The Launch of Rocket Lab

Thoughts

Very much enjoyed the book. I was already familiar with Rocket Lab from When the Heavens Went on Sale and from various interviews and YouTube videos, so I knew the broad story of the company and its Electron and Neutron launch vehicles. What I had not realised was that Rocket Lab was not solely a launch company.

The biggest surprise for me was how much sits under Space Systems. I knew Rocket Lab built rockets, but I had not really appreciated how involved it is in spacecraft, satellite components, software and mission operations. I was particularly surprised to learn that Space Systems accounts for around 70 percent of the company’s revenue. That figure probably best shows how incomplete my picture of Rocket Lab had been.

It was also interesting to learn that this was not simply a later diversification away from launch. The book describes how the Electron Kick Stage had already been designed with the potential to become a functioning spacecraft, with Beck saying that moving into spacecraft and satellites was always part of the wider plan. Electron was the initial focus, but apparently never intended to be the limit of the company.

One thing that stood out was how Rocket Lab can still be involved in missions launched by competitors. A company might compete with Rocket Lab for the launch itself while still using Rocket Lab spacecraft, software or components. It makes the business feel much broader and more resilient than I had assumed from thinking of it mainly as a launch company.

I also liked its approach to building capability. Rocket Lab seems very willing to solve problems internally rather than immediately accepting that something has to be bought from a supplier. At the same time, it is not dogmatic about building everything from scratch. If another company has spent decades developing a difficult specialist capability, Rocket Lab has been willing to acquire it and build from there. I find that combination much more interesting than acquisition becoming a substitute for being able to develop major new things internally.

I also liked how consistently innovative Rocket Lab has been. From 3D printing the Rutherford engine and using electric pumps, to attempting mid-air recovery of Electron and pursuing a number of other firsts, there is a clear willingness to try approaches that are quite different from the established way of doing things.

I was also impressed by Electron’s launch record. Rocket Lab has built up a large number of launches with relatively few major failures, and Electron reached its fiftieth launch faster than any other commercially developed rocket in history. What made that even more impressive to me was seeing a company from relatively humble origins establish such a strong record in an industry dominated by SpaceX and major national launch programmes. Electron’s record is pretty remarkable.

CAPSTONE was another part I liked. Rocket Lab stretched beyond what it could comfortably do at the time, was late and lost money on the mission, but came out of it with capabilities it could reuse on harder missions afterwards. I like that idea of stretching far enough that even a messy project can leave you significantly more capable than before.

Peter Beck’s comments on Mars Sample Return also reminded me of something I liked from The Book of Elon: the idea that engineering, rather than science, is often the limiting factor. We already understand much of the underlying science and have demonstrated many of the individual technologies. The challenge is engineering and integrating the systems well enough to actually carry out the mission.

I also enjoyed the New Zealand side of the story. Even if Rocket Lab becomes less New Zealand-focused over time, with the company headquartered in the US and much of Neutron based there, it still feels like it has very strong Kiwi DNA. To me, it is one of New Zealand’s great modern technology successes and inspirations, and a company that represents the country very well.

What makes the story particularly exciting is that, despite everything Rocket Lab has already done, it still feels early. After around twenty years, numerous launches, hundreds of satellites deployed, major spacecraft programmes, deep-space missions and the expansion into Space Systems, there is still Neutron, larger constellations, orbital manufacturing, planetary missions, space infrastructure and services from orbit ahead.

Very excited to see where it goes.

Selected Highlights

How did a self-taught engineer from New Zealand, a country without a space industry or any rocket launch capabilities whatsoever, become one of the world's most successful international space companies building and launching its own rockets and satellites to space?

To be fair, the likelihood of a young kid from a small town in a non-space-faring nation, with no university degree, establishing a space company that built and launched rockets to orbit at a time when that very act was illegal under a myriad of international treaties was, admittedly, slim. But not impossible. Somewhere between unlikely and impossible is where magic happens. This is where Rocket Lab was born.'

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if you go to university or not—you can end up in the same place. You just have a different approach to getting there.

Once you build an engine, how do you really verify how good it is?… strap it to your back.

“It became super clear that a foreign national working in the space sector, which is a dual-use environment, was not a goer,” he said. Without US citizenship or a green card, he couldn’t access NASA’s technology. “Let alone a foreign national with no university degree from a country that has no space heritage whatsoever.”

His JPL visit was particularly disappointing.

“The average age at that point was fifty-two,” he said. “Most programs were dying. All the cool stuff looked like it had been done. So I walked out of there thinking, ‘This is all wrong, this is not a place that’s going to suit me.’”

“I can remember one startup and they were very proud to show me a torch ignitor that the US government had funded them to the tune of one million dollars to develop,” he said. “They proceeded to show me this janky machine with rough edges screwed to a piece of plywood. I’m like, ‘Man, if I’m the US government and someone presents that and I’ve spent a million dollars on it, I’d throw it back in their face.’”

Though inspired by meeting Ky “Rocketman” Michaelson, Peter knew a NASA career wasn’t possible.

“Shit, what am I going to do?” he thought as he left LAX. “I started thinking about it logically, as engineers do, and there was only one obvious thing left to do. The logical thing to do was to start a company.”

Halfway through the flight, he began mapping plans for his own rocket company on paper. He kept the name simple: Rocket Lab.

Peter went into that day quietly confident in what he and his tiny team had created. “Maybe there’s a certain level of arrogance there,” he reflected. “But you have to be confident in your workmanship, otherwise you would never do it.”

“In this industry, people will do a lot of talking, a lot of PowerPoints, and all the rest of it. Whereas I prefer to talk less and spend all that energy and time just making stuff and improving,” he said.

“I have tremendous respect for Mark, but I needed to run free,” Peter explained. “I needed to bet the company that minute of that day on a project and make commitments and get well over my skis. I needed absolute freedom to run.”

“The reality is that the space industry is a dual-use industry. Mark was uncomfortable doing any work with the military. But the military created Rocket Lab and nurtured it for the very early years of its formation,” he added.

He had no official aerospace industry lineage to draw on, nor a team of engineers with degrees from MIT or Stanford to pad out their resumés. That proved to be an advantage in the boardroom of Khosla Ventures. Vinod describes himself as a techno-optimist who believes that only the “improbable” ideas are important.

“One of the things I’ve learned is that experienced people seldom innovate,” he explained. “So I only focus on people who are inexperienced. If Peter had hired a bunch of NASA and JPL people, it would have cost him five times as much.”

“We haven’t the money, so we’ve got to think.”
— Ernest Rutherford

“Sometimes the hardest path is the best path. Mahia was definitely the hardest path.”

— Sir Peter Beck

“…There’s only one reason New Zealand has a space industry, and that’s because of Peter Beck.”

— Steven Joyce

“With Electron and Neutron capturing most of the headlines written about Rocket Lab, it’s easy to overlook the fact that the company is also in the business of building satellites and their components that are propelled into orbit by those rockets and other companies’ launch vehicles.”

“Rocket Lab powers virtually every national security and civil space mission that Boeing doesn’t manufacture. We supplied 80 percent of the solar power for the OneWeb generation one constellation,” Richard pointed out.

Rocket Lab’s Space Systems—1,700 Missions and Counting

“Rocket Lab’s Space Systems division has evolved into a comprehensive end-to-end space solutions provider, offering a wide range of components and services for both its own missions and those of other companies.”

“We were very late on that mission, and we did that at a firm fixed price,” said Peter. “So we lost money on that mission. That was not a good economic mission for us. But that mission enabled us to win the Mars ‘ESCAPADE’ missions from NASA.”

"Clearly there's a launch monopoly in medium-class launch. No monopoly ever survives the test of time. We are probably the most likely to be able to have a crack at actually breaking it up."

— Sir Peter Beck

It’s arguably the most complex interplanetary mission since they landed on the Moon,” he said. “But there’s no gap in the engineering. There’s no Manhattan Project required to execute it. It’s literally stuff that we’ve all done before. You’ve just got to do them all at once.

“It all goes back to what I was told as a kid, which is to have the biggest impact you can have.”
— Sir Peter Beck

“Everyone thinks you are crazy until you do it; then you are just called a visionary.”
— Sir Peter Beck