RKLB Factory Tour: Satellites, Spacecraft & Mission Control

If you turn up tomorrow and say, “I want to build 1,000 satellites,” good luck. The CAPSTONE mission to the Moon we did for NASA a few years ago—that was done out of here.

Really?

Yep. The Electron rocket was under $100 million, and 80 people put the first rocket into orbit. These particular missions are very difficult missions. They have a 12-year lifespan, operate in nasty, nasty radiation, and are missions that just cannot fail. We have 13 acres of factory—

Really?

—around the world, yeah. So this is a pretty small piece of Rocket Lab.

Is there anything we haven’t seen or aren’t allowed to see?

Lots.

We just saw a tiny portion.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We are here today at Rocket Lab in Long Beach with Sir Peter Beck. Thanks for having us.

Oh, thanks for coming. Appreciate it.

So what are we going to see today?

We’ll try and show you a little bit of Rocket Lab. We’re spread across the entire United States, Germany, New Zealand, and a little bit of Australia, so there’s a lot to see. But we’ll show you headquarters here, a little bit of satellite manufacturing, and some engine development.

Amazing. Let’s walk through. You have one of the coolest entrances I’ve seen.

Does it remind you of anything? This is how I test how much of a sci-fi nerd you are.

Star Trek?

No. It’s probably a little old. It’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s like—

That’s exactly what I was getting at.

Yeah. I think it’s—

Yeah.

—the best sci-fi movie ever made because it’s the most accurate. But this bit is supposed to remind you of the bit where they shut down the HAL 9000 computer, you know?

Mm-hmm.

“Don’t do that, Dave.” It’s like that.

Do you have any other inspiration from sci-fi movies in here?

No.

No?

Just the one, yeah.

When we walked in here earlier, we were stuck to the timeline because it’s jam-packed with so much stuff. There’s so much going on. It might be cool to walk through some of that and show what you have—

Sure.

—in the lobby area. It seems like a showcase.

1. Rocket Lab Starts With Nothing

Yeah. Like any company, it’s the 20-year overnight success. We started the company in 2006, down in New Zealand. Between 2006 and 2009, we were our own little technology development house.

Mm.

In 2009, we launched our first suborbital rocket, called RTA-1, and we were the first private company in the Southern Hemisphere to reach space—not orbit, just into space.

Just 3 years after starting.

Yeah. I think we had a total capitalization of under 100,000 New Zealand dollars, which was about 60,000 U.S. dollars at that point.

Wow.

Yeah.

And to think there are billionaires starting companies now that don’t actually reach space.

This is true, yeah. I think one of the success stories of Rocket Lab has been—we have this saying. Well, actually, we stole it from Ernest Rutherford, and that’s why the engine is called a Rutherford. He said, “We have no money, so we have to think.” That’s kind of the ethos of the company. We came from very humble beginnings, and on that rocket there are Swagelok fittings that I salvaged from a junkyard.

Really?

Well, yeah, because I could only afford the ferrules, not the cost of the fittings. I would get the fitting from the junkyard and buy the $3.20 ferrules to put in it, then recondition it into a fitting, you know? It was seriously constrained stuff. But from that adversity come good ideas.

Mm-hmm.

In 2010, we won some work with DARPA and developed a new kind of propellant and propulsion system. We did a little instantizer rocket-launched UAV [?]. Then 2013 is really where we started to grow up. That’s when I went out of New Zealand, came here to the United States, and started raising our first venture capital.

Hmm.

Khosla Ventures were the first folks to put some venture capital into the entity. At that point, we flipped from being a New Zealand company into a U.S. company. Khosla put $5 million in for the Series A round, which, at that time for me, was the most insane amount of money imaginable.

Yeah.

For that, we got our first 3D-printed Rutherford engine hot-fired and proved out a whole lot of composite structures and stuff.

Mm.

Then we did the Series B round in 2014, with Bessemer leading that. In 2015, we broke ground on Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand. That was the very first private orbital launch site. In 2016, we finished it. In 2017, we launched our first vehicle and raised our Series D round, and we became a unicorn at that point. That’s when things started to move a bit.

Big deal.

Yeah. In 2018, we launched 3 rockets. Probably the 4th rocket in the stable, rocket number 4, was one of the more satisfying ones for me personally. Prior to this, I was a kid sitting in New Zealand, dreaming of working for NASA.

Mm.

I had this little plastic space shuttle that would sit on my desk beside me. When I started my career in engineering, it used to sit on top of my toolbox, then on top of my laptop, and so on and so forth. I never really got to be employed by NASA, but I got to launch their payloads.

And you couldn’t be employed by NASA because you didn’t go to college, right?

Yeah, no. I was objectively too dumb. I was also a foreign national, so foreign national, no degree—it wasn’t looking good.

Hmm. How does that bleed into the culture here? I’ve heard that you’re a number-eight-wire type of person. What is that?

Oh, no. It’s a New Zealand saying.

Yeah.

Number-eight wire. I actually personally hate it because it—

Really?

—means, well, it has two connotations. In New Zealand, it means to bodge stuff together.

Mm.

And I’m the opposite of a bodge-stuff-together kind of guy.

Yeah.

But its subliminal meaning is more about making do with not much.

Mm.

Which I think is technically accurate.

Yeah. So how does that—even from the beginning—bleed into the culture today?

Well, today, if you look at what we achieve with the amount of capital resources that we expend, it’s always pretty significantly better than most people.

Mm.

For example, the Electron rocket was under $100 million, and 80 people put the first rocket into orbit. At the time, our nearest competitor was Virgin Orbit, which was funded by Sir Richard Branson. I think Richard put $1.2 billion into that company before it ultimately went bankrupt with a handful of launches under its belt. So, yeah, we are never the most well-financed, although as a public company we’ve certainly been much more well-endowed than we ever have been. It’s hard-baked into the culture here that everything is ground right down to the very last bit.

There was an interview we did where someone mentioned that startups often die from indigestion of funding.

Totally. Absolutely. If I look back and think of lots of startups that I’ve seen or been involved with, the ones that have failed most spectacularly have been the ones that have been funded most heavily.

Yeah.

Or the most significantly.

2. Rocket Lab Goes Public

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So as we walk through the timeline, there's a really interesting point where, in 2021, you go public and make a ton of acquisitions.

Yeah.

So what was the process for going public here, and how do you see that happening today with everything that's going on with SpaceX?

Yeah, so there were a couple of reasons to go public. One was logical, and one was—well, almost logical, but personal. I think being a public company teaches you extreme discipline. You can't be messing around as a public company, wasting capital, and not delivering. The company has always had a really strong culture of delivery, but as a public company, it's just much, much more intense.

Mm.

The personal reason why I wanted to take the company public is that I'm trying to build a multigenerational space company. So many companies in this industry are defined by their founders or a small group of people. You have to ask yourself, when they ultimately kick the bucket, what happens to those companies? The only thing that my parents ever said to me as I was growing up was, “Have impact.”

Mm-hmm.

“Have the most amount of impact in your lifetime.” You can have an amount of impact when you're alive, but if you can keep that impact going after you're dead, then, by proxy, you have much, much larger impact.

Mm.

So the idea here with going public is enforcing that discipline so that when I'm long gone, this thing just keeps going and going and going. Whereas a private company, it's like, if the founder, CEO, and all of that just carks it one day, then what truly happens to those companies?

It's interesting, because this is when you start making a heavy amount of acquisitions, which has become one of the defining factors of the company as you build out the entire platform. You're not just a launch company, and I think that's a big misconception. You do a lot of components and space manufacturing and that kind of thing. So how do you see the evolution of Rocket Lab as we look through this entire timeline and what goes forward?

Yeah, it seems to just be a constant exponential ramp-up. That's certainly what it feels like. To your point, 2021 was a very busy year. We went public and acquired 3 companies.

Mm.

Don't recommend that. It is really painful.

Why? Because of regulatory stuff with each acquisition, or?

Well, anytime you acquire a company, it's like you go out to a used car lot.

Mm.

This is going to—They're going to hate me for this analogy. But you go out to a used car lot, and you look around the nice, big, polished car. It all looks great and it's all shiny, and then it's not until the drive home that you realize the visor's squeaking, the wheel's rumbling, and all of the things that just aren't quite right.

Yeah.

There's no such thing as a small acquisition. Ironically, some of the smaller companies have consumed vastly more time than some of the bigger companies.

Mm.

It's just a lot of work to integrate a company in, aggregate all the financial systems, and get the culture where you want it. It's just a huge piece of work. So doing 3 at once was not fun. But ultimately, it was great. We got there in the end.

Mm-hmm.

To your point, I think people focus on the rocket because it's the big firework in the sky, and everyone gets emotional, and it's all very cool. It's hard to get emotional about a reaction wheel or a star tracker—a little component that goes into a spacecraft. But the reality is that launch is a huge moat, and all of these spacecraft components are huge moats as well.

Right.

It doesn't matter how much capital you've got. If you turn up tomorrow and say, “I want to build 1,000 satellites,” good luck. It's just not happening, because the supply chain is so small and fractured. We saw that, to get to this end-to-end space company in our vision, we needed to own all the components that go into the spacecraft so that we could literally build any spacecraft we want.

Wow. So we have mission control in here as well.

3. Mission Control Reaches Mars

Yeah, one of 5. This is generally for satellite operations. Sometimes we'll do launch vehicle stuff in here as well, but it's mainly for satellite operations. This mission control has seen some really cool missions. A couple of spacecraft—ESCAPADE—on their way to Mars were all controlled out of here. The CAPSTONE mission to the Moon that we did for NASA a few years ago was done out of here.

Really?

Yep.

You did it out of this location?

Yep.

Oh, wow.

And in New Zealand, actually.

Mm.

Because it was a 24/7 operation.

Yeah.

Each control room would just hand off to the other. It was one of the advantages of having things in opposite hemispheres: it's always sunshine somewhere.

Mm-hmm.

So, yeah, it was really good.

Did you discover anything on the Moon that you can't share but you're going to share today?

No. No aliens. That mission was actually the very first part of the Artemis program.

Mm.

We went into a really weird orbit that the Gateway mission was going to go into to prove that the orbit was stable. It was a crazy, crazy mission. In fact, that's the CAPSTONE spacecraft behind us. That's engineering model number 2.

That one went to the Moon?

Yeah. Well, not that one. The one that went to the Moon is about 5 million miles away in an almost heliocentric orbit around the Sun, so that's a spare one.

RIP.

Yeah. It's like Contact. You always build 2.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. So the headquarters has this cool lobby. We have mission control.

Yep.

What are we going to see behind these doors?

4. Rocket Lab Builds Spacecraft

Yeah, so behind these doors is some of our satellite manufacturing. We have a number of programs being built in there. We always like to have a really cool program—not that they're not all cool, but a particularly cool one. Generally, what that means is we always have a mission to Mars or a mission to another planet in the clean room there. But, yeah, we'll go through here, and you can see some of the satellite manufacturing that's going on.

You have a super-special dream mission to Venus, right?

I do, yeah.

So what's that about?

In short, it's about: can we find life in the universe? I think that's probably one of the biggest questions as a human species that we can answer, right? Are we the only ones in the universe or not? Venus has this really unique cloud layer about 50 kilometers up that, in theory, can at least support some kind of life.

And there have been traces of phosphine gas found in there. Phosphine gas only comes from organic symbiosis.

Mm.

So the mission is to go there and actually see if we can detect life.

Yeah. I am late to the game on this movie, but I recently watched Project Hail Mary.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So now I'm obsessed with it.

There you go.

When are you going to start using astrophage for your propulsion?

Yeah, yeah, that would be good. Well, I'll tell you what: burning dinosaurs is not getting us there, that's for sure. Yeah.

And so you guys— I think in here you're doing some electric propulsion. Is that what I heard?

Yeah, this is one of our spacecraft programs, so you can see some of the buses in the background for our particular customer. This is a production line, so you start at 1 end and sort of move over to the other end if you have a spacecraft. That little tent is the electric propulsion integration, assembly, and test area. That's where we integrate these little electric thrusters.

Mm-hmm. And what's the use case for electric thrusters?

Good for station-keeping, a little bit of orbit-raising, and it just avoids having tremendous amounts of chemical thrusters on board. Yeah, these particular missions are very difficult missions. They're 12-year lifespan missions, operating in nasty, nasty radiation, and they're missions that just cannot fail.

Yeah.

I think there's always a big difference between low Earth orbit missions that have a short duration and are allowed to fail, and what we do, which is super hard—defense-related or interplanetary stuff—where you just can't have stuff fail.

Yeah. We just passed by 1 of your vending machines.

Yeah.

What is in that? I just saw some tape and some—

Oh, yeah, no, it's like supplies.

—electrical components.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Not chips.

What is that?

Well, it just makes it easier for the staff if they need various bits and pieces—consumables for the—

Yeah.

—spacecraft build. Rather than going to a storeroom, having to stand in line, and asking somebody, you can just go to the vending machine and get it. It's just way faster.

That's innovation.

Wow. I'm sure if you asked them, they would rather have chocolate bars, but—

So, okay, we have this big, huge facility behind us.

Mm.

Are we allowed to talk about this?

5. Rocket Lab Scales Beyond Launch

Yeah, this is a thermal model of one of our spacecraft that we built for a customer. It gives you a sense of the scale here. These are just aluminum blocks to represent thermal masses. Something like this, we'll build the complete spacecraft, and then it'll go into thermal, vibe, and shock testing before we actually start to put the real one together.

Mm. Where do you do all your testing?

It's all done in this facility.

Yeah.

We could go in there, but it would take forever to get you booted up into extremely flattering gear. But there's shock testing, environmental testing, and functional testing in there.

So we're in just 1 of how many buildings on this site?

3 buildings on this site. Overall, I did the calculation: we have 13 acres of factory space around the world.

Really?

Yeah, thereabouts. So this is a pretty small piece of Rocket Lab.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah.

So you have New Zealand, you have here, you have Virginia.

Yeah, we have—

Germany—

—Albuquerque, Tucson, Arizona, and a whole bunch of stuff in Middle River. That's where the Neutron rocket is being built. And then Toronto in Canada, and then Manark in Germany. Oh, you know, I'm blanking on a whole bunch: Stennis in Mississippi. So, yeah, all—yeah, a whole bunch of places.

How many employees are in this LA facility?

I think there's about 800, thereabouts, across the 2 campuses.

It's a lot. Are we allowed to look in here?

Yeah.

I always have to ask. You never know.

No, I know, but you have to look in here. This is beautiful.

This is beautiful.

Yeah, this is a project we're doing for NASA called LOXSAT. That big Christmas bauble on the top is actually a sphere full of liquid oxygen. We're helping NASA figure out how to store liquid oxygen in orbit for very long periods of time, which is super important if you're going interplanetary and doing long-duration missions.

People are now trying to mine that on the Moon.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it beats having to carry it there, I guess. So, yeah.

Are you excited or hopeful about the Moon—the lunar programs, or whatever they want to do?

Oh, look, I mean, I'm like any space geek: I'm super excited.

Yeah.

But I guess where we play in the Moon stuff is that we provide a lot of components and systems to other folks doing the Moon stuff. That's mainly because there's a bit of whiplash there: America's going to the Moon. No, no, now we're going to Mars. Now we're going to the Moon again. Now we're going to Mars. No, no, this time we're really going to the Moon. That's fine, but when you're a Moon company, that just plays havoc with your balance sheet, and you're just swinging around all over the place. We get to play in these programs, but we like to play at a system level rather than a mission level.

What do you think the biggest mistake is for these new entrants to the space ecosystem? Apparently, the space economy doesn't actually exist.

Yeah.

But what do you think the biggest mistakes people—new entrants—are making in the space ecosystem?

That's a big question, because there are so many different facets to it. More generally, I would say it's the underestimation of how hard it is. But also, I'd say most failures are because people don't build reliable stuff. It's easy to rush it and throw something on orbit, but I think the distance between putting something on orbit and putting something on an orbit that can last 12 years or go to a planet—that gap is just massive. So, if you want a valley of death, that's kind of it.

We're just about finished at this location. Is there anything we haven't seen that we're not allowed to see?

Lots.

A lot?

Yeah.

We just saw a tiny portion of it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, we have a lot of national security programs, so these are the missions that we can show you.

Bummer.

Yeah.

Damn.

It's still pretty cool.

It's really cool.

Yeah.

I'm not knocking it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's really cool.

Yeah.

Okay. So now we'll go over to the engine propulsion lab.

Yep.

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