走进 Rocket Lab：与 CEO Sir Peter Beck 对谈——创纪录业绩、Neutron 与 Flatellite

Rocket Lab.

Rocket Lab. Rocket Lab. We rang up Sinclair Interplanetary at that stage and said, “Doug, we need some reaction wheels.” Doug said, “That’s great, Pete. It’ll be 9 months.” I said, “Doug, I haven’t got 9 months for anything.”

So the way to solve that problem is we just went and bought Doug. Now we make over 2,000 reaction wheels a year. We recently did the launch for the Space Force—the rapid call-up launch—and they gave us 24 hours to integrate a satellite into a rocket, push it out to the pad, and launch. We did it in 16 hours and 42 minutes.

We go after those big prime contracts. Even if we lose, we still win, and when we win, we win twice. We won an $800 million contract. There were 2 other primes that also won contracts, but that actually turned into over a $1 billion contract for us because the primes needed our stuff.

The nose-cone shape of Electron isn’t actually the optimum aerodynamic shape. The optimum aerodynamic shape looked inappropriate, in my view.

Some people did the opposite of that and made it more appropriate. All right, Sir Peter Beck.

Pete.

We are here yet again. We just completed a pretty comprehensive tour of your facility here in Long Beach, California.

Yep.

Thank you for having us.

Oh, super. Great pleasure. Awesome to be able to show you around.

We’re here just after record earnings.

Mm.

So what happened this quarter?

We pretty much put nearly $1 billion of backlog in the books, had record revenue, and saw a whole bunch of growth everywhere, as well as acquisitions. It’s been a busy old quarter.

We’re going to get into all that, but what I think was really interesting and amazing is that, as you continue to make more acquisitions, you’re strategically placing yourself far beyond what people used to brand you as—a launch company—and into an entire space-ecosystem company. So what is your plan there?

1. Building The Space Ecosystem

Yeah. When we started the space-systems team, the first thing we did was try to buy a reaction wheel. We rang up Sinclair Interplanetary at that stage and said, “Doug, we need some reaction wheels.” Doug said, “That’s great, Pete. It’ll be 9 months.” I said, “Doug, I haven’t got 9 months for anything. We need way faster than that.”

So the way to solve that problem is we just went and bought Doug. Now we make over 2,000 reaction wheels a year. We basically repeated that. If you took a satellite and laid it out on the boardroom table, we pointed out all the things that were really painful, went out and acquired the very best companies—or, in some cases, created the technology ourselves—and then scaled it.

That puts us in a really unique position because, yes, we can build platforms at scale for other people, but we can also do that for ourselves.

What do you think the moat is now?

Launch is always a huge moat. Launch is probably the biggest moat, but I would say the second-biggest moat is those components that go into spacecraft.

Yeah.

Because you can have infinite capital, and it doesn’t make any difference. You still need some star trackers and some reaction wheels, and they’re just not available at scale.

What has it been like for you as you scale this company out, moving into this more manufacturing-components era of Rocket Lab?

It doesn’t feel like anything’s changed because, if you take our first real product, being the Electron launch vehicle, everything in that launch vehicle we design and make: every engine, every avionics box, and every piece of software. We cut our teeth on how to be a manufacturing company during that process.

Then we hired our COO, Frank Klein, who came from Mercedes and brought a whole bunch of that expertise as well. Now I’d say we’re at a scale where we have all the ERP systems and the MRP systems, and the Rocket Lab system, where even if we acquire a new company, we literally just pick that system and those people up and plonk them in. It’s like scaling at the push of a button.

What was the initial process for going and doing so many strategic acquisitions as a way to grow? What was your thinking behind that?

As you say, they’re strategic. I’ve always viewed the large space companies as having the ability to build their own satellites and launch them. If you’re beholden to someone else providing you with all the critical components, then your ability to scale is governed by their ability to scale, and that’s not a place where you want to be.

For us, it was just sensible. At the time, I remember a lot of folks were saying, “Why are you buying this company in Albuquerque, and this company in Toronto that makes these little things, these little widgets?” I think it’s very obvious now that those widgets are the things that truly enable a sense of scale for some of the space infrastructure.

Let’s talk about Iridium—

Mm.

—because that was a big recent acquisition.

Yep.

Why did you make that acquisition, and how does that change the future state of the company?

2. Iridium Expands The Moat

It’s funny because I thought everybody would have picked that up early, right? I was surprised that people were surprised we would be doing that because, if you just think about it logically and stand back and go, “Okay, what is the biggest TAM in the space industry?” It’s comms.

If you ignore broadband, because 2 really well-capitalized people are taking care of that, what’s the next logical thing to do in comms? It’s safety-critical, defense-critical services. That is Iridium.

It’s a super-quintessential Rocket Lab deal. We don’t come with hopes and dreams and bore a big hole in the P&L. Iridium adds profitability to the entity straight away. It also buys us time to put up a new constellation.

It’s literally the quintessential Rocket Lab deal. We don’t buy companies that are startups that maybe will do something one day. You have to be proven and successful, and then you’re the right kind of target for us.

What’s really amazing is you’re pretty much one of 3 companies now that are doing successful commercial launches, and you’re expanding out into new territories. What does this mean for you against Blue Origin and SpaceX?

They’ve both got their own ambitions, and some are further along than others. I think it would be very difficult to go and play in the broadband market. You see the amount of capital that’s required to be successful there.

We’re as good a place to play. In that L-band spectrum, which penetrates through rain, weather, and buildings, you can just do stuff—it’s physics. You can do stuff that the higher broadband spectrum can’t do.

Acquiring that spectrum is super important. Acquiring their business is super important, and it really gives us a great platform to scale and provide a lot of applications. But I think Rocket Lab is not the L-band safety-critical comms company. That is number 1, and there’ll be many, many more after that.

You’ve made 7 acquisitions at this point that have integrated well into the company and been successful. So what is your process with that? How do you create such a seamless motion?

I’m glad it looks like that. It’s like the duck on the pond, with the little feet flat out. It feels a little bit like that.

No acquisition or integration is easy. There’s no small one. But it does help that we’re extremely picky. We like to acquire companies that we’ve worked with. All of the component companies, we’ve basically used them in our own systems in the past.

Those relationships and the understanding of those teams matter. If you look across all of those component acquisitions, there’s one thing written on the top of their boards, and that is “100% mission success.” There’s no, “Let’s be fast and near enough.” It’s always 100% mission success.

SolAero never had a solar panel fail in orbit in 40 years. Doug Sinclair and his reaction wheels, same again. PSC never had a separation-system failure. You have to be of that mindset to be able to integrate with Rocket Lab.

From a diligence perspective, I guess generally we know the team. There have been a couple of times when we knew them less well, but typically we’ve selected them for a program or worked with them for many years.

So in that respect, the diligence doesn't take a huge amount of time. We know a little bit what we're getting. The integration playbook, I would say, has evolved over time. At the very beginning, we were very, very light-touch, and I would say now I think we have a much more well-oiled machine where, on day 1, there is literally a day 1 in the playbook. On day 1, the walls are black, the snack machines are in, Rocket Lab T-shirts are on, and we're go. Throttle's wide open.

We've been touring the building. We've been driving around in the golf cart. Everybody's wearing your merch. Is this required?

Mm.

No?

No, you get a set of merch when you come, but most of the team buys it, yeah.

Really?

Yeah. And I think that's a great metric for a company. It's like, how proud are your employees to work here? I think all the successful companies, in my opinion at least, have employees who feel like they're really part of it and are really, really proud of it.

We talked about this in the tour, but this is one piece of many pieces—

Many pieces.

—of Rocket Lab globally.

Yeah.

You're an international rocket sensation.

Yep.

And galactic.

Yeah. The lawyers hate me saying it, but global domination is definitely part of the plan.

We love global domination.

Yep, yep. Underrated. So we start off in New Zealand. There's the Electron factory in New Zealand, and there's the launch site, where there are 2 launch pads. Then we have a small team in Australia, mainly in business development. Then we start off here in California. We have these 2 facilities in California.

Then we have Rocket Lab Optical Systems in Tucson. In Albuquerque, we have our solar plant. In Toronto, we have our Reaction Wheels. In Stennis, we have our engine test facility. In Middle River, we have a Neutron facility. In Maryland, we have separation systems. In Virginia, we have a launch pad. In Germany, we have our optical terminal business. I'm sure I've forgotten 1 or 2, but yes.

Were these through acquisitions, or—

Some were, yeah. Most of those were acquisitions. Stennis, obviously, was not, and Middle River, obviously, was not, but some were, yeah.

I want to go back to the beginning of how you built this all out, because the top 3 countries for launch are the US, China, and New Zealand, and you created a monopoly on launch in New Zealand. What was that process like for you? How did you—I will say—write the laws there?

Mm.

3. New Zealand Wins The Launch Race

Well, at the end of the day, if you have a small launch vehicle and you turn up to a large launchpad, the reality is that the fees don't change. When you're trying to sell a rocket for $8 million, you can't have $1.5 million worth of launch fees. On a $50 million rocket, it doesn't make any difference, right? We were very early on this: in order for this to be financially viable, we need our own launch site.

Mm.

Building your own launch site in the States was non-trivial. It was non-trivial in New Zealand as well, but ultimately, we felt it was easier to do that in New Zealand. And to your point, New Zealand had no space industry, so sometimes it's easier to start something from scratch and formulate it in a way that makes the most sense than to try and integrate with a whole bunch of rules that don't fit.

Is this why you got knighted?

One of the reasons, yeah, for creating a space industry and—

What was that like?

It's very weird.

Really?

Yep. Super weird.

Why?

Look, I just like to build rockets. It's great for your mum and stuff like that, but a lot of people do a lot of amazing things, and it's an amazing thing. The way I look at it, it's really for the whole team and entrepreneurs in New Zealand. I'm grateful for restaurant reservations. But, yeah, I think it's a very humbling experience.

Why is New Zealand geographically advantageous for launch?

Launch Complex 1 is in a very unique position: we can launch sun-synchronous and also out to mid-inclination from the 1 site. Here in the States, if you want to go sun-synchronous, you generally have to go out of the West Coast. If you want to go mid-inclination, you have to go to the East Coast. So we get a huge swath of azimuth, and there's 1 plane every 3 days that we have to worry about.

Really?

That's it. Whereas in the US, of course, you're shutting down a tremendous amount of airspace, and it's a big deal. It's a real thing.

Mm.

In New Zealand, there's just nothing there, so it's very easy to launch. We're able to do things like the launch we recently did for the Space Force—the Rapid Call-Up launch. They gave us 24 hours to integrate a satellite into a rocket, push it out to the pad, and launch. We did it in 16 hours and 42 minutes.

That's insane. And there's nothing below you but Antarctica.

No. There's nothing at all. When we're out mid-inclination, sun-synchronous, it's Antarctica or Chile.

Is Chile actually that close?

No, it's miles away. It's halfway around the planet. So, yes, there is nothing. There's absolutely nothing, which is great, but also, we had to build an entire industry from scratch in New Zealand. There were no suppliers, no infrastructure, nothing. We had to build absolutely everything.

Is it more expensive there because of that?

No. I would say we control our own destiny very, very well. So, no.

No? Did you find the pyramids in Antarctica yet?

No, I haven't had a good look, to be fair.

Okay.

They might be under the snow. I don't know.

Because you had such big earnings—

Mm.

You had record earnings this quarter, if you didn't know that.

Yeah, but we had record earnings last quarter as well, and probably the one before that.

Well, I guess before we get there, you went public before other space companies. One of them that recently went public—I don't know if you know—is SpaceX.

I've heard of them. Yeah.

But what was it like, and why did you make the decision—

It's nice to do something before Elon for once, that's for sure.

What was the process, and why did you choose to go public when you did?

4. Going Public For The Long Term

Yeah. For a number of reasons. One, if you can reach a certain level of maturity and go public—

Mm.

—the capital markets enable you to do things you couldn't do in private markets. Buying Iridium—we could never have done that as a private company. So it was the right time for us to become a public company.

The other part of it, which is a little bit selfish, is I didn't want to build a space company that just lives for the lifetime that I'm running it. It needed to be multigenerational and go on and on and on and on. Being a public company really enforces that discipline of profitability, and profitability is survival. The rockets and satellites are all cool, but at the end of the day, it's all for nothing if your economics aren't there and you're not profitable.

So for future founders who are thinking about going public and trying to time the markets, which I've learned from our partnership with the New York Stock Exchange—

Gotcha

is not something you can really do.

You can't, no.

Do you have any advice for founders?

Yeah. Do it for the right reasons. The worst thing you can do is go public because you can't raise capital privately. We never had an issue raising capital privately. We probably couldn't have raised the quantum of capital privately, so there needs to be an inflection point. But a lot of companies went public during that SPAC time because they were just crap companies and couldn't raise capital privately, so their only option was to be a public company. That's never a good reason to be a public company.

Being a public company is a lot of work. There's a lot of constraints that come on you, and it's probably way less fun. But it gives you a set of resources you didn't have before, so make sure you need those resources. If you don't need those resources, then don't do it. That'd be my advice: do it for the right reasons, and make sure you're ready to do it.

Yeah.

Just go home and cry a little bit. Yeah. No, look, I'm focused on the longer term.

Mm.

Neutron delays are always a question, and rightly so: people should be riding us hard for that. But at the end of the day, I'm not going to say it doesn't matter, but how late was Electron to the market?

I don't know.

Nobody knows, because it doesn't matter. It was late, too. But the point being, the most important thing here is what happens in the next 5 to 10 years.

Mm.

That is where we go from where we are today to being really, really big. Making sure all of the pieces of the puzzle are lined up—all the chess pieces on the chessboard are in the right place—is super important. That's why, as we started acquiring these component companies for satellites, each chess piece on the board was in place to make sure that when it came time to do something like Iridium or more, we were ready to go.

Mm. On the tour, you walked us through the engines. You walked us through Electron. We saw the machines. This is the number 1 question a lot of people have been asking me.

Mm.

I'm sure you're probably tired of getting asked it, but why is Neutron still facing delays?

Yeah, it's a great question. It's a rocket program, and I think every rocket CEO is probably afflicted with the same optimism over reality. But I would say that I'm being really strategic about how we bring Neutron to market.

Mm.

It's one thing to put a rocket on the pad and just fly it once. That's super important—don't get me wrong—but I guess the question that investors and analysts should be asking me is, “Pete, when's the 10th rocket going to be on the pad? How quickly can we get the 10th rocket on the pad?” By the time you get to rocket 10, your reusability is sorted, all your production is sorted, you're banging out whole stages, and all of the launch infrastructure is just cranking.

Your first rocket on the pad is hard, but making sure you can scale quickly after that first rocket is the most important thing. It would be really bad if we put the first rocket on the pad and then it was 2 years before we put the next one on the pad, which happens more often than not. I just don't want to be there, so I want to make sure that after flight 1 we can really scale and ramp quickly. Launch is constrained for everybody else, and launch is constrained for our government customers. I'm now my own user of launch for Iridium. I need launch, too, so I'm my harshest customer. Making sure we can get through that scaling quickly is really, really important.

And so with Archimedes, which is going to be powering Neutron—

Mm-hmm.

—you’re using a different design for this one versus your competitors. Why did you make that decision?

Yeah, so the Neutron vehicle is composite. Everything is a giant engineering compromise in the rocket world. If you fill a room with engineers from every discipline, if one of those engineers is happy, you have failed. Everybody needs to be equally as miserable. Then you know you've got the right design, because it's just this giant compromise.

One of the compromises we made is that we want the Archimedes engine to be incredibly reliable, and we don't want to have to service that engine for multiple flights. We make super-lightweight structures and super-low-stressed engines. If you make heavy structures, then you have to make super-high-performance engines. You can be lazy on your structures and really difficult on your engine, or you can be really lazy on your engine and really difficult on your structures.

We build everything out of carbon, so naturally our propensity is to have super-high-performance structures, and we have a lot of experience with the material. It was sort of the natural choice to make Neutron out of composite.

You stressed this a bunch on the tour when we were looking at the engines and what kind of factors you had to lay into reusability—

Mm.

—and how you're going to design that differently because you have to use it again.

Yeah.

It doesn't just burn up for 5 seconds—

Exactly.

—and then go away.

Yep.

So what kind of decisions did you make there?

Well, I made a constraint at the very early part of the program where I think I lost a lot of credibility with the engineers, and I said, “Look, guys, we need to be able to turn this vehicle around in 24 hours.” I'll admit, that's a stupid constraint, but what that constraint did was drive a whole bunch of really, really important design decisions, like propellants, engine lives, and structures.

The hungry hippo fairing came out of that because it's like, “Guys, you've got 24 hours to fish a fairing out of the ocean, recondition it, blow all the salt water out of it, and get it back on a rocket.” That's not going to work. That requirement drove the design for the hungry hippo fairing, so we never throw away a fairing.

Sometimes you've got to be cruel to be nice, and that was an example where we put this unrealistic constraint on the team, but it drove a whole lot of goodness everywhere throughout the vehicle.

This is a very difficult business you've found yourself in. How do you handle all the challenges?

If you want an easy life, you do not become a rocket CEO. There's a far easier pathway to a low-stress life than that. But no, it's super fun and super meaningful. Every founder does it because they believe in the outcome of the business.

One of the cool things about space is that you get to touch so many people. People don't realize how much they rely on space infrastructure. If you order a pizza, the GPS got it there. Your Tinder date knows where to turn up because GPS got them there. There's a tremendous amount of space infrastructure in our everyday lives that everybody uses and just doesn't realize they're using.

It's kind of ridiculous that you can put a little box of electronics up in the sky and really have so much impact on everybody down on Earth. At the end of the day, that's probably what gets me out of bed the most. The only thing my parents said growing up is, “You can do whatever you want, but have the most amount of impact with your life possible.” That's how I feel like I can deliver on that.

You've talked about building this as a multigenerational company. Do you envision your kids taking over?

Absolutely not.

No?

Absolutely not.

Why?

No nepotism in the Beck family whatsoever. No. They have to go and chart their own paths. Absolutely not.

What are they going to do?

We'll see. My son's very much into motor racing, and my daughter's into performance, so none of them have chosen boring paths themselves. We'll see how they go.

What if they get interested and turn around and they're like, “Oh, wait, I want to take over the rocket company. This is pretty cool, Dad”?

Well, that's just way too tough. That's just not happening. Absolutely not.

Okay. So, to go back to the earnings, you had huge announcements. You closed very large contracts.

Yeah.

I'll list them out for you. You're probably tired of talking about them, but okay. You have $580 million in space systems contracts.

Mm.

$437 million in launch contracts.

Mm.

But one of those contracts is for Flatellites.

Yeah.

Can you talk through Flatellites and explain to the audience what that is?

Yeah. The Flatellite is actually a really important platform for us because that will be the platform that we scale our own future constellations off of. If you ever come to New Zealand, you'll drive down the road and see creeks named Creek 1, and then the next creek will be Creek 2. It's maybe a little bit of a New Zealand thing. We're not very imaginative in our names.

It was a satellite, it was flat, and it was like, “Flatellite. That's got to be the name.” But it is a flat format, and it's a high-density format that's specifically tailored for the Neutron vehicle. I think the big deal about that is that, yes, it was our first scaled Flatellite deal, but it wasn't for some janky mission. It's for a really important national-security defense mission.

Mm.

I think that says a lot about the government customers and where they rank Rocket Lab's ability to deliver new stuff.

Defense has become a prime mover for you internally. How do you think about the different categories that you service?

Mm.

5. Rocket Lab Targets Defense Contracts

We play in areas where we think that we can be disruptive and can add real value over others. National security is one of those areas that I think has typically been pretty well underserved. The typical national-security contract would go to your typical primes: cost-plus, blowouts in timelines and money, and all the rest of it. We're just not built like that.

When we go out into the national-security world, it's firm-fixed-price, and we deliver. That's a different paradigm to some of these customers. Even when we go after those big prime contracts—I mean, we're prime on 2 national-security programs right now—even when we go after being a prime, even if we lose, we still win.

And when we win, we win twice, because we'll go head-to-head with a prime for a contract. If we lose, then the next day there's a whole bunch of purchase orders for reaction wheels, solar panels, and a whole bunch of stuff. And when we win, and there are other primes that win, we win twice.

Our SDA contract was a great example. We won an $800 million contract. There were 2 other primes that also won contracts, but actually, that turned into over a $1 billion contract for us because the primes needed our stuff.

Damn. That worked pretty well. One of the other announcements that you had during this earnings call was for Ghost. Can you explain what Ghost is? I found this completely fascinating.

Yes.

Essentially, we've got 3 launch sites for the Electron vehicle. Our government customers, mainly around the HASTE missions, were really keen to see us go into very discreet locations to do some of that testing. It was driven by a requirement from the customer: Can you build this mobile launch site?

Now that we're doing Neutron, even the smallest thing needs a crane. You look at an Electron launch pad, and it's tiny now, so moving stuff around is not a big deal for us anymore. It's pretty elementary for us to build these mobile launch sites and plonk them down.

As a rocket-space-company CEO, I have to ask you: Have you seen aliens?

Oh, no, I have not seen aliens.

No?

6. Life May Already Be Silicon

No. I think, statistically speaking, it would be naive to think that there aren't other life forms out in the universe. We've got our Venus Life Finder mission to have a look in the clouds of Venus for some signs of life.

But I don't know. I've got a slightly different take on what life may be in the universe because I think we look at life through a very narrow lens. If you look at the human timescale, it's ridiculously short compared to everything around us. This concrete floor is going to outlive us by 100 times. This concrete floor maybe in 1,000 years would still be there, whereas a human timescale measures it in 80 years.

Nothing in the universe is measured in 80-year increments. It's measured in million-year increments. So the way I think about looking for life in the universe, I don't think there'll be little watery-sack-kind-of people floating through the universe. I think it's most likely evolved into some kind of hardware silicon, or maybe even just signal.

Because if you want to travel the universe, this is not happening. This is totally useless. Maybe a piece of silicon is better, but why are you moving hardware? Why not just do consciousness with a signal?

So I think, if we think about stuff in the timespan of the universe, the signals aren't going to be in hertz. They could be 1 cycle in a million years. I think we're probably looking at everything in the wrong timescale.

That's a great answer. That was a huge answer. As we close out, I have 2 last questions, but let's bring it back to today and a smaller timescale.

Mm. Yeah.

What are you most looking forward to in the next 6 to 12 months? I don't know what kind of increments you work by. Some of these AI companies work in weeks.

Yeah.

Some work in years. I don't know the difference.

No, it's very well understood here: a Rocket Lab year is a dog year. People will start in this company, work 3 months, and then say, “Oh, well, I've been here for a year.” They haven't. They just haven't. So it is a very long timeframe.

Look, I know all the focus is on Neutron, as it should be, and I'm looking forward to getting that thing to the pad and scaling it. But Neutron is one element of the big piece. It's an important element, but I think what I'm looking forward to in the next 6 to 12 months is getting that Iridium deal all tucked in and moving on to the next.

There will be a series of transformational things that I've got my eyes on that I think are really important to do over the next few years.

Amazing. Well, you've made it 20 years.

Ugh. Remember my comment about dog years?

Yeah.

Can you imagine that? It feels like a long time, but yes.

It's a long time.

Yeah.

As you've made it this far, I'm really curious, because you have a very distinctive background compared with other space CEOs. You've really worked to get this company up and running. I do think a core component of performance is who you surround yourself by. Some people say it's your closest 5 friends. It could be a mentor. It could be some figure that you've had growing up that you look up to.

I'm curious: who are those people for you?

That's a great question. It's funny because I don't have a very wide friend group, and I never ever bring work home. Because if you have a rubbish day at work, the last thing you want to do is bring that to somebody and ruin somebody else's day.

I draw inspiration not from singular people but from a wide variety of sources all the time. I think the people I find most inspirational are the people who just work. That doesn't need to be some highfalutin person—somebody who's working three jobs out there to put food on their table is an inspiration to me. Someone who's really, really grinding it to try and get ahead—that's an inspiration to me.

I don't really have any mentors or any people that I just sit there and idolize and look up to. I think I just draw the stuff out of all the amazing people that you see around us all the time. I know that's a bit of a cop-out of an answer, but it's the honest truth. So many people have so many amazing qualities.

I mean, I did hear you've never read a business book before.

No.

So what are your operating principles?

Just do logical things. At the end of the day, I think business is like a game of chess. It's fairly logical. There are some parts of it that are illogical. Government is nonlinear, so you can put an input into a government and you just never know what you're going to get out.

For the most part, business is pretty basic and pretty logical. Make money, and that's a pretty straightforward sort of concept.

Some people forget that that is the purpose of a business, especially when they're overfunded.

Yeah. In the space industry, it's very easy to get wrapped up in the cool stuff, and we do get to do cool stuff. There are plenty of examples of things that probably don't make a lot of sense. The Archimedes engine is black. I make them paint it black because it looks cool.

There's no logical reason—I can come up with an emissivity reason why they should be black, but sometimes there are those little elements. That's fine on the small scale, but I think it's really important to remember that in order to do this cool stuff, you have to make money.

Is there anything else that you've done, like painting the engine black?

Yep. The nose cone shape of Electron is that shape. It's not actually the optimum aerodynamic shape.

Really?

No. The optimum aerodynamic shape looked inappropriate in my view.

Really?

So I changed the shape to more of an extended ogive just to make it look a little bit nicer.

Some people did the opposite of that and made it more inappropriate. Sir Peter Beck.

Pete.

Thank you very much, Pete, for showing us around, taking us on a tour, and letting us spend the day here at Rocket Lab.

My pleasure. Thanks very much for coming.

Amazing. Cool.

Cool.

Awesome.

Thanks.