Rocket Lab long ago graduated from underdog launch provider to industry heavyweight (with funding to match). Now the company is planning to go to the moon, Mars and Venus in the next decade. But it may come as a surprise that the company planned to go beyond Earth’s orbit from the very beginning, as founder Peter Beck explained at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021. In fact, it was in plain sight the whole time.
Beck explained with a touching anecdote that his own ambition to explore and learn from space goes back to his youth. “You know, the earliest childhood memory I have is standing outside in the bottom of the South Island, a little town in New Zealand called Invercargill, on a cold winter’s night looking at a crystal clear sky with my father,” he recalled. “He was pointing out to me that all the stars in the sky have planets on them, and perhaps on one of those planets, that could be somebody looking back and asking the same questions that I was asking.
“That really was the point in time where I decided that space was the thing that I was going to do. That memory stuck with me, you know, forever. I always felt that, if I could have the opportunity to go out into those stars and explore and perhaps ask or answer, one of the biggest questions in mankind’s history — ‘Are we the only life in the universe or not?’ — I would take that chance.”
Of course, many of us as children had aspirations to become astronauts and intrepid space explorers, but he put in the work, and has been “tremendously fortunate,” as well, he noted.
But more to the point, he said that the plan to go from low-lift rides to orbit to designing spacecraft and interplanetary missions has been part of the company all along.
“Movement into, you know, satellites and spacecraft design and manufacture was part of the original ethos, from day one,” he said. “In fact, if you go right back and you look at the very first kick stage we flew — it was Flight #2 on Electron — you’d notice that, if you can find some early pictures of it, around the periphery of that kick stage were some flat sections, and those flat sections are now filled with solar panels. So the plan to build spacecraft and satellites was there from day one. But you know, like anything, unless you have reliable access to space, you have nothing — so we needed to solve that problem first.”
Increasingly a part of that problem is cost, and reusing launch stages has emerged as one of the primary ways to lower it. SpaceX led the way here, and Rocket Lab wasn’t far behind.
“A lot of people think reusability is about propulsion and landing and guidance, which it is, but primarily it’s a thermal problem. And we spent a lot of time with Electron trying to solve the thermal problem, because reentering is no joke,” he said. “What really drove that is, I remember standing inside the factory one night, everybody had gone home. And I’m like, ‘Ahh, I want to double production quickly!’ We built the infrastructure, but you’ve gotta hire people, and then do lots of training and so on and so forth … I mean, the factory is capable of it, and we can scale it, but it would be much easier to just not have to build them. And then we said, well, we’ve got enough data here to give it a go.”
While Electron ultimately relied on atmospheric braking and a midair catch by a helicopter, the much larger Neutron launch vehicle will be a “more traditional” approach to rocket reusability. Although Beck couldn’t provide any new details on Neutron, he did go into how lessons from Electron informed its design and manufacturing.
“A lot of focus gets put on, you know, the big pointy thing with fire roaring out, heading into the sky, but honestly, that is just part of a system, and understanding the true cost and the operation of the system is critical,” he said.
“One thing that I would say that Electron has taught us is that there’s a lot of things that are completely launch vehicle size agnostic. So whether you’re flying, you know, a 400-ton vehicle or a 13-ton vehicle, the flight safety team, believe it or not, is the same. Your quality control team is the same. They don’t care if it’s a 12-inch valve or a 2-inch valve, it’s the same. So operating a small launch vehicle has really forced us into coming up with really clever ways of reducing cost, but maintaining the level of safety and reliability.”
Beck said that he expects to see some consolidation in the space industry soon as the realities of doing business at scale interrupt the ambitions of startups, though he fully supports the latter.
“The space industry is this incredible industry where there’s a lot of inspiration and aspiration, and it is just phenomenal — this is what makes the industry exciting,” he said. “But physics is a hard taskmaster. There’s one law you can’t break and that’s the laws of physics. So very quickly, aspirations butt up against the laws of physics and material properties and all these kinds of things, and it gets really complicated really, really quick. So aspirations are great … execution is more important.”
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