Sir Peter Beck unplugged: ‘Transport can make it free for all we care’

Peter Beck has had a pretty good June. Earlier this month, he was made a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. Then, Mister Peter Beck presided as Rocket Lab launched its 50th Electron rocket, becoming the fastest company to launch its 50th privately developed booster.

Finally, last week, Rocket Lab revealed it had signed its biggest launch contract ever: 10 flights for Japanese Earth observation company Synspective. Ars caught up with Beck while he was in Tokyo for the announcement. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation, which touches on a variety of launch-related issues.

Ars Technica: Hello Pete. We’ve been talking about small launch competition for years. But when you add up the record of some of your competitors in the US – Firefly, Astra, Relativity Space, Virgin Orbit and ABL – they are 7-for-21 in launch attempts. And if you take out the already retired Rockets, it’s 1-for-6. Some of these competitors have, or have existed for a decade. What does this mean for the startup business?

Peter Beck: Well, I think you said it. It’s a tough business. But here are some things. First, I think we brought the right product to market at the right time. You need two things to be successful in this game, right? You need a steady stream of customers, and you need to build something that can be produced, and then produce it. Both of these things should go hand in hand. If you put the first rocket we ever built, Flight 1 against Flight 50, the rockets are mostly the same. We didn’t put a minimum viable product on the pad and then have to go back and redesign it. This was important because we came out of the gate with Flight 2, Flight 3 and Flight 4, all in a row. We built something to be manufactured. It is often said that manufacturing rockets is much more difficult than building the first one, and I think that is correct.

Ars: Why is she?

Beck: So when you’re first building your first five or 10 rockets, you know, they’re built by engineers with a lot of time to lovingly scrutinize every detail. By the time you get to rocket 50, it has been built by a skilled technician on the shop floor reading the instructions. And you have interns, you have new people that you’re training and, you know, to build them reliably, you have to have all of the engineering or all of the company’s systems in place. They are MRP systems [material requirements planning]ERP systems [enterprise resource planning], supply chain, finance. This is what makes a production line run and turn.

Ars: Why do you think Rocket Lab has succeeded where your competitors have struggled to get to their first launch and then achieve a high cadence?

Beck: I always compare building a rocket company to running through a maze at night. You simply cannot make mistakes. And I’m not arrogant to say that we didn’t make mistakes, but you can make engineering mistakes. You can’t go down an engineering dead end. And if you also look at the funding profile, we were not the default winners in this. I remember running around Silicon Valley trying to raise $5 million at a time. Everyone would look at Virgin Orbit and say, “Well, how is it competing with Richard Branson?” For all intents and purposes, he had infinite capital. We have a saying here at Rocket Lab that we don’t have money, so we have to think. We have never been able to outspend our competitors. We just have to anticipate them. We must be weak and mean. If I had to boil it down to one succinct thing you could put in an article, I’d say it’s to be extremely efficient and not make mistakes.