走进 Rocket Lab：Sir Peter Beck 如何打造 Neutron 发动机｜Tour 02

That was the old Virgin Orbit facility. There were over $100 million worth of assets in that building, and we managed to buy the whole thing for $16 million.

What?

This is an Electron. This is the rocket that we fly the most right now. It's flown 93 times, the second-most frequently launched rocket in the world behind the Falcon 9. This line right now can produce 1 engine every 8 days. There are over 930 engines that have been to space. We've got 2 engine test cells, and that runs 20 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Do you keep a tracking list of all the potentially bankrupt space companies—

Oh, yeah.

—and which facilities you want to buy?

Yep.

Who's at the top of the list?

Oh, no, I'm not saying that. That'll get me in trouble.

All right. So now we're riding over to the engine propulsion lab.

Engine development center, technically. EDC, yep.

Okay. Technically, engine development center.

Yeah.

1. The Virgin Orbit Bargain

How long did it take you guys to build out this entire facility, and are you going to be buying more buildings here?

Oh, I hate buying real estate.

Really?

It's my pet peeve, because there's just so much of it, and it's just a cost. This building we kind of stood up fresh. Where we're taking you, EDC, was arguably one of the best deals of my life, because that was the old Virgin Orbit facility. There were over $100 million worth of assets in that building, and we managed to buy the whole thing for $16 million.

What?

Yeah, I know. It was the—

Wow.

—fantastic contribution from Sir Richard Branson to the space industry.

One sir to another sir. Wow. So what was the process like for flipping that over?

Well, it happened really, really fast.

Yeah.

They were in bankruptcy, and we saw it come up. We all just piled into golf carts like this, hanging off the back, and nipped down there and made it happen.

And you got to take all of the equipment inside?

Oh, yeah, all the machines—

Really?

—everything, yeah. The whole lot.

That's pretty convenient.

Oh, yeah, it was great. We never had to worry about a factory for building engines ever again. We're totally sorted.

Do you keep a tracking list of all the potentially bankrupt space companies—

Oh, yeah.

—and which facilities you want to buy?

Yep.

Who's at the top of the list?

Oh, no, I'm not saying that. That'll get me in trouble.

I'm assuming there's going to be more.

Oh, there is. There is.

There's going to be a bunch more.

2. Space Companies Refuse To Die

The funny thing is that space companies are really hard to kill.

Yeah.

The number of space companies that should be dead and aren't—the sort of zombie companies—is quite incredible. It's not like other industries where, you know, you go to die, you just die. Space companies tend to linger for quite some time.

Why is that?

I don't know. They just seem to—

How do they continually get funding?

Yeah, they just… It's a great question. I can't—

People just love space so much?

Yeah, I think so, and there are always enthusiasts. The thing about space is that it's awesome that somebody can be really, really forward-leaning and promotional, and everyone gets excited. But the downside to space is exactly the same thing: it's really difficult to understand and comprehend. People can stand up and make these claims, and it's really, really hard to corroborate unless you go 5 layers deep into the rocket equation.

Right.

So.

Who has been the best at that kind of diligence and research that you've found?

Hmm. There are investors.

Are investors actually good at doing that?

Not really. Not really. You see so many companies that are just objectively terrible, and they just continue to get funding. There's just new investor after new investor after new investor. Sometimes, the really big firms that you think are really good at it are actually the worst.

Damn. So we're right next to the airport. Do you fly your helicopter over here?

No, no.

No?

No. No, that's purely a New Zealand activity.

All right. We're now going to see the engine development center.

Exactly right.

How did you guys structure this facility? You have all these different units. What are we going to see?

3. Rocket Lab Prints Its Engines

So there's a whole big machine shop in here. There's probably one of the largest 3D-printing shops you're going to see. One of the things that we pioneered early on with Electron was our 3D printing of engines.

You can talk closer.

Sorry. It was our 3D printing of engines. Most of the Rutherford engine is 3D-printed, and most of the Archimedes engine is 3D-printed. You should see some cool stuff.

How many times do you do this tour? Do you typically take the Space Force on this tour?

Oh, not that often. Oh, yeah, yeah, but I try and outsource that as much as possible, I think. Far useful for other things.

What are we going to start with?

We're going to go in here.

Okay.

We're going to go into additive manufacturing.

Oh, my God.

These are all 3D printers, so additive manufacturing. At least by mass, the vast majority of all of our engines are 3D-printed. We have some really, really unique processes in here as well. Have a look at this one here. That's a thrust chamber for Archimedes, and that's getting clad. That's actually copper, and then we clad it with a superalloy over the top.

We use 3D printing because we're able to incorporate a whole bunch of geometry into one kind of design. We're not stupid. We don't 3D-print bolts and all that sort of stuff. But we really become very good at designing these really complex architectures that, if you can get away with it in your 3D print, allow you to print multiple parts all in one part. At the end of the day, it's all about speed and cost.

Yeah.

An Archimedes engine is an incredibly cheap engine. Same with a Rutherford engine. It's just ridiculously so. So we're building engines fast, building engines cheaply, but at high performance. There are probably about 10 people who run this whole shop, so it's all automated.

Wow.

There are a variety of machines and a variety of materials. We print Inconel superalloys, copper, titanium—basically any material you can imagine, including our own material that we developed specially for the Archimedes engine. There's a whole lab back there with materials scientists developing new materials for that particular engine and environment.

What are the biggest differences, obviously there are some, between Archimedes and Rutherford?

The Rutherford is an electric pump cycle, whereas Archimedes is a staged-combustion cycle. The scale of the engines is enormously different. We'll go and have a look at some. It's a much more complicated cycle and a much, much larger engine.

And different fuel type?

Different fuel types.

Okay.

But in saying that, a lot of the ethos of how you do it has remained the same. How we do injectors and how we combine multiple parts into an engine all remains the same.

What's your favorite part?

The favorite part of any engine builder is the injector, because that's where the magic happens—the black magic happens. Everything else is to contain that mixing and produce thrust. But the injector and the turbopump, those are the 2 bits that are pretty cool.

Do you go out there? Where do you test these?

We have an engine test facility in Stennis, Mississippi.

Okay.

We've got 2 engine test cells out there—

That's pretty far from here.

Yeah, but we're spread literally right across the world. No, this feels very close. In Mississippi, we've got 2 engine test cells, and that runs 20 hours a day, 7 days a week. It's just firing engines all the time. Down in New Zealand, we have an engine test cell for the Rutherford. We produce 1 Rutherford engine every day to support that program.

Wow. That's wild.

Yeah.

The machines are getting smaller, and then they're getting bigger.

Yeah. Well, there's actually a really, really big machine that's going to turn up next year, which will be the largest.

What is it?

It can basically do a whole Archimedes engine in 1 print.

Really?

It's as tall as me, yeah.

Who makes it?

These guys make it.

Okay.

The same people, yeah. But we're the first customer of it in the world. We should go and have a look. I'll just check this one's running first. Yep.

So what are we looking at here?

So this is a laser powder machine, so there are 12 lasers in there. We're basically sintering the metal together to make a part. The technology has been around for quite a while, but the speed and complexity of the parts that we make here are pretty crazy.

How expensive is this?

They’re not cheap machines.

It’s like a couple million?

Oh, yeah, no—

Tens?

Yeah.

Hundred?

No, not 100.

No?

No. I mean, for these big machines, it’s less than 10 million, but for some machines, it can be more.

Do you have a favorite machine?

They’re all my favorite machines. I never choose one. That’ll be the one that gives you grief. They’re mesmerizing. You can literally stand there for hours if you’re not careful.

Get a live cam on this.

Yeah, you get no work done.

So how long does it take from powder to engine?

It depends on the size of the part. I think our longest print is around 3.5 days.

Okay.

Somewhere around there.

Yeah.

Yep.

For people who don’t know, what is the biggest difference between your engines and the other engines that are on the market?

Our engines are very much designed for the Neutron vehicle. It is a reusable launch vehicle at its heart. So what that means is our approach to engine design is slightly different from an expendable engine, because an expendable engine needs to run for 190 seconds on the first stage, say, and then it never needs to run again. Whereas a reusable vehicle, especially the way we’re doing it, we want it to just run and run and run and run.

The qualification burn time for an Archimedes engine is 1 hour. The engine has to do 40 starts and run for 1 hour. Whereas Rutherford for Electron, because it’s a single-use engine, its qualification, or its acceptance test, is about 5 minutes.

Wow.

It only needs to run for 190 seconds in its life, so a 5-minute run is pretty much enough.

What is the biggest engineering difference that you had to make?

It’s just designing it for that longevity. I’m not going to say it’s relatively easy to make an engine run for a short period of time. It’s still difficult, especially with a staged-combustion engine, but it’s just way harder to make a staged-combustion engine run for 1 hour and not even worry about it running for 1 hour.

Yeah. I was talking to someone else, but I was so excited that when we started doing these interviews and these tours, they took off, and we ended up on the fun side of this new reindustrialization and renaissance.

No, well, I really enjoy your work. I think it’s fantastic.

Thank you.

I think a lot of people these days are just always focusing on the doom and gloom of the world. Having great stories where people are doing great things is super great to watch.

Look, it’s really cool because we’re educating both investors, but then literally so many people are just excited about this stuff right now because they’ve never seen it before. There’s just been more and more media that’s picked up, and then, coming from the new-media angle, doing it all on X and then sharing it on Instagram and YouTube, it’s been super fun. Okay, so we were just looking at all the big, huge machines.

Yep. Additive manufacturing, yep.

Additive manufacturing. Now we’re walking up on something that is also very large that will probably go into space.

Yes. Before we go over to have a look at the Archimedes engines, no tour would be complete without an Electron rocket, so I figure you have to at least have a look at that.

I was really curious about this because you guys have really great naming systems.

Yeah.

But they’re all very different and unique. So how did you come up with the Hungry Hippo?

It just looked like a hungry hippo. Didn’t you play Hungry Hungry Hippos as a kid?

No.

Right.

When are you going to develop your own game?

Oh, I don’t have the time for that. There’s barely time to develop a rocket, let alone a game. Yeah.

We could outsource that.

Yeah, we could. Well, we like to have fun with the mission names as well, because it’s such a serious business. All of our rockets’ mission names are always something a little bit funny, just to lighten it up a little bit.

Mm-hmm.

So for people who have never seen this before, could you walk through the entire rocket?

4. Rocket Lab Builds Everything

So this is an Electron. This is the rocket that we fly the most right now. It’s flown 93 times. It’s the second-most frequently launched rocket in the world, behind the Falcon 9. The bit up at the front is the fairing; that’s where the payload goes. Then this little bit behind that is the kick stage.

This is the second stage of the vehicle, and this down here is the first stage. In traditional Rocket Lab fashion, it’s all carbon composite. The whole rocket is incredibly light. We’re very good at those super-lightweight structures.

Mm-hmm.

This is the hot bit, so this is where all the engines are, down at the end. These are the Rutherford rocket engines. They’re all gimbaled individually. We build everything in this vehicle: every piece of hardware, every piece of software, tanks, engines, you name it. I think that’s one of the key successes of the company: that vertical integration.

Yeah. And now you’re expanding outward and building out space systems.

Yep. Yeah, and we do the same with that. If you pull apart a satellite that we’ve built, the flight computer will be ours, the reaction wheels will be ours, and all the solar panels will be ours. It’s the same philosophy, yeah.

What else are you going to start to add on? You just acquired Iridium.

Not much left. Yeah.

There’s a lot to go.

Well, yeah. There are components that we’ll add down here.

Oh, okay.

Yeah. Iridium is just the start of our applications layer.

Mm-hmm.

All the cool kids have got a comms layer, so we need to have one of those too. But no, seriously, Iridium was incredibly strategic for us to enter into that applications layer. I’ve always believed that the big space companies of the future are all going to look a little bit the same. They’re going to have their own rocket because access to space is key. They’re going to have their own ability to build as many satellites as they need, and they’re all going to have applications.

What about tourism? Are you going to do that?

We could do tourism. I don’t think I’d be a very good tour operator, if I’m honest. But better engineer than tour operator.

When you say that you're a very serious engineer—they're serious engineers as well—but how do you take on the tourism bit of it?

Yeah—

How serious is that?

Well, I think there will be commercial space stations, and there will be tourists to go to them and all the rest of it. I guess, for me personally, I'm just not sure that's that exciting for me and for the company. I think it's always a tricky business.

Unfortunately, I'm the CEO, so if anything ever goes bad, guess who's knocking on the door? I don't know if I want to have that kind of level of responsibility. While we're here, we can talk a little bit about what you've been walking up—the Archimedes production line.

This line right now can produce 1 engine every 8 days. There are a couple of elements here. This is the thrust chamber of the Archimedes, and this here is the turbopump. All the raw propellants come in here. This is plus or minus 15,000 horsepower, if you're a metric—if you're an old-school horsepower guy.

These 2 things together really make up the Archimedes engine.

And you're using methane for this one?

Methane and oxygen, yep. Or methalox, yep.

You're using kerosene for the—

For the Rutherford. It's a kerosene vehicle.

Okay.

Why the difference in the fuel type?

Reusability.

Okay.

The trouble with kerosene is that you get these little soot deposits in the regenerative channels of the engine, and you have to purge the engine out. It's sort of dirty.

The design requirement for the vehicle was a turnaround in 24 hours, which was an absurd design requirement. But it drove a whole lot of really good decisions, one of them being methane, because you can run an engine and, after the engine's run, it's still shiny stainless steel and there's just no residue whatsoever.

You do the same with a kerosene engine, and there's just soot and black crap everywhere. It's just not fun. Every decision around the whole vehicle is designed around reusability and quick turnaround cadence.

What has been the biggest challenge? Because I could imagine doing this, you're going to constantly meet new challenges along the way. What has been the biggest challenge in making it reusable?

The reusability in itself is a challenge, because if our job was just to make an expendable launch vehicle, we'd be there now.

Yeah.

We'd be launching Neutrons flat out. But what we're trying to do here is make a step-change increment on the current state of the art. We can't just come to market with a vehicle that's as good as the current one on the market. We have to come to market with a vehicle that's way better.

Designing a vehicle that literally comes off the barge and goes straight on the pad and launches again is what we're trying to achieve here. That drives a whole bunch of engineering compromises and a whole bunch of engineering decisions. That in itself has been very, very, very difficult.

If you look at the Archimedes engine itself, the object of that engine was to make the most boring engine possible. If you're sitting on an airplane and you look out at the engine on your wing, you're not marveling at how amazing that is or how close to the knife edge that engine is. You want to know that engine is boring, right? It's not going to blow up.

Mm.

Same thing for this. The Archimedes engine needs to just go and go and go and go. That actually pushes you into quite different design envelopes, which in itself creates challenges.

The chamber pressure is relatively low for a staged-combustion engine, which means the internal temperatures are low. You'd think, “Oh, that's good for longevity,” which it really is, but actually it makes it much harder to light because the temperatures are way lower.

You create these things that are ultimately good, but you create a whole lot of problems along the way to try and make something good.

How often do you look around at the market and see the different engines that are being built, whether it's Merlin, whether it's Raptor, or other companies' engines, and try to gauge whether or not you should take some components of another one, use them, or test them against?

Everybody looks at everybody else's work. It would be disingenuous to say that we don't look at other people's engines, failures, and successes and learn from them as well.

But our path is probably pretty different from any other path. The engines you mentioned are really high-performance engines, and they're really strung out, which is great. This, I would say, is the first engine that's just not designed to be like that. It's designed to be the most benign engine that you could possibly imagine, so that you can just run and run and run and run and never even think about it.

A lot of the lessons in some of those other products probably don't apply to this so much, because we've got our own set of unique problems.

Anything else we should see while we're here?

There's another engine up here we can look at. This is a vacuum engine with a turbopump on the side of it, so you get more of a picture of the actual module itself.

Pretty.

Yep.

How long did it take to design this?

About 3 or 4 years—the teams have been working on the engine. The initial design is quick, but the challenge with a staged-combustion engine is you can't separate components, test them individually, and then bring them together.

The first time you hot-fire an engine, you have to have the turbopump and everything on it as 1 thing. You have to be extremely hardware-rich at the start of your program, because you consume a lot of hardware. You literally eat engines up.

There was 1 hot fire that we did very early on in the test program. The engine leaned out, and it actually consumed the whole injector, which was bizarre, because there was literally just a big hole left. There was nothing left in the injector. The propellants were still coming together and mixing and producing thrust, and the engine was still running—not just fine, but still running.

It's one of those things where it's very, very difficult to analyze. You've just got to test. You've just got to spend heaps of time on the engine test cell. That's why we have 2 test cells, like I said before, running 20 hours a day, 7 days a week.

The other end of the scale is the Rutherford engine. These are the engines that go on the back of the Electron rocket. There's 1 engine made and shipped out every day.

There are over 930 engines that have been to space.

How many do you put on Electron?

There are 10.

How many—10?

10.

And then how many Archimedes are you going to put on?

There are 10.

10?

Yeah. Yep. The reason for that on Neutron is the upper-stage engine produces a certain amount of thrust, and you have to manage that thrust for the acceleration of the upper stage.

Mm.

It just so happens that, coincidentally, it’s the ideal amount of thrust to land a rocket. You need at least 1 engine to do that final terminal landing phase. It just makes sense to have 1 engine and have 9 of them on the bottom and 1 on the top. That’s just physics. It just works out like that.

Yeah. So I have to ask you a very difficult question.

Mm-hmm.

I know you’re already nervous for this.

Mm.

But what is your hottest take right now?

5. Space Has Barely Begun

Hottest take right now. I think we’re in a really, really interesting time within the space industry. I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and at the start of that, it was like, one day there’ll be the democratization of space, and it won’t be governments launching rockets; it’ll be commercial entities. We’re well past that.

I think my hot take would be that the biggest thing to be done in space hasn’t even been thought about, let alone talked about. I think we’re at the very, very beginning of the whole process. If you want to make an analogy here, it’s like we’ve sent our first email at the beginning of the internet.

Damn.

Was that hot enough for you?

That’s a pretty good line.

Okay.

Well, amazing. Thank you so much, Peter. We walked through the HQ. We walked through this facility. We saw all the engines and the machines that build them. Thank you so much.

Oh, my pleasure. Yeah, it’s great to have you.