Peter Beck — We're scaling Electron faster than SpaceX scaled Falcon 9

**Peter Beck** (0:00)
The only thing my parents ever said to me is, we don't care what you do, as long as you have impact. For me, that was space. We were very practical kids. You would know if you built something that was rough, the whole family would go, that's piece of shit, why did you build like that? There was an expectation that everything that came out of the garage was beautiful. Electron, as far as the launch cadence, scaled faster than the Falcon 9 The team is just totally Relentless, and nobody survives here if they just want to come here and work eight to five and cruise and then go home.

**Ti Morse** (0:27)
You mentioned that the most stressful part of your life is launch day. I'm not even sure if you like enjoy launch day.

**Peter Beck** (0:33)
No, I completely do not enjoy launch day.

**Ti Morse** (0:38)
Today, I have a pleasure of sitting down with Peter Beck, the founder of Rocket Lab, founded in 2006 Over the past five years, you've gone from basically doing like six launches to, I think last year you did 21 It's same thing with SpaceX. I think SpaceX was at like 31 launches in 2021, now they're at like 160, something like that. Things are scaling really fast. What is the biggest limiting factor to increasing launch cadence and mass orbit?

**Peter Beck** (1:03)
Well, for Electron, quite often it's customer readiness. So, the factory out there is capable of sort of one a week as it stands. So, over 50 launches a year, but it comes down to customer readiness and the market for dedicated small launch continuing to grow.

**Ti Morse** (1:25)
I've seen so many start ups pop up in the last two or three years just expecting Starship scale up. Is this something that's also going to be basically like really benefiting you guys?

**Peter Beck** (1:34)
Well, it's been like that for as long as I've been in this industry, right? So, there's always been a tremendous growth. And in fairness, it sort of goes and fits in cycles a little bit or waves, where there's a tremendous amount of venture capital went into space start ups, and then it sort of backed off a little bit. Then there was the rise of the SPAC where a whole bunch of those venture capitalists made their funds back again and thought, hey, this space thing is good. So, there's another big wave of investment into venture capital investment into space. And the one thing I would say is consistent, is there was always the promise of the democratization of space. So, for the longest time, I can remember everybody saying, well, space is about to democratize, meaning that it always used to be the governments who built the rockets and the governments who built the satellites. And I would say in the last decade, we've actually truly witnessed that, that complete democratization of space. So, there's a few launch vehicle companies now that are launching regularly, in fact, way more than governments. You know, Rocket Lab itself launches more than governments, apart from, I think, the Chinese. So, in the same deal in spacecraft. I mean, we send a spacecraft to the moon, two of our spacecraft are on their way to Mars right now. You know, these are typically, you know, government-dominated domains, historically at least. So, you know, in the last decade, a lot has moved.

**Ti Morse** (3:05)
What do you think is the big reason that governments have been like less effective at building like space programs and making it so you can basically build a lot of rockets?

**Peter Beck** (3:15)
Yeah, I think it's a couple of things. It's like anything where it's incredibly difficult, it requires a nation worth of, you know, talent and energy and you can't make any money at it. Those are the things that governments are really good at. The moment that a few of those things aren't true, like you can make some money at it, and it doesn't require a nation of energy to achieve it, then that naturally democratizes into commercial entities. And, you know, that's exactly what's happened with space. Like it no longer takes a nation to build a satellite. You know, a few college kids in a dorm can go and build a little satellite.

**Ti Morse** (3:53)
I think on another podcast that I was listening to, you basically said New Zealand has like this culture of not really wanting successful people, or something to that effect. Is there like a big tall poppy syndrome situation happening?

**Peter Beck** (4:05)
Yeah, I mean, there is a kind of that tall poppy syndrome in New Zealand. But I would say, you know, over time, I've realized that it's really just a construct of the New Zealand media. Actual mum and dad at home wants everybody to succeed. And I think that's true in most countries where successful entities or people, you know, they get sort of beaten down. It's generally, you know, mums and dads at home are just super stoked to see someone when I think it's like I said, it feels like, you know, to me, a largely a construct of the media.