Off-Nominal - 191 - It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere…at a Rocket Lab Facility (with Richard French)

Episode Date: April 4, 2025

Jake and Anthony are joined by Richard French, Vice President, Business Development and Strategy, Space Systems at Rocket Lab, to talk about their Mars Sample Return architecture, the way they’ve been putting the word out on it, and to hear what’s been up with their space systems side of the business lately.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 191 - It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere…at a Rocket Lab Facility (with Richard French) - YouTubeRocket Lab | The Space Company | Rocket LabMars Sample Return | Rocket LabNASA Installs Heat Shield on First Private Spacecraft Bound for Venus - NASANASA selects seven companies for MSR studies - SpaceNewsNASA awards Rocket Lab study contract for Mars Sample Return - SpaceNewsVarda Space capsule lands in Australia with critical data for hypersonic vehicles - SpaceNewsRocket Lab to expand into laser communications with Mynaric acquisition - SpaceNewsRocket Lab on X: “Stage 2's qualification campaign tests…”Follow RichardDick French (@DFRocketScience) / XFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine start. Hello, Jake. How's it going, buddy? Good, man. A long time, no talk. Yeah, I know. We did a secret one before this, so we're tuned up. We did a pre-recorded show, yeah. Yeah, we're tuned up. I was mentioning this before we started. We got Richard French here from Rocket Lab, who I've been told by many people that I should get to know. He's got the vibe. He's got the vibe in there. He's got the logo. He's got the vibe. How's it going, Richard?

The very first sound he makes is crowd. It's probably somewhere. It's good. Your company doesn't exist in a time zone. Your time, you're a, you're the, you're the international airport of space companies. It's whatever time you want it to be. And we keep adding more. Yeah.

You can literally say it's five o'clock somewhere at a rocket lab facility. Extremely accurate. Yeah. All right. Well, yeah, we're excited. We got you here today to talk about Mars. Sample return. Would you guys have been super active about?

So we're really excited to talk about kind of what your ideas are and how it's going to work. And where it fits into the new world. I don't know. We're going to see how to the slots into the reality of today. So it should be good. What did you crack? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. What did you crack open there? We want to see what you have. This is just a Kirkland sparkling water. So, yeah, it's boring. It had a good sound to it. So they got good carbonation. It did.

Yeah. I never I never seen your logo before so yeah, maybe I brought the wrong leverage. There it is. That's great. You got Jake.

I'm doing round two two weeks in a row. So this is the other one of the meads that I made. Yeah, yeah. So it's a double batch and so I had two like carboy's fermenting these

and I put vanilla and cinnamon in one. So this is the spiced one. So it's an apple, cinnamon. vanilla. But you called it Oberon. Yeah, yeah. They're all the ones I make her named after planets or moons.

So this is Oberon, Otonia. So autumn, Oberon, you know, which is why I'm drinking it in the spring. Well, yeah, I'm from Michigan and Oberon always signaled, you know, from Bells signaled the beginning of summer. So that's cool. Okay. Yeah. If you don't know, if you don't know, if you don't know, Oberon's and Bells, you got to try that. I've had a lot of those.

I got a red wine, which is also not daytime or seasonally appropriate, but I did cook with this recently, this Merlot, and I was like, well, it looks kind of nice today. So I'm pretty pumped.

We got quite the spread here on the show. So it's good. Yeah. Good stuff. Where do we start, Anthony? What are we going to crack this open? Well, there's been like seasons of Mars sample return,

I feel like. We've talked about it. There was the, you know, I just feel like it's come up with so many different contexts and different times in the show since the drama of, hey, this isn't going the right way from the NASA side. Let's go out and look for proposals. Rocket Lab not included in the first round of those proposals gets added on, which I don't know if there's a story that we can be told there. And then now, you know, since we got the can kick down the road and everybody kind of was all right with it getting kicked

down the road, except Rocket Lab has been out there pounding the pavement trying to get this thing through everybody's head that Rocket Lab should do it. And I think that's where we've been intrigued from our side of like, is the strategy just like, let's ground game this and make sure that people know they think of Mars Samper Turn and they think Rocket Lab? What's the strategy behind that? Yeah. Well, you know, we think Mars sample return should be done, right? I mean, that's like, you know, just the base. And the way MSR was proceeding, it was kind of on a path to cancellation. It was getting too expensive and it was going to take too long. And so, you know, we're kind of crazy about science at Rocket Lab. And that was one of the things

when I met Peter, you know, six plus years ago and he had this vision of an end-to-end space company. I was like, oh, okay, cool, we'll be able to build satellites. How do you feel about doing science missions? How do you feel about doing planetary missions? He said, I'm all about I said, okay, sign me up. And so this is really just like the continued extension of this passion and strategy that we've had. And the more we studied it, the more we're like, no, actually, we can do this. Or we can do this in a way that balances cost, schedule, and risk. And it's the right strategy.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like, hmm. Yeah. It's, it's so I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm just really curious to me because it's like, uh, the, the, the impetus to do Mars sample return is like almost never been the question, right? Like it's, everyone agrees that it needs to get done. Like, it's, it's, it's always just in a matter of like when and how and, and like, and like, has always been, you know, like it, like, since there have been to Cato surveys for planetary science, Marl slam returns. floated to the top. And so, like, I'm, you know, I always kind of find it kind of funny when I, when I hear, you know, this is not a criticism, but you lead that off like, oh, we think it should be done. And it's like, I hear that a lot. I hear, you know, NASA gets on a call. Like, first of all, we just want to say that this is really important.

And we think it should, you know, like everyone seems to kind of like be reiterating that. The MSR affirmations that it needed to be. Yeah, it's like really interesting that everyone says like, we want to make sure that nobody thinks that we think this is a bad idea. Right. Like the Decaturvey version of a land acknowledgement, like you got to hit it up front that you respect the Decatur process and then you can move on to the rest. Yeah. Yeah.

I think it's actually important though because like in, you know, you're clearly in the same little echo chamber that we're in, which is that we're crazy about space and we love space. And so it's all obvious to us, but, you know, somebody that maybe sits at the office of management budget or, you know, somebody that sits in a congressional office that has all these other priorities like, you know, they may need to hear. your stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. It's one of those times where we're not the audience, right? Yeah. Let's keep coming up. So what is the, when you look at like going out and communicating, right?

Like whether it's, I feel like it was either you or somebody at a conference recently that was out there talking about the moral Semperturn architecture. Peter's bringing it up all the time in interviews. Is there a like a map internally of how we would like to see this part of the process proceed from here, right? We've got a huge political upheaval going on right now with the NASA budget. This process that was announced last fall was like, you know, we've got a year, a year and a half to figure this out again before NASA's really going to, has committed to coming back with something, though we expect that to change when the Isaac Minera kicks off. So what is, when you're

looking at it from a business strategy perspective, like what are you trying to lobby NASA to put in place? Is it to rethink that punt a year and a half down the line? Is it to get some new contract mechanism in place? What would be the rocket lab solution to that? Absolutely. I think hopefully we've been clear about this. We're asking for leadership, which is action. Leadership should be leaning towards action, and that action is to empower the private sector and unleash the innovation, ingenuity, capabilities in the commercial sector to bring solutions forward. And that shouldn't wait. There's no more study is needed for us to do that. And, you know, so we've called for competition. We've called for something to happen this year that would allow, you know, one or more commercial solutions to get into, you know, phase A, you know, kind of standard, you know, mission processes, but to put ambitious goals in place, you know, to do this on a cost and a schedule that makes it really relevant to the geopolitical situation, but also palatable to the budget.

reality that we live in. Yeah. How do you, I'm, I'm curious like where you think that the program has opportunities because, you know, like we, there was the initial problem we face here is that the price had climbed up to like, you know,

10, 11 billion or whatever, whatever number they'd put together. And then, you know, we had this press conference as Bill Nelson was stepping out the door and they came up with some ideas that they want to study and, you know, they got the price.

down to, I don't know, what was it, seven or eight billion or something like that, which like to me is like, yeah, it's like I'm, you know, congratulations on saving four billion dollars or whatever it is, but also you're still way out of line. And then you guys came in, I think your number was somewhere in the four to five range. Is that about right that you're, yeah, less than four. Yeah, we've been saying less than four. Yeah. So it's like, how is it, like, you know, what is it about your proposal that is bridging an additional savings from, from the NASA. Like, you know, both the original and the current plan of NASA, you're still beating both

those, like, way out of the park. Like, what? Yeah. Yeah. Where are you messing up? Yeah. So a few of the key, key features that allow us to hit that number. The first is that, you know, we're committing to an FFP contract.

And so, you know, we only get paid if we're successful. It's very standard kind of, I mean, it's becoming an increasing standard with forward-leaning space acquisitions. And so a lot of the cost estimation with some of the other numbers that you're hearing are in the context of more of cost type agreements where it's sort of just assumed they'll keep growing. There's not cost containment. So I think our agreement to do FFP is very important. Another is just, you know, we're a single, quickly integrated prime contractor. And so, you know, the, the structure of the existing MS program was very much like everybody,

is involved. You know, we had, you know, tons of NASA centers, tons of traditional contractors, the Europeans were involved. And, and so when you have all of those pieces to coordinate and interfaces to manage and, you know, constituencies, quite frankly, to keep happy, then, you know, costs are, you know, will, we'll be, we'll be commensurate with that. So, and so we eliminate a lot of that with our single, you know, vertically integrated, you know, prime contractor approach. And then, you know, we did what a lot of, what they asked us to do. In the studies, the rapid architecture studies, we simplified it. You know, we brought forward a lot of technical innovations that we think actually are material in reducing the cost. And, you know, we're not, you know, we don't have

complicated permetacoupling, you know, no dependencies on crude operations, which is, you know, some the things that are being considered. You know, we've got a single-stage to orbit Mav. The Mav that was previously proposed was solid. It was multi-stage. It had complicated mechanism, complicated ejection system. And so we really leverage a lot of our chemical propulsion expertise on that. Solar-powered systems, simplified robotics with partners that are.

that are proven. But one of the things that I really like about our proposal is that we were working with a lot of NASA centers. So it's not about just like, you know, NASA, you're out, we're just going to do it. We bring together the best of NASA capabilities, technology, test capabilities, analysis capabilities, with a commercial implementation. And so a good example of that is working with NASA AIMS on thermal protection technologies. And, you know, you might have seen some tweets recently out of NASA AIMS and I think out of our own feed about our Venus mission and how the Small Spacecraft Technology Program helped us out on our Venus mission with T-Chil.

And so we shipped the carrier structure to NASA Ames. They manufactured the TPS. They bonded it. I think we're going to take it out of the box in like a week. And so we're going to have, there you go, yeah. I feel like this news went out and nobody, like I noticed and nobody talked about it. And I was like, is something happening here? Like, why?

Nobody's paying attention to us, but it feels like a big piece of news. It's just a privately funded mission to Venus goes for life. Like, I mean, you know, happens every day. There was a discussion in our circles of whether this was the real production spacecraft or if it was a test article because it was like really just not clear. Yeah, that's the real thing. That's what it'll launch. We've been squirreling away avionics.

We've been working with our principal investigator, Sarah Seeger at MIT and her instrument team, Daryl Baumgartner and measurement technology is building the auto fluorescence nephalometer, and they've got it built. And so we've got a bunch of hardware ready to go. And so I've been telling Chris Mandy are the guy leading this for us. like, man, get that probe, you know, into our clean room and people are just going to want to work on it. Because as we've said, this is, that one's a nights and weekends program.

Yeah. But yeah, the same philosophy, right? I mean, we, we couldn't have designed a 3MDCP, four-body heat shield ourselves. That technology just doesn't exist in industry. And so, so, you know, we brought together the best of government and commercial. Do you see that, like, like that, what is it, like a pattern or that? kind of relationship where where the NASA centers are sort of more operating. They're operating less as as the project managers of something and bringing in industry.

And then it's like almost like a flip relationship where they are like offering their services and then industry is going to them and kind of plucking the things they need to assemble something. Right. Do you see that as like sort of a good future model that we can move towards? Because it feels like things are changing kind of in the, you know, the government private space relationship world has been for 20 years. Is that kind of how you see things going forward? Does that work pretty well for you guys?

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a really useful model. It's kind of returning to the NIAC origins of the agency where there's this acknowledgement early on that there's a bunch of research and development and test capabilities and other things that would broadly be needed to drive the creation of aviation and all the companies were benefiting from it.

I you know like all all models are wrong some are useful I think it's a very useful model I don't think it's the only model like there there are you know I spend 12 years at JPL and and you know maybe I just drank a lot of the Kool-Aid but like I do think that NASA centers should should maintain their capacity to do hard things and that and so they you know just becoming a service center to industry and kind of doing basic research and stuff like that i think is a very important piece of it but like what's the balance and and um i you know i think that they you know they they should be centers of excellence for space exploration but clearly it needs to evolve you know where commercial should do it or where where the only way to meet our ambitious goals is for a

a lower cost approach we've got to you know we've got to be open to it yeah what's super interesting about this proposal is that we don't have a ton of examples of you know a big flagship NASA project where we get some you know legitimate cost estimates from a government run one and then it flips and we move to this kind of commercial one and so this is like one of those rare times where we have like the same scope and a price for price comparison for like the private industry way to do it versus the government way to do it i think everybody knows that when you know when NASA runs things themselves. I think about,

I think everyone will talk about the SLS rocket. That's a program that NASA runs themselves. Everyone knows it's expensive. Like it's not the cheapest way to go about the mission. But this is, I feel like this is a really interesting way to actually quantify. Like, okay, no, like Rocket Lab can do it for four point whatever billion. NASA can do it for eight.

That's how much it costs to do the centralized, you know, manage the constituencies. like you said, all that kind of stuff. That's how much it costs. That's your premium to do it that way. And there are, I mean, there are benefits to that. But it's really interesting to me as a case study for that kind of situation, right? It is, yeah.

It'll be a really interesting case study after we execute on it. And then we can see how well it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, if you mess it up, then we've got different results from this experiment. Yeah. And risk management is a big part of it, right? So, you know, mission classification.

And at Rocket Lab, we do a lot of risk management. And I think we do it well. But you've got to know when, like, that stack of paper is actually adding value or that stack of paper is actually just costing you money. So, but undoubtedly, a commercial approach will, you know, will be, we'll have its risk. Do you feel like there was a... Of course, we've seen government emissions have their own risks too, right? And so it's not like that's there without risk.

Do you feel like there is an era of Rocket Lab or a position that Rocket Lab needed to achieve to have like the, I want to say legitimacy, but like the heft behind it, right? You've accumulated all these companies over the years that are building out space systems. A huge percentage of revenue is not rocket launches, even though that's the name of the company. And you've got, you know, the components that you're selling, the solar arrays, the Star Trackers, the propulsion. you've got enough of the constituent components that you can go out and be like pretty brazen to say like we're calling our shot this is how much money it is we can pull this thing off was that possible before this moment or do you feel like now rocket lab is at the point where they can do that yeah it's a really good question and um you know a couple of anecdotes I mean the first is when I left JPL there were certain missions in my because we always wanted oh it's being shut down by JPL yeah JPL big JPL shutting him down They got him. They got them. They got them.

He's been swatted. Hold on. You're back. JPL's acting your connection and they didn't want you to talk about the things that you wanted to do post JPL. Exactly. But like MSR was one of those missions where I was like even though we wanted to do planetary, we won't ever do that.

Like that's crazy. Like that's a class of mission like James Webb, right, that you're never just going to touch you. So, you know, we were like, oh, let's do Simplats. Let's kind of, you know, get after these, these more. modest things. You know, fast forward six years, we're 2,400 people now. We've demonstrated that we can do hard things. You know, we studied it. We studied it for like a year, broken into its constituent parts, built up a plan. It's like, oh, wow, our expertise is actually extremely

well aligned with key parts of this, like building small rockets, like the chemical propulsion problem, the high propellant mass friction. We've been doing deep space comms and nap. You we're doing our PO on this mission. We've done entry missions, you know, for commercial. And it's like, well, we're actually starting to put all these pieces together. And if I, you know, then we started looking at benchmarks and, you know, where was SpaceX when they were asked to go solve commercial crew and cargo? Like, nowhere near as capable as we are today.

And so, so it just spent no industry. There was no commercial industry around them that was like, wow, look, there's a whole section of the industry doing it this way now. They were just the one. And yeah, it was, it was more. a limb at that point. It's evolved in a huge way since that moment. Absolutely. So yeah, the support systems are very much evolved. So, yeah, I mean, listen, we're not, we're not saying we've done it, right?

We haven't said that it's not going to be hard. We're not saying it's not without risk. We're not saying we're going to do it by ourselves. We've got partners. And a lot of those are, you know, NASA centers, Johns Hopkins University, a bunch of other industry partners who have deep experience doing Mars missions already. And so, you know, we're going to bring the team together. But, yeah, we think the commercial lead is the right way to get done. Yeah, it's exciting. It feels like you're, you know, you spend all this, this energy and effort and,

and, you know, capital to build out your business in a more, you know, diversified way. And after a while, eventually you get to start cash and checks on that. Right now, okay, now you've assembled all this kind of capability. And it's like, now we get to go and do this and this. You're not just a rocket company more. You're a space services delivery company that just happens to have a pretty big rocket department, right? Yeah, 100%. You look at our financials.

We're 70% space systems. And despite having acquired a number of businesses that positioned us as a prolific provider of merchant component, capabilities. You mentioned some of them, solar arrays, reaction wheels, start trackers, radios, sepsystems, flight software, ground software. We're working on commercializing some of our organic capability. Our biggest growth area actually is satellites and missions. And that's all organic. And so, you know, we are building the engineering team, the production capability to do all that stuff. And that was another one of the benchmarks that I did with MSR. It's like if you break each of the major program elements, you know, the SRL down with its pieces, you know,

the ERO down with its pieces. We're proposing a comms, you know, orbiter to kind of, you know, burden the ERO with less requirements. And can kind of think about each of those as a big program, big programs that are roughly the scale of things we're doing today. It just happens that it's like, you know, four of them put together. And so, yeah, there are a lot of ways that we thought, about it and it's like actually this is a digestible problem. And I think the, I mean, to your point about like the the space system's business, this is about business. Like we're not going to do Mars sample return and plan to lose money. Like this is important to the business. We think we can, we can make some money doing it. But it's also it's kind of bringing the values for like we want our

workforce to be able to work on cool problems. And this is a pretty cool problem. You know, we want to be known as a company that solves hard problems. This is a hard problem. And, you know, we want to do science and work with NASA. And so there's like all these values being expressed in this opportunity. So, yeah, that's part of why we're being so vocal about it. All right.

So June, NASA goes out and they, award study contracts to seven organizations. October Rocket Lab gets added. Can you fill in any of the details? Because there was not, I mean, listen, before you talk, before you talk, because you're public company, yada, yada, yada. I've submitted requests to make, to see whether protests filed. The government told me no protests were filed.

I heard something different so that maybe you could paint in the details, but like something clearly happened. Please tell us. Listen, we were very happy to be given a study contract. and, you know, that some, you know, budget was found to do so. Like that, that, that was, that was nice. You know, we, we were working on it. It really supercharged our efforts and legitimized it.

So that we were, you know, we had, we had to catch up. I mean, you know, the rest of the teams had, you know, more than twice as much time as us. We were, you know, said, like, listen, we're going to let you do this, but, but you've got to deliver on the same schedule. And so, you know, we kicked butt and did that. but no, we're just happy that we got a study word. Fair enough. All right, so you talked about the fact that, you know, the model difference between what the NASA program is going to be and how you're envisioning this new thing. But how do you look at the political end of that, of which pieces of the proposal that you're laying out are politically survivable?

Do you think it's feasible to say, you know, the NASA and partners would be in a position to just say yes and greenlight the whole thing? Like, that seems far-fetched to me, but how does that, not that that should be your responsibility to calculate. Like, you need to put your best foot forward. I totally understand that. But where does the rubber meet the road? And how do you actually see that sort of thing getting approved or greenlit or whatever? Yeah.

I mean, it's like, it's civics 101. Like, how does the, how does the U.S. government work? And, you know, there's, we have the Congress and they appropriate and you've got the executive and they make budgets. and budget requests. And there's some key kind of offices like the office of management budget that are a big role in developing it and also giving guidance to agencies. And then you've got agency leadership that, you know, can exercise their voice and their

discretion that the law allows to execute. And so you've got to work all of it, right? And really, you need leadership in every one of those pieces to concur at some level that it's the right thing to do. And so I think we're we're trying to create a scenario that they can do that. Like, you know, it's it's a, you know, it's kind of a good time to be in the commercial sector, right? You know, we've got a lot of pro commercial themes. You know, it's a good time to be bringing forward a lower cost solution in a time to cut your right out of the program, for instance. No, we didn't think about that. We were looking at.

that ways to simplify and it just, you know, getting, getting something for free from Europe actually costs a lot of money. It's weird, you know, but, and it also wasn't Apple to Apple. Like, Europe wasn't doing the full ERO. They were doing a bus and you still had CCRSs and EES and other complicated things getting bolted on. And it's a good time to be offering solutions that are on relevant timescales to the, the the geopolitical competition that we're in.

So we think we're scratching a lot of itches, but yeah, it's got to be a priority for the leadership at the agency that, you know, is coming in. You know, we'll see how confirmation, you know, occurs with the new agency leadership and, and with all the other priorities that are being balanced in Washington,

like, where is this going to shake out? So, but we're hopeful. I'm genuinely hopeful that, that this is going to, you know, that this will be an opportunity. And we're not saying it should just be an opportunity for us. Like, this should be an opportunity for the commercial sector to bring, bring the best solutions forward and compete. Yeah, my question, none of that was a criticism of like,

I think you're going about this wrong, right? I do think the best way is force a conversation by putting out, like Jake was saying, you know, we've never really seen a fully end-to-end plan that you could compare apples to apples. So forcing a conversation by making yourself present in the conversation and continuing to show up and knock on the door and make them respond to it. And like, that's a, whether or not you get 100% of the thing or 50% of the thing, it's better than just not being there and being in the arena at all. So, I mean, at the very, at least, you take the, you take the thing off the table of,

you know, the excuse comes off the table that there's no good options for us at NASA, so we're going to cancel the program. It's like, no, on record is a company that has provided a pretty. good option tonight. Now they need to justify why they didn't, if they canceled it, they have to justify why they didn't give it to you, right? Yeah, yeah. I think we're, and I just think we're prone to action. One of the stories I love that, that, and I think it's even true. You know, Pete, you know, got a, he got a hotel room in Washington, like, you know, outside Congress or some agency. And he didn't check out until he had a treaty sign between the U.S.

in New Zealand so that we could have an FAA, you know, regulated launch site in New Zealand. Like that's the kind of like determinism that it's like, yeah, you just, yeah, like you said, show up on the front door and don't leave. Knock politely and don't leave. Yeah, yeah. You got to be nice. You got to be respectful. And, you know, we're doing our best to do that.

respect to all the, I mean, but I, it's kind of personal for me. I have one of my technical mentors at JPL, one of his technical mentors was a key guy in architecting the, the parachuteless EES approach to, you know, the impactor landing to meeting backward contamination requirements. And so to get to like, I mean, like in aerospace, we're all like, you know, you know, my mentor was big at by his mentor. It's like, there's this like lineage. And so, yeah,

to actually, I think we'll get to work on this and actually build this thing that, that, that our forefathers thought about is pretty awesome. Yeah, the PhD heritage, right? Oh,

that's also the thing that's different though, right? That there are people like you in the company. The company is doing more and more things every day. I mean, every mission that Varda is flying. They're kind of flying off the line right. now it seems like, you know, every bit of that, it looks like one of the pictures on this website

about Mars SEPR return. So the like drip campaign of actually flying missions in an industry where there's a lot of people that don't fly missions and talk a lot about flying missions has always been the thing that, you know, Rocket Labs has been one of the leaders in of like doing the thing and then talking a lot about it, sometimes to a fault, I'll say, honestly. Sometimes like, hey, you probably should have talked about that one a little bit more than you did before the thing happened. Yeah, yeah, that's right. don't need the minute-by-minute blog post of what went wrong.

Like, like, just get back to work and, like, make the next one happen. But, like, straight up, I'll put this heat shield up again, right? We were like, is this an April Fool's joke when this got posted, right? Like, Jake and I, I sent this to Jake. I was like, is actually the thing that's happening? Like, there is a spacecraft that has material associated with it that is part of this mission, because that message was not out there, right? All we ever hear is, like, nights and weekends, working on it, it's a cool mission,

but nobody really knows the actual atoms of this mission. And that's one of them that I'm like, I would have preferred to see a picture of this before this guy was putting the seat shield on. Yeah, for sure. And I, you know, I've done a okay job not getting too much trouble yet on this call, but like hopefully you'll know more about Venus. Hopefully we'll talk more about it. Hopefully, I mean, it truly is a nights and weekends mission.

So, you know, our thing is to kind of, you know, talk about stuff after we've done it as opposed to like what we're going to do. But as things get more real, it's easier to talk about them. So now that we have our code... He's looking off screen so much. He's looking off screen so much. I feel like we're doing a good job. Yeah, I'm looking at my minders.

Like, you know... You say nights and weekends, but we've already established that doesn't matter at Rocket Lab. But it's always the daytime somewhere. And we're always working. Yeah. Oh, that's funny. So, you want to talk a little bit about the space system stuff? You get that on the list here.

Yeah, I absolutely do. This is one of those shows, by the way. Sometimes we do shows and we get to, we're all of a sudden, we're like, shit, it's 55 minutes in and we're done the show. This is one of those. We didn't talk about any of the stuff. Yeah, we're like, man, we can. Yeah, I'm trying to keep you on track here. Yeah, sorry.

The space is inside, right? You just recently announced the Flatelite platform, which is always talked about with our own constellation or Constellation. or constellations. Your Rock Labs involved with Space Amendment agency, you're hooked into the whole Apple MDA Global Star stack of companies working on that constellation in whatever order I'd got wrong. We are a couple of years now into being a spacecraft bus provider, and I'm curious what differences there are now.

Was it a year or two ago that they all got named and made official? It feels like it wasn't that long ago. I'm glad you noticed that, yes. They were, the naming was a thing. They were all photon. Yeah, the naming was a thing. There was a point at which we were calling all of our spacecraft photons, but they looked very different, right?

It's like, oh, yeah, that's a photon, that's a photon, you know, but like these are clearly not the same thing. And I was sort of fine with that, but at some point, you know, our comms team was like, no, we really need to communicate a little better with the world about what we're doing. And so we named them. And so, yeah, Flatlight is the fifth of the family. And it's obviously a flat pack concept that's particularly well aligned with, with, you know, a lot of the comms applications that we see coming,

as well as some key national security applications. And it's all just about constellation economics. Like the best way to maximize the amount of satellites you can launch is to stack them up and get rid of that dispenser and use every bit of volume. And so we've been working on it for a while. We've had a number of customers that were working directly with and felt like it was time to tell everybody about it. I feel like the spacecraft side has been a journey. Grant Bonnan is in the chat, who I remember for years, every time I didn't review Peter Beck,

he would ask me, like, ask if photons ever going to launch in someone else's spacecraft, like provoking me to make a conversation back probably before this conversation was settled internally. But, you know, that's a long way now from that. You've got five different buses that you're selling to people. You're launching all these small constellations on electron. What is the sales process like these days now that people know that you have this line of spacecraft and that everyone's working on some sort of constellation? Like matching them to buses, I'm curious about what the sales cycle actually is in an era

where there's so many people vertically integrating. What is it like? Yeah, well, you mentioned Grant. And I just throughout like Grant introduced me to Pete. Grant was really the key guy that got me into Rocket Lab, and it was, I really enjoyed working with him. You know, we were, we were working on napkins to make Capstone happen, you know, working over that first Christmas in 2019 to get our proposal in. And honestly, Capstone is where, I think, a company was sort of forged in fire, you know, forged in the flames of hypercury. you know like that convinced us that we could do hard things and and actually if you go back to that

era so you know it was it was grant and john springman you know and we're having this debate about and many out of events and and uh and a bunch of other really great guys that uh that we were having this debate about like what do we want to what do we want to be what do we want to build and i was very dead set on building you know shoeboxes and beer fridges like I wanted to build operationally relevant systems, high power, high delta V, you know, long life, high radiation tolerance, precision pointing. Like, let's not let there be a problem that scares us. And so that's what we've been going after.

And so, you know, customers would come to us and say, hey, I've got a hard problem. Can you can do that. And I'm like, yeah, we'll do that. And I think that that's, you know, that's been core to our strategy. We think you get more value when you solve hard problems. And so some of these other companies that you might be referring to, like, okay, yeah, maybe they can give you a cheap bus, but like, does it work? And does it do what you need to? Like, does it have high operational duty cycle?

Can they get you to Mars? I mean, there's a bunch of things that we think that we're kind of specialized in. And that's driven a lot of conversations. And so, and you asked how like the same. processes today. I mean, it's good because there's so much demand. You know, the government needs a lot of systems right now, whether it's Space Force, intelligence community, NASA. Like, that's just huge demand signal. And then you've got commercial with, again, like, huge demand signals, you know, growth of 5GNTN networks, you know, geospatial continues to grow. And so, so we're kind of, you know,

blessed with being able to pick who we work with right now because there's there's just a lot of opportunity you know we can kind of pick you know the the type of people we work with and the type of problems and and you know in six years on now we've got some heritage we've got some models to kind of fall back on and say oh we can do deltas and incremental things and and and that helps guide us also take's got nothing on spaceships I got a shitload of stuff on spaceships. Yeah. The Varda space missions have been a journey of their own.

The first one is up there for very long time. Second one's land. Already land in Australia. Third one's up there now. I have no idea. It's hard for me to understand where the line ends on what part of the mission Rocket Lab is doing and what part Varda is doing. And, right, it's a rocket lab spacecraft.

But what are the operations like of that thing? How involved are you all in that program? Because it feels super integrated. Yeah, yeah, it is very integrated. I mean, you can't, that's a great example of a hard problem. You can't do it unless you're super integrated. I mean, from an engineering perspective, our mission ends when we separate their capsule,

but we can't separate it until we very precisely targeted at the entry interface. And so, you know, the propulsion, the GNC, the flight dynamics, you know, everything, you know, all the meat and potato stuff that goes into the spacecraft up to that point, you know, is all, you know, getting to that interface. And then once we release them, it's their, you know, the rest of the responsibility is theirs, you know. Yeah, but that's like 90-9% of the mission. That's like all the way done the mission.

That's kind of wild. Yeah, but, you know, I mean, as a former entry to set and landing person, like, there's definitely some important stuff left, right? You know, going into the handswomen. That's not the handwave. That's not the handwave their work. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, it's, I agree.

like, you know, again, having spent some time at JPL, like JPL was really good at that, propulsion, GNC, flight dynamics, you know, multi-physics problem of being really precise. And so, so, yeah, we think that that's certainly one of the hard problems in that mission. But it's not like, yeah, Varda showed up the day we released the capsule. I mean, they were absolutely there along, you know, and collaboratively designed. developed and, you know, through the whole operations. And so, yeah, it's been a cool team effort. But the operation, the actual, like, mission is what I'm interested.

Because that, that to me sounds really different than, you know, this person bought 20 buses from us and they're going to go operate themselves or, you know, fly their own consolation. Like, how is this actually scalable? Like, you couldn't sell 200 of these tomorrow because you'd have to operate them all unless you're just doing that now and you envision that moving on. We could do that. Yeah.

I mean, uh, and, uh, and maybe there are some, maybe there are some, maybe there are some customers that, that need that many,

you know, you know, spacecraft capable of dynamic space operations that, that might be, that might help, you know, be used to target things, uh,

in the upper atmosphere. Hypothetically like, like, like, like, some of those capabilities may or may not be described by a color. Yeah, you know.

Some of those capabilities may or may not be in discussion right now. And, and, and our capabilities may or may not be extremely well, aligned with those solutions. And given our constellation class manufacturing of all the piece parts, yeah, I mean, you have to kizen the problem at every stage. And every time we launch, every time we operate another one, we get better, we get faster. The team is so proud, like on this last one that we launched of how quickly we commission. And it was like, wow,

like we had planned for all this time to commission and get stable and it took like that long. And so, you know, we're learning on every mission and getting better. And our ground software is getting better, too. So Constellation is kind of a key thread throughout design, development, you know, manufacturing and operations. We have to be able to answer the mail across the board. And I think we are. I mean, that gets us to the million-dollar question, right?

Is it when do we see a Rocket Lab operated, installation that's selling services, right? It feels like you've been building all the constituent parts, like you said, not just technically, but as a business. And there's been like, Peter has himself done some like very like kind of like wishy-washy, not quite clear, but a little bit clear statements about it. Yeah. So one thing you talk about in advance. Yeah. Maybe it's the, maybe it's the public company stuff that's coloring the way he does his those comments. But yeah, I mean, what's that look like? Well, I'd be able to buy Rocket Lab internet at some point. Like, What's the deal?

It takes a look at a switch, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, I guess what I'll say about that is, you know, hopefully the strategy is clear. You know, we've been working to from the bottoms up, you know, grow and integrated or an end-to-end space capability, you know, with the launch, you know, focus first on meat and potatoes with the spacecraft bus. You know, with Mineric as an example, you saw our intent there to fill in another key technology gap. But, you know, the mission layer is, you know, it's tough, right, to go to that next step. You know, payloads and missions and, you know, and so I'd say we're still, you know, developing capability there.

Our space development agency prime contracts, a good example where, you know, we're going with a lot of partners to integrate payloads to deliver tactical communication satellites to the warfighter. And so we're learning how to do the comms problem on that mission. But it's not like we have all the payload capability today to go and have the cost structure to go and be our own operator. But I guess the other thing to say is that missions are a different business. You know, we are, the application layer is a different business. You know, we're a manufacturer today.

We're about enabling other customers. and you get exposed to a whole different financial risk. And so, you know, we're pretty concerned. Yeah. There's brand risk, too. I always say this about SpaceX that like, you know, everyone, I felt like the last 15 years are dominated by like Comcast being the butt of the jokes about hating your ISP and SpaceX is on the glide path to being the I,

the ISP that everyone hates. Like, if you get big enough, eventually you're the ISP for most people and they complain about you. So there's brand risk to going that way as well. Yeah, yeah. It's actually funny, yeah, because like, like, it's, I mean, we shouldn't talk about it any specific kind of, but yeah, there's like, there's a life cycle to two companies where like they're the innovators and then they become the giants and the monopolies and then they start to aprophy and decay and eventually, you know, all their piece parts are sold off for scrap and and it seems like that cycle, you know, is, is compressing the time. So, yeah, we're still very much. You're the king of like buying companies that are in bad financial situations and getting amazing deals. Like all the Virgin hardware that came out of Virgin orbit, Rocket Lab scooped that up, integrated it.

Mineric, I think the acquisition was like a third of how much investment they had taken over the time. And that's, you know, presumably a pretty good capability that's adding in. So whoever's, you know, yeah, whoever's out there scoping it out. They're doing a good job. We like deals. It's very, it's very rockab, very scrappy. Going to the first. We also, we also know we bring to the table. You know, it's not just about, you know, some capital. It's, it's, okay, we can help scale. You know, we're a manufacturing company. We've demonstrated, you know, scaling. We're continuing to scale ourselves. And so, you know, companies that didn't quite make it because of those problems, you know, are a natural fit.

but yeah you know we're going to take our time in getting to that application layer and and I think you know we definitely want to talk about it because it's it's the purpose right like why are we putting all these pieces together like it is ultimately to go there but um there's just so much work to do in the meantime like I'm I personally am super patient about it but but we also want to have a north star that we're more pointed towards yeah I know you're on the space system side of things, but there were some cool pictures the other day of neutron stage 2 qualification. And I'm curious maybe from your perspective specifically, Flatolite obviously designed. I think that's probably roughly like the diameter of neutron.

So it fits in the Fahrenheit. Absolutely. Yeah. So yeah, can you give us any neutron intel that maybe from the space systems perspective on like how things change when this is flying, not just Flatelite, but other things in the line that you might see tweaks to? I can't, I'm not going to give you any neutron updates, but I can certainly talk about how excited I am on neutron. And, you know, the, you know, this is a super important rocket, not just to the company in our broader strategy, but also, you know, what we're doing in space systems. So, you know, we certainly have in space systems not worried too much about which, which rocket we fly on, although not flying on our own causes a fair amount of trouble in some cases.

You know, designing for everybody's rocket, you know, designing, you know, waiting around for other people's rockets to be ready and, and that kind of thing. Like, it causes problems. So I'm really excited to get Neutron to the pad and start taking advantage of it. Yeah. Yeah. vertically integration. Vertical integration is a hell of a drug, right? Yeah, I mean, we keep learning the lesson over and over again.

Like, you know, it's really better to trust yourself to execute. And so if you can have that freedom, then, then, you know, do that. And it's great business also. Like, I didn't, I mean, I've always been a mission person, you know, satellite guy. I didn't think the component business would be so interesting, but it's pretty interesting. And it's where a lot of our scale and manufacturing strength comes from. And so, you know, if we can make a business out of some of the stuff that we're doing and enable other customers, then we're super happy about it.

In fact, I think that's one of the things I love about Rocket Lab, period, is that I think we've just demonstrated, you know, to be a good partner. You know, we're not, we're not about just vertically integrating for ourselves. We're vertically integrating to help solve other people's problems and we'll, and we'll, we'll always, we'll continue to do that. Yeah. Yeah, it's definitely something that kind of sets you a little bit apart from some other vertically integrated companies, right? They're, you know, I'll say, SpaceX seems to focus a lot more on the end product, right? So they vertically integrate up so that you can buy a seven-day flight to the ISS, you know, that's kind of like, that's kind of, that's kind of, that's kind of, you know, that's kind of. like where they their angle is but it seems like you kind of do a lot of stuff you know along that

value chain right you know you can you can pop in by just the engines or just the rocket or just the ball bearings or whatever whatever little parts you're selling there so yeah no I I love ball bearings actually like that's like that's kind of a romantic thing to have you know we buy ball bearings today but it's like I'd love a ball bearing factory what a weird what a weird desire but we'll allow It's like that. You haven't, you haven't, you haven't dreamed about your own ball bearing factory? All the time. All the time.

Listen, I'm the guy trying to try to buy 200. What's the returnable capsule called? See, I don't remember the names. This is the problem. What is it? Not Explorer, Latin Lightning. Pioneer. I'm trying to buy 200 pioneers.

So I'm saving up for that, not the Balbering factory. Yeah. I don't know what I do with them. We'll get working on a quote. Yeah. I mean, we do usually ask when we get those kind of requests. Like, do you have any money? So, so yeah, just get ready.

You're ready with your hands. Yeah. You're on a podcast right now, so take it easy. You there, all right? Yeah. Yeah, that's how. Do you have any money? Now, you're talking to two freelance freelancers here who, uh, yeah, yeah.

We don't have bosses. You know the bill. How much is this thing going to cost? How much do you have in your wallet right now? Yeah. I don't know, man. The exposure you'll get on this podcast that run is pretty sweet. It's, uh, it's so good that most of the people that work your company listen to it already.

And that's pretty much the entire audience. if that works for you, then I'm your guy. Jake's point about, like, you know, the difference between Rocket Lab and SpaceX in terms of the parts that you're able to buy and supply outside of the company. That, to me, is very, like, I think this equation often gets applied to SpaceX and Blue Origin in that SpaceX had to be scrappier than Blue Origin because Blue Origin had funding from day one, and SpaceX had to, like, work the way with contracts. Rocket Lab is like another level deeper where there was a scrappiness of trying to, you know, put together the business model that that got you to where Rocket Lab is now that didn't come with a giant, you know, big anchor project right up front of the company in the way that, you know, the Falcon 9 early days are linked to a giant anchor project existing. And Rockalap didn't have that, right? It's been a lot of these other missions that have flown or different constellation deployments.

factor in the era of like you know transporter and bandwagon missions flying and then on the rocket lab side it's like a customer will sign one mission and then eight and they'll fly a whole constellation. I always find that funny that it's like new company it's always like a Japanese synthetic aperture radar satellite that seems to be your stick. That's like your huge

market right now. They'll buy one flight and then they'll buy eight. Big in Japan so yeah it's a it's a good market for that. They love the black rocket. I think your observation is apropos. I mean, there are some similarities. Like, yeah, SpaceX started without a lot of resources, but you have to give Elon credit, like, he can raise money.

And so, you know, basically that company has unlimited capital, it seems now. So that is a different world than we live in. We've always been very resource constrained. And I think we like it that way. Like we're, you know, Pete has his leadership style and, and, and we love it. I love working with Pete, but, but Adam, our CFO, you know, has one too. And it's, and it's to protect the company's finances and to drive us all towards being efficient. And, and so we live that every day.

And, and I think it's like when we got the Virgin building, whatever, 144,000 square feet or something, and we moved our engine production over there, it's like, oh, we could just, like, stretch our legs and like use the but you know people's like that's how much space you get to build rotha food okay like fit in that it's like well there's all this fit it's like no like this is the resource that you're going to live with and i think that i think that pressure to always be fiercely efficient which is like one of our values is is is pretty important in the culture there's i mean there's a lot of benefit to that right like that kind of growth is a lot more sustainable, right? You don't grow outside of your bounds by accident when you're growing that

fast, right? So if you're if you're kind of incrementally slow drip, you know, slow and steady, it wins the race kind of situation. It saves you from like a lot of the, the shitty parts of a giant company where it's like, oh yeah, today we have to lay off 2,000 people because we lost a big contract and we weren't planning on losing that. And, you know, like, but if you've got a whole bunch of small businesses, you can really weather that in a lot more stable of a way, which I think is good. yep cool well

boy are we at the end and we have another three hours of content that we could possibly do so all those people in the chat that were telling me I should hang out with Richard we're not we're not wrong yeah what are the things that people should be watching for we've got obviously the neutron schedule

was announced on the last earnings call that this year is still the target on ramped to some programs so that was big news but what else should people have their eyes out for Well, I mean, we're continuing to execute, right? I mean, we've got a bunch of missions that you know about and work. You know, continue to deliver your satellites for MDA and Global Star.

That's pretty amazing. The factory here is just pumping satellites out for that. Of course, we've got a satellite in space right now. I think, yeah, we're waiting for another entry with Winnebago 3. and, you know, Winnebago 4 is, you know, we'll get to the launch pad after that. A bunch of cool missions, I mean, Victus Hayes is well along. You know, we're going to be flight ready this year to do our tactically responsive space mission, which to me is kind of, it's a bit of all the pieces coming together.

We've sort of been dreaming about this electron-integrated, satellite and electron, you know, let's call a photon capability, that's like standardized. And it's not like we're redesigning it every mission. It's just, okay, we're done with this one. And I can publish a performance curve, you know, payload versus altitude and it would on ISO lines of inclination. And, you know, here's how much power you get or maybe we'll have a couple different power configurations, one with deployable arrays, one with, one with, with, with, with, uh, body fixed and

and like, this is a product. And if you want 20 of them, then fine, we can build, we can build 20 of these for you. So, uh, I'm, I'm really excited to see Victus Hayes fly and, and, um, and it just, it emphasizes all the parts of the company. I've got electrons, we've got our own launch, you've got our own mission operations. We've got hard problems with dynamic space operations, RPO, and space. And so, yeah, that's one of the things I'm pretty excited about. And then, of course, Escapade. You know, Escapade's sitting in the clean room, ready to fly.

So, you know, stay tuned for the update plan when we've got it. And apparently some mysterious Venus stuff, so that'll be good. Yeah, yeah, Venus, yeah. More shocking pictures of the space. talk more about Venus, yeah. Yeah, we know you're talking about it after, but please tell us before you fly it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, last month, we entered a probe at Venus and...

Yeah, don't let John and the McDowell be the one that breaks that story. Right, yeah, yeah. Scott Tilley is out there. I'm pretty sure they just entered at Venus. Honestly, I believe. The more RPM spin rate, we can tell from the polarization of the, it's like, If you woke me up from a dead sleep and we're like, Scott Tilley found the Rocket Lab Venus mission entering Venus's atmosphere, I'd be like, yeah, I believe that entire storyline, start to finish. All right, Richard, thanks so much for hanging out.

Jake, do we know what we're doing next week? What time is? Oh, yeah, we do because we recorded it earlier today. Yeah, that's right. I'm traveling next week. We recorded one for you. Chris Carberry is back with a director friend this time talking about a movie that he made. Yeah, alcohol in space.

The movie. That's literally the name. Alcohol in space dash the movie, which is, it pairs greatly with, do you know that I own the domain Anthony dash online.net? That's my website URL because I was very nostalgic for the late 90s and I was worth $10. Anthony dash online.net. So check it out. It's a great website. Love it.

All right, y'all. Richard, thanks again for hanging out with us. It's been last time. Well, we'll do it at the right. We've got to figure out what the Rocket Lab time zone is, and then we'll align it to that. So, yeah. Exactly.

All right, everybody. See you later. Bye. Thanks, everybody. One, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one, end of death.