Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: Mars Sample Return, but at what (fixed) price?
Episode Date: February 7, 2025Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck joins the show to unpack his company’s bold, $4-billion fixed-price plan to bring Martian samples home, why he believes commercial partnerships can unlock new frontiers... in planetary science, and his “soft spot” for interplanetary exploration. Then, Richard French — former JPL engineer and now VP of Business & Strategy at Rocket Lab — provides deeper insight into their proposed Mars Sample Return architecture, explaining how a single, vertically integrated team could cut costs and secure mission success. And yes, we get an update on the status of their Venus mission, too. Discover more at: https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/can-rocketlab-save-msrSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
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Hello and welcome to the Space Policy edition of Planetary Radio.
I'm Casey Dreyer, Chief of space policy here at the Planetary Society,
welcoming you to yet another month to talk about the at this time, right.
Uninteresting and sedate area of space policy and politics, particularly that
affecting NASA this month, of course, I'm going to be talking about Mars
and maybe not the Mars you're thinking of, but the samples that are currently
sitting there
on the surface and actively being collected
by the Perseverance Rover.
The idea that we need to bring those samples back
is the culmination of more than 50 years
of NASA ambition and scientist ambition
to study pieces of Mars in a pristine state
to help understand not just the history of Mars, but helping to set the
chronological history of the entire solar system. There's also the little fact, of course, that maybe
we'll find evidence of life or past life in some of the samples that they're collecting right now.
It is a big deal. The project, of course, for those of you who've been following along,
The project, of course, for those of you who've been following along, has hit some snags. It's been more than two years since NASA paused most of its work on Mars sample return
after an independent review project found that Mars sample return was functionally spiraling
out of control.
It was originally intended to be a lean project costing no more than $3 billion or so, returning samples by 2026.
By the time the team looked at it in 2023,
cost estimates had spiraled to nearly $11 billion,
which is a bad place to be before you actually commit
to your design and start building everything.
NASA has spent an unusually long amount of time,
let's say, going through multiple rounds of
program reviews, reconsiderations, and finally, right in the final weeks of the Biden administration,
Senator and Administrator Bill Nelson made the announcement about what the path forward from our
sample return was going to be. That announcement was to pursue two further studies with a decision to
be made in 2026. These two studies are somewhat different than what had been
proposed before but still had large parts of consistency. They would both
still use the European provided Mars Earth Return Orbiter. They would still
use a NASA created Mars Ascent Vehicle, the rocket that sits
that would launch the samples into Mars orbit. And they would still use a variety of NASA provided
equipment to gather the samples, store them, launch them and bring them back to Earth.
However, the distinction, the two concepts that they were going to do was one was going to pursue
how you land the sample retrieval lander or in
this case the thing that's carrying the rocket. The first concept provided by JPL
was to use a slightly larger version of their sky crane system. The sky crane is
what we have seen with Curiosity and Perseverance. You know it hovers above
the surface of Mars, it slowly lowers your payload onto the ground, flies off.
Very clever system, very exciting looking, and most importantly, validated.
It has worked twice. You don't get many shots at Mars and so that's really important.
The second option though that Bill Nelson stated was to pursue some sort of commercial partnership.
And when I think most people heard this, they assumed that it would be a full commercial reconfiguration of the mission.
But it really isn't. It seems to be one particular piece, which is the landing on Mars.
So instead of using a sky crane, this concept would use a commercially procured heavy landing system to place that rocket and collection system on the surface of Mars.
Notably, nothing like that exists.
There's nothing off the shelf.
There's no commercial market for this as it stands at the moment.
And so it wasn't exactly clear who or what would provide
this commercial service.
NASA said it will study both options further for at least
another 18 months, which again
really starts pushing our timelines far into the 2030s for sample return.
Now probably, maybe, Bill Nelson was talking about Starship.
I think that's what would jump to mind for most people.
But Starship wasn't said, but that was mainly probably because of procurement and contracting
rules where you can't show deference to one potential contractor over another
when you haven't made any formal project commitments.
But as we know, Starship has a long way to go to Mars.
It's still working to launch.
It is still working to get to orbit at the time of recording.
That doesn't mean it's impossible.
And it seems very likely that that
could be a serious contender for landing something on Mars.
Now, there's a lot of questions with that, but at the same time
It's almost besides the point because either option that NASA had done these early estimations on that they will study
either option seemed to cost
Roughly the same in terms of when you're rounding to billions both of them were estimated to be between six and eight billion dollars
So that's cheaper than 11 billion, three billion cheaper. That's, you know, that's a
dragonfly mission to Titan right there. But that's still a lot of money. That still makes it among
the most expensive planetary science missions ever done. It makes it among the most expensive
science missions ever done. And for those of you paying attention to US politics right
now, we now have a new administration since that
decision was made.
And that new administration and Congress aren't particularly
excited about spending lots of money right now.
So there is an uphill battle for either of those pathways to
get approval in this new NASA administration.
Now it's going to Mars. There's a Mars focus in the new administration.
Perhaps that has that going for it.
And for those of you curious about what's going on with this new administration,
please stay tuned for our February 12th planetary radio where me and my colleague,
Jack Coralli, will be speaking about, you know, since what we're seeing and what we're doing.
But this episode, we're talking about Mars.
So we have this uphill battle.
We have a $7 billion concept, one of two.
And seemingly, where do we go from here?
Well, enter Rocket Lab.
This company is best known for making a small launch vehicle,
Electron, which launches frequently
and is a successful company on its own.
They also produce spacecraft components. That's a big part of their business.
They have over 2200 employees.
They're one of the most successful private space companies
besides SpaceX, just without the level of attention that a lot of people
broadly, I say, would see.
Rocket Lab, I think, made a very interesting and surprising pitch to NASA
saying that they could do Mars sample return.
They pitched their concept, which we will discuss in much more detail with our two guests.
But generally, the rocket lab concept for Mars sample return is to send four spacecraft,
a communications orbiter that would stay at Mars and provide a permanent piece of infrastructure
for future missions to communicate back to Earth.
They would launch a lander.
They would launch a return vehicle.
And they would have their own rocket.
Rocket Lab, of course, knows how to launch small rockets.
This idea is not just really interesting for what it does,
but what it doesn't do.
It doesn't use the European provided
Orbiter it doesn't use a NASA provided launch vehicle
They do and they do emphasize that there's lots of NASA input and collaboration and partnerships built within this plan
But at the end of the day, it's one company vertically integrating the entire Mars sample return project
Their estimate which I emphasize is their estimate, is $4 billion.
And coming back years earlier in the mid to early 2030s, then either option
provided by NASA.
Now, here's the real kicker.
$4 billion is obviously a lot cheaper.
And some people would say, oh, they can't, you know, what if they can't do it?
What happens to this?
Just grow anyway.
It is a fixed priced bid.
That is interesting.
And it's paid out by milestones.
If Rocket Lab doesn't make progress in our sample return, Rocket Lab doesn't get paid.
So that is an interesting and very different approach to something as big.
And if it was even implemented, historically notable.
No other big science mission has ever been designed that way.
So to say this is ambitious is an understatement.
But it's very interesting.
And it really, to me, highlights the this porous and dynamic
threshold between what commercial and private space companies highlights the porous and dynamic threshold
between what commercial and private space companies
are able to provide and feel confident in doing
versus what government and public systems
have been classically doing.
We are still in this active discussion
or an active experimentation
of where it makes the most sense to apply commercial
or privately procured hardware and where it makes most sense to do government procured
stuff and there's places for both. But this overlap we just don't know. And that's what's
fascinating. So to talk about this, I have two guests from Rocket Lab
joining me today on the show.
The first is Sir Peter Beck,
the CEO and founder of Rocket Lab.
Peter and I talk about why Rocket Lab made this pitch,
why Rocket Lab wants to do MSR
and why he feels confident they can do it.
I think also we have a very fascinating
and interesting discussion about the distinct nature of science missions
vis-a-vis commercial and human spaceflight needs in that science missions tend to be
bespoke one-off and highly designed to answer specific questions where other types of projects tend to be
Making a lot of the same thing
multiple launch vehicles multiple crew capsules multiple satellites you don't of the same thing. Multiple launch vehicles, multiple crew capsules,
multiple satellites.
We don't have the same types of economies of scale,
but Peter will talk about why he sees opportunity
for various commercial opportunities within that.
My second guest is Richard French.
He's a former JPL engineer.
He worked at NASA headquarters
for the Science Technology Mission Directorate, and he is now the director of business development at Rocket Lab. We go into a much more
technical discussion about how that mission could work and how companies like Rocket Lab structure
themselves in a way to increase efficiency, decrease cost, and how they would approach risk when you have a fixed amount of money to work with.
I have no idea if Rocket Lab would succeed in doing this.
Anyone will face a massive challenge, as they will freely admit,
only two countries have ever successfully landed on Mars.
And one of those, obviously, was done pretty much all by JPL.
So there is a lot of uncertainty going forward, but I think there's such an interesting aspect
here in terms of our developing markets, developing capabilities and our institutional abilities
to take those risks themselves as well.
Notably, as Rocket Lab will point out, NASA did not choose a pathway that supports their
vision.
But now with the new administration and a new NASA administrator coming in, perhaps
it's time for a second look.
Before I speak with Peter, I have one pitch for you.
March 24th, there's the day of action that the Planetary Society is running with its
members.
This is a day that we all come to Washington, D.C. and we talk to the
people who are making the policy decisions and fund the programs that we
want to see at NASA and in space exploration. Our day of action is
something we love doing. Actually most people love doing it themselves and they
have a lot of not just fun but a huge sense of reward and satisfaction. Going to congressional leaders and saying,
we care about these things.
We care about space exploration.
We care about scientific exploration.
We care about openness and transparency,
and we care about a NASA that is a uniting force
within the country.
These are all critically important things to say right
now.
And with a new Congress, and of course,
it's functionally a new administration,
at least in the implementation side,
it's very important that members who are able to come and join us
have this opportunity to say these things matter.
You can register and learn more about the Day of Action
at planetary.org slash day of action.
Registration goes through the end of February.
So please consider joining us at the day of action here in March 24th, 2025.
And now joining me on the space policy edition, Peter Beck.
Sir, Peter Beck, welcome to the space policy edition of Planetary Radio.
I'm delighted to have you.
Oh, it's my pleasure. Thanks very much for inviting me.
Let's get right to it. Why does Rocket Lab want to pursue Mars sample return?
Well, I think it's firstly, it's an incredibly important mission and the science is incredibly important. I think everybody also knows that I have a real soft spot for interplanetary missions.
And I think it's if you have the capability to to do those,
then it's almost your duty to go and do them.
And then certainly, I think as I look across all of the kind of Mars programs
we've been involved with and some of our acquisitions have been involved with
and the things that we're good at, it's kind of perfect.
If we think about transiting to Mars and having a big ball of
Delta V to get there, I mean, that's basically the escapade spacecraft. If we think about
a small rocket launching off a small planet, well, I think we're pretty good at building
small rockets that launch off small planets. So that's a key strength. And then Rondeverne
and proximity missions, you know, we have a big mission with Victor Hayes, we're
doing a bunch of that and we've done a bunch of that in past for other customers as well.
So that's kind of a sweet spot.
And then there's two private companies that have rented a capsule and landed it back on
earth and one of them is us, with respect to all of the GNC required to accurately and
do a reentry interface.
So I look across all the things we're really good at and think, man, this utilizes a lot
of existing technologies and existing capabilities.
And as we sit down and we put together a plan to go and do it, we believe we can do it at
an extraordinarily affordable price, which I think kicked off the whole commercial, let's
let commercial take a look at it at discussion.
I want to get into that aspect of it, but I'm struck by something you said, which was
you have a soft spot for interplanetary exploration.
And I wonder how important is the kind of the founder model or the in commercial spaceflight
companies in a sense for pursuing missions like this, rather than if you were just a broad
publicly traded company with an appointed CEO,
is there something important about
how commercial space companies operate
that requires some kind of,
I don't want to call it a rational,
I find it very rational,
but some kind of deeper level commitment
to the idea and effort of going into space to push
companies like yours to pursue things like this? I think that's a very personal question, I guess,
in some respects. But rest assured, the board of directors is not going to let me go off and do
something rogue that makes no money. At the end of the day, my fiduciary duty to the shareholders
is paramount. So we're not going to lose money on it. But I think
interplanetary emissions are difficult. They're really difficult and they require a level of concentration and resources that's pretty extreme. But I mean, if I look across our company,
this is just kind of what we're made to do. So it doesn't feel unnatural. And look, if we can
return good value to the shareholders and also do this at the same time, that's just a win-win. And where I guess some people may be scared of
these interplanetary missions, I'm enthralled by them. And that's kind of the company's
DNA as well. We don't shy away from really doing really difficult things. But yeah, look,
I think if you didn't have a passion for doing them on the outside, they look pretty complex. But I think
with Escapade, we proved that you can build not one but two spacecraft in just a few years,
and make money doing it, and provide a great solution to the nation. So I don't see it as
necessarily as digital as that. Yeah, it wasn't in the sense of,
I guess irrational was the wrong word.
But it's this idea that there's a fundamental motivation
and drive maybe that comes from a founder model of organizing
a company.
And I don't know if that resonates with you
as a founder of this company.
But something that pushes or a vision or some kind of,
as you said, that you create in a sense
the DNA of this organization.
And that's what strikes me as something, I think, unique
about this new kind of commercial industry
that has grown up in the last 20 years.
I wouldn't consider prior to that aerospace industries
representing that kind of ethos or belief system
beyond pure fiduciary duty, nothing beyond that.
I think that that's probably fear.
Although, if we look at historically
who has done these interplanetary missions,
they are typically companies that have CEOs
that are pretty purely driven by fiduciary responsibility,
right?
But they don't do fixed price bids.
No, they don't.
That's true. That's fair.
But look, you have to have some level of,
I think, passion, but also caution,
because there's a tremendous amount of passion in the space industry.
And it's one of my pet peeves is you see a lot of cool technology that are put together by founders,
and then they go looking to try and create a business around the cool technology.
And that's just something that we've always been allergic to here.
So, yeah, I'm sure there's a... Look, I'm very passionate about it, and I have a soft spot,
and I'm sure that that comes in
into the equation and probably we look at these
interplanetary missions with more vigor than some might,
but make no mistake, these are not philanthropic projects.
You know, we obtain our financial responsibility.
Your incentive is to do that.
So I've spoken with your colleague Richard French
about kind of the nuts and bolts of how this project is structured and formed and proposed.
But I'm interested in how you tried to approach it again as this milestone based fixed price contract in a sense that a motivation at this scale,
this would be a very challenging thing to absorb huge overruns in for any company.
How do you approach that then in a way that you are confident that you can make it?
What key approaches in terms of management and design is Rocket Lab proposing in a way
that you are that will make this succeed?
Yeah, so firstly, we've only ever thanks price contracts for everything we've ever done. So
appreciate your point on the scale, but I mean as far as like scale, you know,
the Neutron rocket is a fairly large scale project as well, so there's
internal R&D projects that have significant scale. And look, there's just a few
fundamentals that quite frankly isn't rocket science. I mean, it's just don't take
guesses. And where you have risk, acknowledge you have risk and take the appropriate actions both in margining or in
technology developments or in technology risk mitigations to make sure those things don't
eventuate. And look, never underestimate the power of a fixed price contract to force the right
behaviors because everybody in the company knows, you know, every project is tracked with a cost and underestimate the power of a fixed price contract to force the right behaviors. Because everybody
in the company knows, you know, every project is tracked with a cost and a margin against
it. And we make that very transparent for everybody on the shop floor. So there's no
hiding. And I think it's positive reinforcement. And people are not just gathered around, let's
create this piece of technology and on equal importance, let's create this technology and achieve this margin.
You said something again that struck me
that Rocket Lab is always done fixed price
and we've seen other companies obviously struggle
to adapt to fixed price who didn't in a sense organize
around that principle.
Is this a fundamental aspect of a company
has to be structured one way or the other?
Can you occupy an expertise in multiple spaces or the incentives are so wildly different
and the requirements so wildly different that if you don't organize this way from the beginning,
you can't easily adapt into that given structures, approach, management, culture, you name it.
That's probably a fair comment.
I think you see some people who are traditionally done cost plus in the movement to fix price
contracts and they just have a really, really hard time.
And I think, look, there's a number of elements there, right?
I think it's cultural as much as anything because if you don't have, you know, there's
nothing like a bit of impending extermination to drive the right behaviors, right?
And if that, you know, that pending extermination doesn't exist,
then there's no incentive.
And it's not dissimilar to, you know, the worst thing you can do for an early stage startup,
it's give them tons of money because it just, it drives all the wrong incentives.
All of a sudden there's big long lunch breaks and ping pong tables and all that. You just destroy a startup if you give them too many
resources. So more than anything, it's a cultural thing than anything else. I think if you have
the right culture, you can make any structure work. And, you know, as I've seen it throughout
the history of Rocket Lab, you know, the structure of teams can be very different. And if one
team isn't performing, it's often people, you know, think there's a necessity
to restructure and that will solve the problem.
Well, it's not because I've seen, you know, like I say, wildly dysfunctional structures
that just work amazingly because the culture is right.
And I think that the same goes for that with a difference in contracting.
I think you can make anything work. I was going to basically phrase a question out the same way. The idea of an existential threat
as clarifying motivator. And it does seem at the incentives at the end of the day,
if you want to continue with people want to continue having jobs and you want to continue
having a company, it's there. I mean, that sounds, I guess, rather intense, but I guess that's
ultimately what a commercial marketplace is like to operate in.
Welcome to Rocket Lab. Yeah, no.
I'd like to switch a little bit into this idea of space science as a potential or maybe
even the idea of it, space science being a potentially unique market for commercial providers
like Rocket Lab and others.
And this is a question I discussed with Richard a bit,
but I'm quite curious to hear how you approach that field.
Do you consider space science and the requirements
that those types of missions have
as a distinct business case from launching lots of small?
I mean, there's not an abundance of science missions, right?
So the economics strike me as different.
How do you see that?
And is that something that needs to change or you can easily work with it and just given
different types of incentives?
It's a great question.
And I think it's similar in some respects and different in others.
If you talk to the hardcore science contributor at the end of the day, they don't really care
about a reaction wheel or a propulsion system or a trajectory or whatever.
They don't really care about that ultimately.
I mean, they do because we're all geeks
and everyone loves it.
But if you scratch it right down to the raw,
they care about the data that comes off the bird
or the explorer, whatever.
That's what ultimately is valuable.
And commercial industry has advanced a long way.
And programs that required a government worth of resources,
much like launch vehicles, it's just not the same anymore.
So my view has always been, let commercial do what commercial can do,
and government should do what governments can do.
If it makes no financial sense,
and it requires a government's worth of investment and an infrastructure.
That's great. That's what a government should do. But if commercial can do it and just provide
the real value, then the doors should be placed wide open in that respect.
I'm struck by that threshold is changing and rapidly.
Rapid.
And I almost wonder, and I guess we saw this a little bit
with Rocket Lab's relationship in this MSR reconfiguration
reconsideration process, that it almost struck me
as if there may be a cultural, not even resistance,
but just is it even fair to say an awareness
about what commercial is capable of or even hesitation?
Do you see that there's a fundamental cultural change
that has to happen on the government side to say
commercial is offering opportunities that we,
that maybe they couldn't even provide a few years ago.
Is that a required change that needs to happen?
Yeah, I don't think it is necessarily as deep as that.
I just think it comes down to just fundamental human nature.
People wanna build cool stuff. And if I'm human nature. People want to build cool stuff.
And if I'm in the government and I can build cool stuff,
I want to do that irrespective of whether or not commercial can do it or even do it better.
But with MSR in particular, like I see that very, very much as a commercial and government
collaboration because the government agencies have tremendous amount of information that we
just don't have.
And it's been learned over decades very painfully in some cases. because the government agencies have tremendous amount of information that we just don't have.
And it's been learned over decades very painfully in some cases.
I don't view it as this like one or the other commercial versus government kind of a thing.
It's like, let commercial do the things that commercial can do well and let the government
interface with that, with the things and experience, the knowledge and experience that they have.
And let's all just make it happen.
I don't think it needs to be as digital as, well, all commercial should do it and it should
be fully commercial and government should step out or only government should do it and
just procure components for whatever from commercial.
I think it's a much more nuanced, nuanced approach.
But I mean, fundamentally, if we want to do things more affordably and do them more often,
then we should be looking at how can commercial reduce
the cost of some of this stuff.
And I guess it's worth emphasizing here
that the architecture of MSR that Rocket Lab did propose
involved a number of government and US experts partnering
at various levels, right?
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's not just you're doing it closed off
and you know, better than everyone else attitude.
It's you're doing it in outreach.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Just like we're the first to admit,
hey, there's a whole bunch of stuff here
we just don't know.
So it's super helpful to have the people that do.
Yeah.
So it's more like a porous, you know,
it can be like this porous or hazy threshold perhaps
of as it's interfacing, as you said,
in various
ways and dynamic, it does strike me that the approach just may seem so wildly different
than what has been done for large science missions.
And also the fact that MSR itself is strange as a science mission, and that the science
in a sense is done already already and the cores have been collected
and this is bringing them back. There's no science happening during this mission and then all the
processing when you get back. And that almost maybe, is that true? Would you say that that
simplifies it from a perspective of implementation? Because one of the challenges I always see with
science and interfacing that with commercial partners in the long term, is that the science requirements
of these precise uniquely designed hyper sensitive instrumentation, there's not a lot of multiple
application beyond that. So this seems almost like this unique intersection of what commercial
could offer without having to go into these more challenging kind of one-off project approaches.
Oh, yeah, you're exactly right. I mean. I mean, this is a glorified freight mission.
So, no, it's true.
So, this is a good point.
And I mean, even if I look at our escapade programs,
you're exactly right.
Like our responsibility for that program was to build a bus
and host the scientific instruments
and all the rest of it.
And, you know, but the actual scientific instrument element
of that mission is something very, very bespoken
and not done by us.
And nor would we expect to be experts in that.
But with respect to our sample return, yeah, I mean,
no, look, the cores are valuable.
They're sitting on the surface there and they're a hard one.
So they're valuable and we want them home.
But yes, at the end of the day,
there is a count of scientific instrument
on the whole mission is pretty low. It's like, let's get these samples, sterilize them and land them home.
Yeah. Is that again, why in a sense the business case could make sense? Because the other question
I had about science as a commercial opportunity is that what we've generally seen, at least in how
NASA's approach building opportunities for more commercial marketplace is that they're committing
to some sort of long-term program.
And so they're asking for private investment upfront
to help develop capabilities with the promise
that there's a market, at least a government buyer for, what,
10 or 15 years.
And I guess you make it up on the back end,
if you win the contracts.
And you have some sort of, when you're selling this
to investors or trying to raise money, you're saying there's a clear source of revenue
down the line for a while, but that requires again, a long-term program and
MSR, as you said, is a one-off.
And so this is where I see that match of what RocketLab already does kind of
making sense, because you're in a sense reapplying or applying your knowledge
and technology to just a different domain.
Yeah, but I wouldn't underestimate the fundamental shift.
Look, if let's just play this forward if we want it.
And if we were successful in bringing those samples back
at a dramatically reduced price and timeline
than what had been previously proposed. And I'm not talking like one or two billion dollars cheaper here.
I'm talking, you know, dramatically cheaper.
Seven billion dollars cheaper, I think roughly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So what does that do?
All of a sudden that redefines what can be done, right?
So this is where I think you do create
new opportunities in the future.
Because if that's successful,
then other scientific missions and other endeavors,
well, firstly, you've just got, now you've freed up $7 billion to go and do a whole bunch more stuff.
But secondly, I think there's some certain things in space flight history that kind of redefine
the way we think. And look, I think a good example of that is commercial resupply to the
International Space Station and commercial crew. There was a redefining moment and I think anybody now would say, why would you go into
a firm fixed price for sending astronauts to the space station?
That seems nutty.
But at the time it was very forward leaning and bold from NASA to do.
And there's a number of points and you can look back in our history, even just building
rockets.
I mean, that was the domain of governments.
Now it's not.
It's clearly like, I think if anybody has suggested
that the US government start an entirely new rocket program
as a government, most people would look at that
and go, that's stupid.
But let's not forget like 10, 15 years ago,
that would be normal.
And I see MSR as exactly one of those defining moments
where if commercial can come in and
do a great job, if we fast forward 10, 20 years time, that will be the standard.
And the result of that is there will be tremendously more science missions because if Rocket Lab
is successful, you can guarantee other people are going to want to make money too.
So all of a sudden you've got competition and you know, you can afford to do many more missions
So you've got volume and you know scientists presumably making great discoveries
so there's there's more impetus to go and do these missions and
The one thing that I've always kind of hopped on about is that I'd much rather go and do like 10 small missions in a decade
Then one large mission and in a decade because if you think about the way you iterate science in a laboratory, very few times will you work for 10 years and do one experiment.
You'll generally do a lot of different experiments and learn a whole bunch of different things
along the way. And I'd love to get to that point where there's not one Mars mission every
decade of scale. It's just like, we're just going there all the time and doing different
things. And I think you only achieve that by democratizing the science missions in a way that industry
can contribute.
I mean, I guess we're seeing an experiment of that with clips at the moon.
I'm trying to exactly pace.
And that does strike me though, as in sense is Mars about as far and I guess we'll talk
about Venus here in a second.
But are the inner planets, their closest neighbors basically as far as and I guess we'll talk about Venus here in a second, but are the inner planets
their closest neighbors basically as far as you can run that in terms of frequency?
And that just the scale or operational challenges going beyond, do you see that as a domain specific opportunity or do you see the whole solar system at some point being able to increase frequency
while saving, you know, costs? Or is this a Mars and Moon and
Venus thing just to start? Well, I'm forever the optimist. So I don't necessarily that's
in the case, but I'm also the realist in the fact that if you're going to do a mission to
Jupiter and do some crazy stuff, there's certain things where it just makes sense for a government
to go and do. Because either it requires a government's worth of resources or there's just so far
off the ever being a commercial business case that has a risk profile tolerant enough that
anybody would invest in that you should just do it as a government.
So there's always going to be those missions.
But I think as we kind of expand in our own solar system, I think those destinations will
get further and further.
But yeah, I mean, clearly there's a tipping point.
Yeah. And just right now an advantage to being, I mean, you can, I mean, even as the number
of launch windows, I suppose, right? You can launch the moon roughly every month versus
26 months from Mars and different planets. In our last few minutes here, I'd like to
just direct our focus from Mars to Venus and ask if you can give us an update on Rocket Lab's Venus
mission and how that, or if it, impacted
how you thought about approaching Mars sample
return.
Yeah, so firstly, the caveat to the Rocket Lab mission
is it's purely philanthropic and it's nights and weekends.
Unfortunately, we're very busy building a whole new rocket,
so the amounts of nights and weekends is not great.
So progress is slow.
But in saying that, we have a great looking capsule now and Neutron especially gives us
some new opportunities with energy to simplify the mission, which we really like.
So we continue to push hard.
But look, I would have loved to be in Venus by now personally, but I just cannot divert resources off actually doing real work to go and do that mission to Venus.
But look, it's a burning passion of mine to get there. I think, you know, answering, having
a crack at least answering some of life's biggest questions is super important. And
every year we seem to slip a little bit, but that's the reality of just the nature of the mission.
But I think the latest launch date,
I think we have a transit window next year.
I need to check with the team,
but every sort of few months I get to catch up with the team
and get to see cool looking capsule bits.
Do you see this maybe being one of the initial validation flights of Neutron?
Could be launching something to Venus? It could be. There's the initial validation flights of Neutron could be launching something to Venus?
It could be, you know, there's a lot of demand for Neutron.
So we have to, we once again, I'm not going to win any.
Nice to have a paying customer.
Then pulling a Neutron off the line to go and pursue Pete's trip to Venus
is going to go down like a cup of sick.
But look, there certainly are some missions and opportunities
where it might tag along, which makes it a lot easier to get it up there.
Well, Peter Beck, I appreciate your time and really interesting insights.
So thank you.
Oh, thanks very much.
It's great to chat.
We'll be right back with the rest of our space policy edition of Planetary Radio after this
short break.
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Now joining me on the show is Richard French.
Richard French leads the business development and strategy for Rocket Lab and had worked at JPL, NASA's JPL, for over 10 years.
He also spent time at NASA headquarters working on technology applications and development. And his personal experience ranges from spacecraft like S-MAP
to maybe perhaps more relevantly for our discussion today,
missions like the Mars Curiosity Rover landing system.
He joins us now.
Richard French, welcome to the Space Policy Edition.
Nice meeting you, Casey.
Thanks for having me.
So let's jump right into it.
Rocket Lab proposed a concept for Mars
sample return in response to NASA's bigger re-envisioning of its architecture.
NASA did not select or even really, they didn't say any particular commercial
company but they really seemed to focus on two potential paths forward of which
it didn't seem like the Rocket Lab proposal was one of them. In response I've
actually found it very refreshingly transparent to see how
your company has said, well, we had an idea too,
and we want to have it considered more broadly.
What is that idea?
Yeah, thanks. Yeah, our MSR architecture and our website has a nice overview of this.
You can see some good graphics has three main elements, three launches in fact.
We have a Mars Telecommunications Orbiter,
which has allowed us to take some of
the requirements that were on the ERO for
relay and put that into a dedicated asset that will
provide capability beyond the MSR mission.
In fact, it decouples that launch from
the rest of the architecture,
which helps as well. The sample return lander launch is very similar to NASA. It's got a
sample arm, it's got a MAV, and then the Earth return orbiter is the third launch, and that
has the RPO kit, the caching, the capture and retrieval system, as well as an Earth entry system.
And so at the architecture level,
aside from our breaking out the Mars Telecommunications
Orbiter as a way to simplify the architecture,
but also add more value to the Mars program in general,
it looks a lot like the NASA at that kind of high level spider
chart view of the mission.
Maybe just for our listeners, what
is distinct? So you mentioned the Mars telecom orbiter. I think that was,
telecom was originally envisioned to be provided by the European return orbiter
that was going to be there first, just temporarily, and then it would leave. What
makes this distinct in a way that you think is important for mission success
and also cost? Yeah, so zooming in just one level down, it starts to look very
different.
So the biggest difference is that it's a single commercial
led implementation.
It's got key NASA collaboration, however,
and we'll come back to that.
But having a single organization,
a commercial organization lead that implementation
with some of the characteristics that we have is really key,
not just for achieving the technical, but
also achieving the cost and schedule.
EDL is a difference.
It depends on kind of what baseline you're comparing against, right?
Let's say we kind of have this moving baseline, but...
Let's say that what became the $11 billion concept, the one that we were kind of working
with for the last few years.
Yeah, where everyone was kind of designing against, exactly.
So what we decided is we wanted to fit within the Perseverance AeroShell and Heritage EDL
system.
And so that's what we constrained our landed system to fit within.
So we use the Heritage Perseverance AeroShell and the Heritage TPS, and that also allows
us because of our mass not to exceed to fit within the Heritage
parachute.
Innovative MAV, we have a single-stage-to-orbit Mars Ascent Vehicle with a very simple launch
sequence that eliminates the complex ejection system that we see with the NASA solid system.
The engine on that MAV is also a common engine with the ERO.
We love liquid propellant and liquid propulsion at Rocket Lab.
And in fact, that engine is evolved from our heritage
Rutherford that flies on Electron.
And so that common engine across the ERO and the MAV
is an important feature.
And just generally using chemical propulsion.
And so we like chemical propulsion
for simplifying the MAV.
It's a heritage approach,
which has been flown on many Mars missions.
But we also like chemical for the ERO,
which reduces the duration of the mission
and it reduces the complexity,
low thrust and emission design complexity.
We are solar power experts.
Rocket Lab has the highest efficiency
space solar power cells in the world.
And so a solar powered lander
eliminates nuclear
power sources. We also have simplified robotics, and so a simple arm that has perseverance drive
up near our lander and drop the samples within the working volume of our sample arm that simply
puts the samples into the Orban A sample canister. The simplified robotics also appear on the ERO
for the capture and retrieval and the sterilization process.
RPO is unique.
We think we have some innovations on the RPO
once we get into orbit with the sample
that we consider somewhat competitive.
So we won't get into the details,
but there's proven sensors and capabilities
and talk a little bit more about the missions that we're doing today that use those.
And we're really excited to bring some of our expertise in supporting lunar landers
to bear. And so we're participating right now in the Blue Ghost mission. And so some
of the software capabilities and approaches that we're using on lunar landers, we'd expect to make use also here.
So there's a lot of features that start to look a little bit different than the NASA
baseline, which you zoom in one layer down.
There's two kind of themes I'm hearing here, and I'd like to explore both of them.
But let's think about the idea of simplification.
And let's kind of expand some of those acronyms
just to make sure everyone can keep up with them.
But ER is Earthly Turnover, MAV is our Mars Ascent Vehicle,
our rocket from the surface.
And PRO is that the capture device.
RPO, yeah.
Random Approximity Operation in Docking.
You talk about chemical.
And so, and again, just to make it clear,
so I think the European orbiter was
going to be solar electric propulsion.
But you mentioned it with the MAV.
What was the baseline MAV?
Not chemical, we're talking about solids
versus liquid propellants.
Is that the key there?
That's exactly right.
Explain that one a little more.
So NASA had a solid rocket.
And in fact, the solid rocket was a multi-stage vehicle.
So it was a two-stage solid.
But it also had an RCS system, which was liquid propellant.
So there's a lot of different systems all coming together in the MAD, and it also required
an ejection system, which would sort of throw the rocket into the air before it was lit.
And so there was a fair amount of complexity with that.
We went with a bi-propellant chemical liquid propulsion system with propellant types which the thermal characteristics are
very well understood. In fact, they can freeze if you want them to. We size our
thermal system so they don't, but that's a robustness. And it's a single-stage
orbit. So you only have one engine, gimbaled, which provides a huge amount of
control authority, and that gets you to orbit with a single stage.
In terms of the idea of simplicity, is this a fundamental ethos of working at a company like Rocket Lab
or is it almost a requirement when you're working at a company like Rocket Lab that has to be, in a sense, able to stand on its own two feet. Where does that, is that helpful in a sense of helping constrain or prevent
kind of cascades of complexity from developing in terms of these types of
requirements setting?
Yeah, I think it manifests itself in a few ways.
I mean, the first is that as the global leader in dedicated small launch, we
think we know how to build small rockets and all of the philosophies and experience
that we had doing that we applied to this MAV concept.
And so that, you know, we benefit from a lot of experience in that domain now.
I can think of very few companies that actually have an experience that would be relevant to launching a small rocket off Mars.
You know, Rocket Lab isn't that small group of people that have relevant experience. I think you are right though, that being a commercial company and having a set of incentives
and pressures on you to execute, because if you don't, then you go bankrupt and everyone
goes away.
That does drive innovation, but you're holding yourself to some very specific objectives.
We've got to do it in a certain amount of time and we have to do it within a certain
amount of money. And I think that resource, those resource
constraints actually do result in a lot of innovations. And some of them,
sometimes you want to put a little bit of complexity in because that's the
right answer. But simple, of course, is often better. You talk about this idea of
a single organization implementing it and that's worth considering too.
I mean, MSR was... I characterized Mars Sample Return as the way it was originally implemented,
as NASA's science mission pursuing a project as if it were the human spaceflight directorate,
and that they assigned every, almost every NASA center got some piece of this big project in order to build it was almost like a political coalition first design strategy if I
remember correctly I think Marshall was responsible for the MAV Goddard was
responsible for the capture and containment device JPL was responsible
for the lander and mobility stuff on the surface maybe overall system
integration I forget exactly and then there's a whole headquarters office
doing this originally I think even Glenn was
supposed to build the wheels of the European Fetch Rover
when that was the thing.
They were just distributing this all over the place.
And if you're big enough, I think
you can get away with that because we're
going to probably touch on this.
The idea of when you have so many different organizations,
you're creating inefficiencies in management, probably, right?
That you have these various other systems
that are all trying to interact with each other,
coordinate above that.
But at the same time, that was, you know,
without politics, you can't get anywhere.
So in this concept, you said,
is Rocket Lab the implementing organization?
And you're, in a sense, subcontract
or would contract out to other NASA places
as needed
from your design philosophy.
Was that the fundamental approach you're proposing here?
Yeah, we certainly think that a single vertically integrated prime contractor with launch vehicle
and space systems expertise saves a lot of money.
And a large portion of the MSR cost baseline was simply the marching army costs across
those multiple organizations and industry teams.
And so asking a single organization to manage it,
eliminating a lot of those programmatic interfaces,
but also resting on a vertically integrated technical
capability that can eliminate a lot of the programmatic
overhead and reduce the team size is absolutely essential.
If your goal is to reduce cost, right?
I mean, if you don't care about cost, then yeah,
and everybody can have a piece of it, as you point out.
Certainly the political aspect of the European orbiter
is an important one to note.
We don't have any dependency on that.
And I think it's also important to note
that the European orbiter is not free.
There's a lot of US machinery required to receive it it and it didn't include a lot of the costly elements of
what our system includes in the ERO. That's the rendezvous proximity
operations, the CCRS, the EES, a lot of those were still US industry or NASA
contributed elements. That's an interesting point. I didn't even reflect
on that. You're proposing in this a unified concept with a return orbiter provided all in one package instead of having it given
free, you know, as you point out, quote unquote, free by the Europeans and it still comes in.
I think your estimate was around 4 billion as opposed to I think the original concept
was 11 eventually and then these two new paths forward maybe seven-ish that Ness talked about.
That's exactly right.
Is it true that a large portion of your business
is these kind of component level?
I mean, can you just mention that a little bit?
So I mean, Rocket Lab is more than
just a rocket launch company, right?
Absolutely.
Is there a larger component to your business
that just isn't as visible, I would say,
probably to fans or folks watching on the outside?
Yeah, it's visible to the folks that look close,
but I think that, you know, since our name is Rocket Lab
and the Rockets are such a high profile part of what we do,
particularly this year when we'll be bringing Neutron
to the launch pad in middle of this year,
yeah, it kind of gets lost sometimes in the narrative.
And so-
Well, everyone goes to watch a Rocket launch.
No one is going to be watching Ron
seeing a component delivered to the launch.
Exactly. Right, like it's- Exactly. This is going to be watching Ron seeing a component delivered. Exactly.
Right?
Exactly.
This is not that moment isn't the same.
And a lot of the time, it's our customer's mission.
We were really grateful that Firefly
wanted to highlight our role doing software for BlueGhost.
That was really appreciated, because a lot of times,
when you're a component provider,
you're not acknowledged, because it's the customer's mission.
But Rocket Lab has the largest space solar power factory
in the Western world in Albuquerque.
We have the highest efficiency solar cells,
space solar cells in the world.
We have reaction wheels and star tractors,
radios, separation systems.
We've got a very unique flight software,
ground software, and digital engineering tools that we sell.
We sell spacecraft buses, and we're a prime contractor for end-to-end missions. And so,
we've got 43 satellites in our production backlog right now. If you come and visit us
in Long Beach, you'll see a clean room full of satellites being integrated. If you go to any of
our factories, you'll see a ton of hardware in process for delivery to customers. And so there's a lot of scale being built at the component level for serving constellations,
commercial, government, and a broad range of missions.
And then we're continuing on our journey of growing up the value chain.
So MSR, I think, is classically just said a very difficult problem, right?
You have a number of choke points,
the single points of failure.
Things have to work.
And if they don't work, you lose these samples
that Perseverance has been spending four years collecting.
I can see critiques of this proposal saying, well,
it's all well and good that this upstart commercial company has
all this experience, but they've never actually landed on Mars.
They've never had to operate on Mars themselves.
To take this maximalist critique,
how do you respond to that?
It's like these are too precious in a sense of samples.
They have to work.
Can we take a risk on someone who is, while capable,
technically unproven on the surface of Mars?
How do you respond to that?
Yeah, I've got some responses, but I would also ask the question, what are these samples worth? Because if the science community and our stakeholders don't think that they're worth
$7 billion, then they're never coming back. And so we have to balance that perspective
against what resources are really available to bring
them back.
And so we think we can balance that.
Quite frankly, we think there's a lot of outdated thinking.
The realization that some of the traditionally hard problems are now very executable by commercial
is real.
We have the tech required to do MSR.
What's an example of a hard problem that was maybe had outdated thinking, like in a concrete
way that you saw?
I mean, propulsion is a hard problem.
The simple energetics.
So it's hard enough to get to and stop at Mars.
We're demonstrating that at Escapade.
But coming home really increases the gear ratio.
And so just in the mission design, you know, every gram that you need to bring, you know,
take to Mars and then bring back with you has a huge gear ratio on propellant sizing.
So you need a team that does hyper-pump mass-fraction vehicles well.
That's an area that we've just specialized in and we have, we've flown a number and we
have many in development.
I think everyone views EDL as a hard problem.
And of course, propulsion is an enabling technology when you're doing EDL and we have a propulsive
lander.
That's our approach is a pretty traditional propulsive lander architecture.
But there's a lot of other tech required.
Entry capsules with TPS and parachutes.
Well, we've been working those for our Venus mission.
We've got all the GNC propulsion and flight dynamics that we are demonstrating at time
and again on the Varta missions, landing
sensors and algorithms, landers that have to deal with surface interaction like plume
and touchdown.
We're not saying that there's not zero development to put all that technology into the context
of this mission, but all that stuff is being done by industry today.
And we're on our way to the moon with a team that's going to take a shot on that goal.
RPO is a hard problem.
We need a rendezvous at Mars.
Well we have RPO missions.
We've supported multiple RPO missions through our flight software team.
We recently launched the address submission for Astroscale and just got really good position
them really close for their own RPO mission.
So we've worked with a lot of customers that do RPO
and we're doing them ourselves on our own missions
like Victus Hayes.
And the robotics is our problem.
So, you know, it's an area that we're pretty
vertically integrated.
We do a lot of robotics.
We do a lot of our own motors and pumps, reaction wheels,
our separation systems have a lot of robotics,
but there's also a lot of partnership opportunities for other people that do those already.
And so a lot of those snowflake problems that I think people have the perception that no one else can do actually are being done much more broadly in industry today.
Do you think that's a function of, in a sense, the institutional focus or this in the sense that
people working at, you know, classic research institutions are just not interfacing with commercial or that there's a sense of
skepticism or that commercial is only good for one area before, you know, a handful of specialized areas maybe in Earth orbit. And you know what? I'll confess that I've been going through this learning
process too.
And I mean, you're seeing from some of the questions
and the ones that we talked about that it seems to me
the domain of low Earth orbit strikes me
as very different than the domain at Mars or the moon.
And we're testing it at the moon right now
where these applications work.
And Mars is a different area to test.
And it's interesting
to hear this evolution and confidence coming. We're doing types of these things already
that are just not, in a sense, making it breaking through maybe into the older institutional
systems in terms of capability. Is that an accurate way to kind of frame this? Or do
you see another way to describe why that perception exists?
I think there's a few aspects of it. So So you know, firm fixed price contracting, it's a simple idea, right?
I think we all have, you know, understand the debate between cost type contracts and
fixed price contracts.
Clips is interesting because it's going all the way to the service model, which is, you
know, the pendulum is swinging pretty far.
And if you ask me, that is quite an experiment. So that's not just taking a traditional AO framework
and saying, we'll do some FFP contracts for industry
to manage more of the cost risk.
That's a very incremental, almost not
very innovative step in the procurement process.
And so to get what we're asking for,
you don't actually have to take a giant leap, like assume
that there's a market that supports the service economy. And so we do think that fixed price
contracts and milestone payments are the right path and that they have the right mix of cost
sharing and risks to minimize the cost and schedule, but also have adequate risk management.
I think there's at times a bit of a myopic view about the roles of NASA centers.
There's a lot of ways to think about NASA capabilities,
and particularly how they mix with commercial capabilities.
And it's not just NASA leads all or nothing.
The NACA roots of NASA, I think, are a really good historical
model to consider.
And that's really what we're bringing with our proposal is taking the specific technologies
that they've already flown, like supersonic parachutes, which are made by industry partners
already or particular sensors, you know, things that we've been building for NASA.
And so I think that there's a lack of nuance by some people
who don't really understand how NASA even builds their own missions. But it is clear
that there is some resistance. It's interesting that in the... We went there for human systems,
right? We went to fixed price contracts led by industry for objectively a much more costly and much more complex problem.
And so human exploration has embraced these types of ideas.
And it does seem that there's a little bit of resistance to even just go to
fixed price contracting approaches within science and leverage a little bit more
commercial capability in the implementation of those missions.
But this idea of fixed price contract with science,
I'd love to hear your perspective
on this.
And I outlined this to you in advance that hearing you already is perhaps a limited idea
of how cost savings are implemented in a fixed price environment.
And you mentioned this framing of commercial implementation, which I'd like to hear more
about as well.
So in human spaceflight, I mean, it was a big political battle back in 2010 and 2011 to push for this.
And then obviously paid off very successfully,
particularly in low-worth orbit.
But this idea, you're building the same roughly dragon.
You're launching on a rocket multiple times.
You're building the same thing a lot of.
And so I can see how this idea of maybe economies of scale,
and you get really good at producing one thing.
You're producing lots of components
or it's communication satellites,
lots of very broad things that you can replace a lot.
But science, at least in the way science has generally
been done in space, is to me, it's like question driven
and you work backwards.
So OK, we want to solve this question.
Well, we're going to build everything custom
to enable ourselves the best chance at answering that.
So you customize components.
There's no off-the-shelf James Webb Space Telescope.
And you've touched on maybe how that's not maybe too limited
to think about how you get cost savings.
But how do you integrate a commercial model
of doing science when science in general
has been so specialized?
And even MSR is almost kind of a weird one.
It's to return the science, it's returned samples to do science on Earth, right? But it's functionally an engineering-led mission
because there's no scientific instruments on the mission itself. So where do you see this intersecting? Do you see limitations of the domain of science kind of being more limited as a
function of that? Or do you really see opportunities here of how that
can help enable more science that is that cutting-edge boundary of science?
Yeah, there's a lot of different ideas there and we do think there's massive
opportunities. So generally I agree with you that science missions require that we
meet science requirements. Now, and where you said the requirements are very important. If every
mission were James Webb, then yeah, like there would be a lot of, you know, less missions,
right? And so NASA having a portfolio of missions that are set at different levels of ambition
and requirements are important.
And maybe we can return to this idea of how NASA can achieve portfolio balance and how
commercial can be an enabler for that.
But to achieve low cost, it's more than just scale.
And so comparing science implementation with our launch practices is one thing.
And there are a lot of lessons from launch, which is hard.
I mean, there's very few successful launch service
providers.
For sure.
And that are particularly applicable to MSR.
And I like the way you characterize MSR.
It is an engineering problem.
It's not a traditional science mission.
We have to meet science-y type requirements,
like the contamination control is really important.
And the way we handle the samples
to maintain the science integrity of the samples is really important. And the way we handle the samples to maintain
the science integrity of the samples is very important. But a lot of it is just an engineering
problem. And so, but yeah, 70% of Rocket Lab is space systems. And many of those are already
focused on science missions. We just delivered a science mission, Escapade to NASA. We're
operating at Class C plus mission assurance on a number of commercial and national
security programs. So we're not afraid to tackle hard problems in the context of also managing our
costs and schedule and a firm fixed price agreement. I think that's important. I mean,
that is us saying that we are willing to manage some of the risk. We're willing to share some of
that risk and that's because the incentives are there. Like we were running a business. I think it's also important to remember that we're an industry
leader of components. And so our solar power, our reaction wheels, our charge factors,
these component pieces, they can be leveraged at low cost regardless of the mission that you put
them into. And so we leverage scale in certain areas, and then we do bespoke engineering and meet requirements in other areas.
And so there's not necessarily a one size
kind of fits all for everything.
And I think that what I'm hopeful about
is that there'll be more opportunities for missions
that are sized appropriately.
It kind of goes back to this big leadership question of, well, what are we trying to do?
If the answer is bring the samples back at all costs, well, then yeah, do it the most
expensive way.
If it doesn't matter when they come back, then take as long as you want.
If what we're really trying to do is maximize science opportunities for young scientists
and more engineers to work on science missions,
well, that sounds like a different problem to solve.
And freeing up multiple billions of dollars
with the right risk profile on an MSR implementation
seems like a good step.
Yeah.
So, I mean, so in a sense, maybe to just,
if I can say back to you what I was hearing
there, there's lots of opportunities perhaps at the component level, particularly for commercial
implementation or is it just, is it a function of the domain itself?
No, no, no, it's a philosophy.
Okay.
No, it's a philosophy at the mission level.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe just explain this idea of commercial implementation.
Like yeah, well, so commercial implementation is just us doing our job.
I mean, we're running a business, and so it's not that complicated of a concept.
The relationship with NASA, I think, is where it becomes interesting.
So, how do we take a non-commercial technology like thermal protection systems, which are
pretty bespoke?
There's not a lot of need for blunt-body TPS systems.
We're going to manufacture part of the aeroshell and then our
partners at NASA, NASA Ames in this case, would do the TPS. And
they have all the relationships to manage the manufacturer of a
single flight article and we can collaborate. And pretty exciting
next week, I'll be going up to NASA Ames to take delivery of our heat shield
that we're going to fly Venus.
And we built it exactly that way.
So you're leveraging NASA.
Again, you're saying you're leveraging the specialty
development pathways for your managed systems, I see.
Yep.
And there's other great examples of that.
When we think about plume surface interaction
and being sure that the ejecta from our engines,
when we either launch the MAV or when we land our lander,
don't come back and hit us and fail the mission,
we have a lot of analytic capabilities in house for that.
In fact, I was super impressed by our team
and how much work we were able to do on that.
But then there's experts at NASA who
have similar analytics capabilities that we
can check our answers against. And they have specialized test facilities that we couldn't
go do the test in the context of our study, but in the plan. It's sort of just standard approach
to go understand and validate your models in specialized test facilities, which are not
commercially viable. And so there's opportunities like that all over the MSR
system.
But to go back to the cost savings,
like got to manage the team size,
we're generally going to take responsibility
for all the hardware deliveries so that we're really
diligent about what the roles and responsibilities are
and how to manage those costs.
And so just to clarify, this pitch from Rocket Lab,
is this a firm fixed price pitch from our sample return? Absolutely. With milestone
payments, I mean we don't get paid unless we achieve a milestone. I think
that's an important thing to understand with these firm fixed price contracts is
you don't get paid upfront. You get paid after you're successful for the milestone.
And so that's where some of the incentive comes in, is you get paid after the fact.
Now I think the managing the financial risk of that,
it becomes really important how you select your partners.
NASA needs to have a lot of diligence
in how they select partners,
and that they select partners
that have the financial viability
to be there over the long haul.
Right, I mean, that I figure was one of those other risks.
NASA, in a sense, is trading cost risk from maybe some other types of risk.
I outlined a couple of my thoughts on that. You kind of just addressed one, right?
The business cycle or market risk of you want this company to stay in business,
or if you do hit a road bump and you're absorbing some costs, I mean,
Boeing is probably not the right example to use in this.
But the fact that Boeing has absorbed $1.6 billion,
very few companies can do that.
Boeing isn't necessarily the commercial example
we're looking towards, though, I suppose.
But yeah, so I guess that's an aspect you would have to,
you make these partnerships very carefully.
I want to give you the opportunity
to make sure to mention, you mentioned again,
these Rocket Lab is not doing this all alone
in this concept, right?
So you mentioned that you would be like,
Ames, are there other NASA centers or areas of expertise
that in this concept you would be looking towards as partners
in this project?
Absolutely, yeah.
We've got a broad range of partners.
So JPL is the center of excellence
for entry, descent, and landing. They've also pioneered a lot of the contamination control,
with forward and backward contamination control, and done a lot of the development over the years.
And so, they're a key partner in this and we want to make sure that their expertise is brought to
bear. NASA Langley is very important. They've done a lot of work on
the EES system and how to have an impactor approach which meets the reliability requirements for
backward contamination control. But they've got a lot of great capability which is traditionally
applied in the IV and V of EDL, flight mechanics, aerosciences, aerothermal,
and specialized testing.
I mentioned the plume surface interaction.
And so there's a bunch of great capability
at Langley that's important.
We've been partnered with Johns Hopkins University.
They're not a NASA center, but they provide a lot
of expertise in deep space communications and navigation.
And so we've spent the last six years actually working
on affordable approaches for planetary science and
having in-house radios that can do radio nav was part of it and Johns Hopkins has been key.
We have an established relationship at Stennis.
That's where we do all of our engine testing and so it's natural for us to want to expand our presence in Stennis for the
work that we would do for on propulsion for MSR.
And then, you know, Goddard has had an important role in CCRS, and so that's another opportunity. And so there's, as you pointed
out, almost all the centers had a piece of it, and so there are opportunities to leverage that,
but you've got to size it all appropriately, right? Like, if our objective is to do it quickly and to
do it affordably, then we need to make those choices.
I'm curious about your personal evolution.
You worked at JPL, you said, for many years.
You had a stint at STMD and NASA headquarters,
and you've been at Rocket Lab for six years.
When you were starting your career, early in your career,
what was your view of commercial space at that time and how is
that you know, Chloe you are bought into it now or you believe in it now, you work there but I'd
like to kind of hear what made that change or where did you see that opportunity come up? Was
there a turning point in terms of an experience you had or how did your views develop over the years?
I think I was always a zealot when I came to commercial and going back even in college.
But when George Shannon JPL, he was my hiring manager that brought me and asked me, how
would you like to land spacecraft and other planets?
Like, I was like, okay, I'm hooked on that.
And so I went to JPL and got to work on a bunch of flight programs.
But I got really serious about commercial when I went to NASA STMD.
I had the opportunity to go work under Steve Jurczyk and stand up the tipping point in some
other programs and kind of put my money where my mouth was in terms of figuring out how to do that
fusion. And the announcement of collaborative opportunities is a good example of where we try
to institutionalize the use of NASA resources for advancing commercial capabilities that
ultimately would align with executing NASA missions.
And so this kind of philosophy that I'm applying to MSR is not new to me.
It's kind of been one of my strong beliefs.
The most important thing for science, in my view, is to increase the opportunity.
We need more missions happening faster.
There's just too few opportunities for scientists
to propose new missions.
And that's really across all science divisions.
And so we can't increase the opportunity
if the cost keeps going up.
We can't increase the opportunity
if the schedules keep stretching out.
And so the promise of leveraging commercial
with NASA core capabilities, bespoke instruments,
advanced technology, test and analysis with commercial approaches for lower cost but shorter
schedule missions is that promise is just too great.
And if we can just break through this leadership challenge, if we can recognize the opportunity,
we saw it with a shift in human exploration.
They already showed it can be done.
And they showed it can be done, quite frankly,
on a harder problem.
It just takes leadership.
And for MSR, we're asking for that leadership now.
Letting a commercial competitive procurement for a pair,
and I'm saying like pick one, pick a couple
commercial partners, let them get going with phase A
in fiscal 25 so that
we can get these samples back affordably and as quickly as possible.
Would you characterize some of the reluctance as the sense of what NASA does versus, you
know, it's always for the biggest things that should be NASA in-house doing this.
To give it away in a a sense, to a commercial company
is to admit that NASA can't or to say that the agency itself has been diminished. Is
this a sense of identity that's being challenged even though it has the potential for all these
new opportunities and capabilities? It says, no, we do these types of things here and that
is important to us. Maybe there's a sense that they would lose support
or lose public awareness or some consequence.
Is there something bigger at play here?
It seems like a contradiction,
because in some ways NASA's just barreling forward
with commercial part of it.
All of everything new that feels like that NASA has done
since 2017 has, I think,
almost taken like a commercial first or procurement first attitude,
except for the sciences. And it's already been really valuable speaking with you about
this. You've heard my, not skepticism, but questions that I feel like I still need to
be answered. And this idea of this, I think what you're saying here is there's almost
an institutional advantage of the certain types of commercial procurement
and the selective and strategic application of them
for certain goals.
And I think maybe the key something
that I maybe just want to touch on real quick here
is this idea of increasing mission cadence, particularly
at the lower end of the cost spectrum.
I was going to say, I mean, Discovery Program, which
was supposed to be the rapid cadence, low cost mission, grown, you know, each discovery mission is over a billion dollars
now which in launches once every 10 years, which is the inverse of the intent of that.
Every AGU we hear how much more push out there is and it feels like the last couple of years
it's been more than one each year.
And so the rate of push out is increasing.
Right. And you can't,
right. So I mean, I think I resonate very strongly with this idea, particularly for
if one of your goals with this is to develop leadership and management expertise in scientific
missions, engineering aspects, like getting new scientists, new engineers, new individuals up
through that experience chain, you need things for them to cut their teeth on it to try and implement.
Ideally, you want them doing good science and important science, not just quote-unquote,
we'll just go do a science, which I think is sometimes thrown about cavalierly.
But things that are decadal connected or priority, which it seems like there could be some aspect. And it might just be, again, this idea of knowing how to apply the resources in a strategic
way in order to get to that.
And maybe you don't get everything, but maybe you get something important along that line.
Yeah.
You throw a lot more.
Is that how you think about it?
Or where's this proper fusion, I guess?
I did for many years when I was at JPL.
I put forward this idea of capability-driven science.
And so instead of just having, you know, if you operate from the premise that you only get to do a
flagship every, you know, 20 years and then you're going to put all your requirements
on it and then, you know, all of this, you know, momentum builds from it. So can you
go the other way and say, well, what's the capability to do affordable science and start
allocating decadal class objectives to it? And so it was about then that I was thinking,
well, I should just go into private industry and start building missions and take it from that approach. But commercial
absolutely will be an enabling factor for reducing the dollar per science and generally
increasing the cadence of science if you can manage that way. We can't compromise on the
objectives as they stand. The science needs to be decadal class. But we can have an important role in
achieving more science faster and within constrained budgets. But I think it's just important to note
that NASA will always be the leading force for space science in the US. And NASA is the biggest
funder of science missions. And that plays a crucial role in American leadership that needs
to remain true. And we want to see it expand. So the key is, you know, how can NASA be a good and increasingly good
steward of that responsibility and ensure timely results and commercial
can help. For maybe people who don't follow as closely, NASA still in a sense
has the key role of setting the agenda and as the funding source and you
know I think that's important too. commercial companies aren't, you can feel free to grab me.
Actually, you could point out to your Venus mission,
but for the most part, commercial companies
don't do science themselves for the public good,
just because it's not within a business-wise,
it generally doesn't make much sense.
That's right.
You have a public sector to do the science,
so you're still being paid.
You're still, NASA still has to pay someone to do science. It's just how, as you point out,
how they're applying it. So again, so tell me how the Venus mission breaks that paradigm,
or is this kind of a special case that is then, just illustrates the need for broader investment
into this type of activities? Yeah, there's a lot of ideas there also. So I, yes, you're right. Science is for the public good,
but sometimes science is also good business. And whether it's a company that does climate science
for creating products, information products that serve unique weather forecasting niches, or
whether it's a company like Rocket Lab
that just wants to demonstrate that there's potential
to do decadal class science with small spacecraft
and small launch vehicles.
And so we can just demonstrate it once
and help shift the narrative.
It helps that we're pretty passionate about planetary
and that Pete specifically has always been passionate
about Venus and
we kind of thought Venus needed some love. And so there were a lot of interesting, you
know, no pun intended, you know, planetary plans that lined up for that to make sense.
But yeah, generally speaking, I think you're, and I should also mention philanthropic,
like we are seeing a growing opportunity for philanthropic missions, but
as I said, NASA is going to continue to be the center and they will lead it. And so they'll
set the agenda and they'll create the models by which most of the science will get done.
I did want to just emphasize how important it is to acknowledge the roles of universities
and other research institutions, like our PI for Escapade, Rob Willis at Berkeley SSL.
They're just a hugely important source of PIs
and some of the instrument and science capabilities
that we consider bespoke.
Like you can't do science without them.
Our principal investigator for Venus, Sarah Sayer at MIT
and our instrument lead, Darrell Baumgartner
at Tropical Measurement. They're so specialized.
And none of these institutions would exist without NASA support. Yeah, it's so important.
I could not agree more. Richard French, thank you so much for your time today and answering
our questions and talking with us and our audience today. I thought it was fascinating.
It was a pleasure. Thank you.
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