Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck Explains Why His Space Company Thinks Different
Rocket Lab, one of the most interesting companies among the cluster of “new space” businesses upending the process of flying satellites to orbit, stands out from its rivals by being partly based on the other side of the planet in New Zealand. Its CEO Peter Beck also stands out from other space entrepreneurs for his sense of humor. In 2021 he famously ate a hat on camera because he’d once promised investors his company wouldn’t pursue making bigger rockets. Until it did, prompting his unusual meal.
Beck’s company is clearly on the ascent. Earlier this week it pulled off a startling success when it launched two Electron rockets inside 24 hours from two launchpads in two different hemispheres. On Monday the company also won a portion of a nearly $60 million CHIPS grant to build high-efficiency radiation resistant solar cells useful for powering spacecraft. And Rocket Lab may also only be months away from launching its big Neutron rocket, an effort to rival rockets from SpaceX, the Elon Musk-led commercial space company that’s captured a commanding share of the 21st Century rocket launch business.
How is this scrappy half U.S.-, half New Zealand-based space company able to pull all of this off? It might boil down to its atypical (for the rocket industry) approach to manufacturing and innovation, and the big personality of Beck himself.
In an interview with Inc., Beck’s frankness came through as he tried to explain that because of the company’s name, people sometimes misunderstand its ambitions. Rocket Lab’s team is “not trying to build a launch company, we’re not trying to build a satellite company,” Beck explained. Instead the goal is to build a general “space company” offering many different services, despite the vaguely steampunk-sounding branding. “I’ll take that one,” Beck admitted, assuming the blame.
In terms of Rocket Lab’s technological successes, Beck suggested one main drivers is that it has a “just a relentless focus on engineering” rather than purely pursuing profit. He also thinks it makes a difference “having the boss as an engineer,” because important decisions are made from an engineering perspective rather than a financial mindset.
Established in June 2006 in Auckland, New Zealand, Rocket Lab doesn’t really fit the description of a startup any more, having gone public on the Nasdaq stock exchange in August 2021. But Beck insists it employs startup-like thinking in how it develops its space hardware. “Our approach is always very hardware rich,” Beck said. Rocket Lab can “move very quickly, and just, you know, make decisions.”
This contrasts with “old” space contracting practices, exemplified by big industry names like Boeing which move slowly and deliberately to make the most of their lucrative “cost-plus” government space contracts. These firms employ “definitely… the sort of Lego brick mentality,” Beck said, “you put a piece here, then you plan where the next piece is gonna go and it’s old space for sure.”
Echoing comments from the Space Force on down to ambitious space tech founders, and exemplified by projects like the amazing, last minute “little helicopter on Mars” Ingenuity mission, Beck said he believes the rise of the commercial space launch business has upended decades of ingrained practice between the government and legacy aerospace contractors. The need for change, he said, seems to have led the U.S. government to try to “encourage companies like Rocket Lab to speed up the business of getting into space.”
Rocket Lab’s space engineering chops and its fast development pace will be on full display when it demonstrates its upcoming Neutron rocket. This 140 foot-tall, carbon black beast is called a “medium lift” vehicle—not quite in the same class as SpaceX’s upcoming giant Starship rocket, but far bigger than Rocket Lab’s current small 59 foot-tall launcher, dubbed Electron, which pulled off this week’s impressive double-hemisphere launch.
While Electron is, for the most part, a traditional rocket—a single-use craft that falls back to earth after launch—Neutron is intended to be reusable right from the first flight. The new rocket, Beck explained, is designed to “break open” what he called “the medium class launch monopoly that is today.” He was alluding to the way that SpaceX’s partly reusable Falcon 9 has sewn up lots of the commercial and government launch contracts in the U.S. because it can fly so often (over 120 times this year) and has managed to keep launch costs low. Experts contrast the roughly $65 million cost of a Falcon 9 launch with the $2 billion launch price of NASA’s much bigger, but more old-fashioned Space Launch System rocket.
What Rocket Lab has been able to do is “design one rocket, put it into production and learn all the lessons of our production,” Beck said. It’s gone through Electron reusability experiments, and then earned “the chance of doing a do-over where you get the advantages of all of the operational things that you’ve learned…all of the scaling and production.” Beck said, “If you get to design one rocket in your career,” that’s already quite a privilege, but “if you get to design two in your career, then, you know… that that’s really rare. So I consider myself very, very lucky.”
In terms of what drives the man himself, it’s all about having “an incredible impact,” Beck explained. “Like I build a bridge in Auckland, New Zealand, sure, it’s going to have an impact on the people who drive across that bridge in Auckland.” But that’s it. Yet if he puts a satellite in orbit, “it doesn’t matter whether you’re in San Francisco, Auckland, London, like you’re using it and that’s … actually providing value to you.”
He also thinks part of his company’s success boils down to what some people could say is good fortune and lateral thinking: “I have half a brain that’s an engineer and half a brain that’s an entrepreneur,” he said. “And so half is about the future in taking massive risk and the other half is a conservative engineer that wants to mitigate every possible risk that you can imagine.”