm shift. And engineers love to build their own spacecraft. And, you know, I would too. But the reality is, we need to move to a model in space where all that anybody should worry about is either the sensor that generates them revenue, or if you're a government, the sensor that generates you capability. Everything else, in my opinion, should be a commodity. Because that's where the true value in space is created. So what we're trying to do is incrementally knock down the barriers so that anybody can put businesses or innovation on orbit.

And the first big barrier, of course, was launch. The second big barrier was I saw so many startup companies raise some money, go out, build their first satellite, put it on orbit, and something dumb like a reaction wheel or a comm link just doesn't work. And they're sunk. Whereas you should only ever be worried about the thing that generates your revenue, which is the sensor. So it's really trying to lower the barriers that much further, so that if you want to be a space business, you know, you can come with a sensor or even just an idea and we can develop the sensor for you. And then, you know, kind then the way I look at space is there's three pillars. There's launch, then there's a spacecraft, then there's a ground segment.

And it doesn't make any sense for us to go and build ground stations all around the world when there's a company that's done incredibly well doing that. So it made the most amount of sense for us to partner with the best and through that be able to offer a complete solution so that we can really crack the nut on why space is hard and try and remove as many of those barriers as possible. I mean, you're always fighting a physics barrier no matter what you seem to do in this industry, so you shouldn't need to fight all these other ones as well. Do you find that the customers that you're talking to about photon missions like this are the same ones who are buying launches from you today? Or do you see this as a way to

open up new customer bases for Rocket Lab? A bit of both, actually. So traditional customers that are used to doing it the normal way. And the normal way is, you know, you procure a satellite and you wait some period of time for your satellite to be built then you have your satellite then you go out and try and procure a launch and then you do the the kind of the dance to try to make your satellite fit the launch environments and and and so on um so we see customers that are that are used to doing that seeing the utility of a photon where they can just turn up with the sensor they want, and everything's perfectly matched. Through to governments that may not have put anything in orbit before, and they're trying to build a sovereign capability.

And quite often you'll see a government start to build a sovereign capability with launching a few CubeSats and a few university projects, which is really wonderful. But if you want an honest-to-God solution for your country, like you want a platform that delivers real data, then you quickly kind of graduate into a much more capable platform. So this enables a sovereign nation to come in and say, well, we want some communication over this area,

and here's a platform that they don't have to invent from scratch. One of the other things that I'm curious about with Photon, well, first off, do you have a target for when that first Photon mission would be? I assume that you're flying some bits of that as part of the kickstage, right? Because it's a little bit of a blurry line between kickstage and Photon. It's a very blurry line, yeah. Do you have a particular customer for the first launch of photon officially? Yeah, so I think internally we're just calling the kickstage photon now, but it hasn't quite

quite, you know, unstuck everywhere. So I think officially we call it just the photon and it's just various versions of the photon and you're dead right. So you know every every every you know time we fly a photon slash kick stage um it's that incremental bit closer to you know to the fully functional photon platform and um yet we've got some some uh some customers scheduled for 2020 so you'll see some debuts of of what we would call you know photon dedicated mission but it gets super blurry as you say because you can have a photon spacecraft and on top of the photon, you can still have like a microsatellite. And, you know, there's interesting concepts where, you know, we can launch a microsatellite and take the same sensor

and stick it on a photon. So you get like a two for one. We can also stack photons on top of each other. So you can have three or four photons. And they're all highly capable spacecraft with liquid propulsion on board. So you can do all kind of orbit phasing and constellation building. It's really kind of, at least the government circles, it's been nicknamed the sandbox in LEO because you can just do so much with it. It's so flexible. And that begs the question, is it going to fly on other vehicles or is this a dedicated to electron uh kind of spacecraft well I mean I think I think you know it's really it is part of electron um that's that's what I like about it is it always used to annoy me that um it literally I was

building a spacecraft anyway and just throwing it away. So I like the fact that it's a much more efficient, I think the German in me is really coming out, it's a much more efficient way to deliver spacecraft on orbit. But I mean, if someone really wanted to use a photon and on another launch vehicle, I'm sure it would be possible. Everybody's got a price. You never know what they would ask, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wasn't more thinking of that. I was thinking more of the engineering perspective, sure it would be possible everybody's got a price you never know what they would ask right yeah yeah yeah i wasn't more thinking of that i was thinking more of the engineering perspective you know whether whether it would uh you you know make it work yeah i'm sure you could but again solvable

with money of course yep um so the the other extension of photon is this recently announced idea of sending spacecraft to the moon uh with it Is this, again, I keep going back to the same question, is this something that you were thinking about in the long journey to this point with Rocket Lab, or is this something that somebody had a bit of fun one night thinking about photon and how far you could push it? A bit of both, actually. So, you know, we saw, you know, obviously we've been tracking, you know, the lunar activities both in America and in other countries. And it's super clear that, you know, if you're going to send humans back to the moon, it'd be very handy to have some base infrastructure there.

And, you know, we don't see, you know, our role ever is flying astronauts and landing them on the moon. our role ever is flying astronauts and landing them on the moon. But we really see that we could really help and provide critical increase in safety by building infrastructure on the way to the moon and around the moon. So, you know, that's what really spurred, well, look, you know, how far can we go with Photon? And what else can we do here that is going to help the nation's goals of landing a man and a woman on the moon safely? And for us, it was pretty

obvious that to do that, there's communication relays, there's a lot of risk that needs to be brought down, and that's an area that we can really help. And are these missions, are they locked to Photon or is this something that you could deploy a satellite as well, even after TLI? Yeah, no, both. Yeah, absolutely. No, we can carry around about 30-odd kilograms of either a satellite or a sensor. So either one is perfectly acceptable.

Really interestingly sized for a recently announced mission that's going to head to the moon in, what is that, end of next year, the year after that or something like that, Capstone? So fingers crossed for that one. Yeah, no, that is a coincidence. Yeah, it's weird, right? Yep. Okay, so you've got this whole idea of end-to-end services.

Is there a piece of the Rocket Lab puzzle that you haven't tackled yet that you would like to see kind of head the same way of commodity as you were talking about earlier? Not really. I think the three pillars are pretty well defined. And for us, really, there's a very, very strong focus on Photon and really getting that platform prolific

and there's been a lot of attempts at multi-user buses in the past and they've all failed and in my view at least they've all failed because of one thing and that's because they weren't prolific if you can create something that

might not be the most perfect Earth observation platform or the most perfect comms platform, but, you know, it's prolific and it's available and it's inexpensive, then engineers will find ways to really use that. I mean, the CubeSat is a great example of that, right? You know, when the first few CubeSats were launched, nobody would imagine there would be constellations and? You know, when the first few CubeSats were launched, nobody would imagine there would be constellations and, you know, comms relays and Mars that are CubeSats. So it's one of those things that if you create the capability and you create, you know, make sure it's prolific and

affordable, then really it's, you know, it's a wonderful opportunity to really move the needle. All right, Peter, last question before I get you back to your busy day. I always like to end an interview with this. Where do you see Rocket Lab and what do you see them doing in two, five, and ten years? Gee, ten years, that's a terribly long time frame. I like to measure things in days, not years. Two, five, and ten days. What are you doing next year?

Yeah, that's more like it. Well, I mean, so I think, you know, in two years time, it's a very, still quite a long time frame for us. That's sort of, yeah, that's a long time frame. In two years time though, you know, I hope that, you know, that our launch rate is where we, you know, hope to try and get it, which was at least weekly, if not more. And Photon is a very available and prolific platform. Kind of the five and the 10 years, we'll just lump those into one because there's such long time horizons that they may as well just lump them into one.

And I think in five to 10 years,'ll be it'll be a really really interesting time to be alive because i think you know if we're successful if others are successful um spaces is not going to be the kind of this really difficult domain that it is today it's going to be a much more accessible domain not just for you know commercial enterprise but you know for human space flight um for all of these things. So I'm incredibly optimistic for what the future holds. I think if I'm lying on my deathbed, I think the definition of success for Rocket Lab would have been a whole lot of technologies

that have been enabled to be on orbit that are now impacting lots and lots of people down on Earth. I think if we can achieve that, that we've been a part of really proliferating LEO and creating these capabilities to improve life for everybody down here, that'll be a win. That is a perfect way to end it. Thank you so much, Peter, for coming on the show. It's been a pleasure talking with you. My pleasure. Thanks very much.

Thanks again to Peter for coming on the show. It was a great conversation. I hope you learned as much as I did on that. He's a great person to talk with, and Rocket Lab is one of the most exciting companies out there. So a real treat to have him here on Main Engine Cutoff. But I could not do it without all of you out there supporting Main Engine Cutoff over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. There are 334 of you supporting this show every single month. And this episode was produced by 38 executive producers, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Nadeem, Peter, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mintz, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, The Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Julian, and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Adam, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mintz, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, The Everyday Astronaut,

Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Adam, Sam, and six anonymous executive producers. Thank you so much for your support. And, you know, everything that supports this show was what helped me get to IAC last week and meet people like I did at Rocket Lab and land these kind of interviews. So thank you all so much for your support for making this episode, literally making this episode possible. Not just paying for my time, but getting me somewhere that I can meet these people. It's been hugely helpful and I'm so thankful for it. Once again, mainenginecutoff.com slash support. Find all the show notes over at mainenginecutoff.com as well as the blog. Check that all out during the week. You can follow along with what I'm reading, things that are interesting, and what you might hear on the next show. But for now, thank you all so much for listening, and I will talk to you next week. Bye.