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

25:19Peter Beck:And that means by definition, half the time it's going to be off. But that because he's basically pulling in timelines like that, more things are able to happen. If you're doing, you know, this mission where you're sending something to Mars or sending something to the moon, how do you decide how to structure that timeline so that you know that you're actually going to be able to ship? So I guess, you know, you have to be 50 % entrepreneurial and 50 % engineer. And as a public company, you can't just stand up there and wave your arms around. Some people do do that. Yeah, but you get in trouble with it.

25:53It doesn't work. Yeah, no. You have to be respectful to your shareholders and your investors that they're making decisions off your timelines. And sometimes you get it wrong, and that's unfortunate. But generally, the dates and things that we try and put out there, we try and be right. Now, we do run green light schedules, meaning that when we put a schedule together, there's not some big fat in there that says that if this doesn't work, it might, we build a bit of extra time in here and build a bit of extra time in here. Because engineers will take as long as you have allocated them to do a job.

26:31If you allocate all the fat in there, then that is your default best schedule. Whereas we've always run green light schedules from day one, where you put the schedule down in place that you think is if everything goes right. And if everything goes right, then that is the best time that you're going to achieve. And of course, not everything always goes right. But you can guarantee where you build fat in, it'll be the wrong place anyway. So that has been very effective for Rocket Lab. And yep, OK, sometimes we're late on some stuff, but it's not horrifically late. and it's still faster than if you had done a more traditional approach.

27:12Peter Beck:If you do have a situation where things do go late, what do you do to basically make sure that whatever the new timeline is happens or it happens as quickly as possible? Well, I mean, there's nobody at Rocket Lab that doesn't feel the anxiety of something is not going well. Like everybody here is super high performers and they want, you know, It's very important for their own ego to deliver beautiful stuff on time. So it's self-policing in that respect. And look, the stuff we do is freaking hard. And some of it's never been done before. So inevitably, you have issues. And I'd say one of the great things about the company is it's not a culture where if somebody has a bad day, everybody runs away and points at them and going, oh, no, I'm glad that's not me.

28:00It's the opposite, right? everybody runs towards the problem and offers their help and assistance. So, you know, as far as a culture goes, it's, you know, some cultures, it's, you know, everybody's standing on each other's throat to try and get ahead. Not here. You know, everybody runs to the thing that's on fire to try and put it out. How do you actually foster that type of culture? Well, I mean, I wish I could say that there's like a statement or anything. I mean, it's just the way the company is. It's just the way the company has always been. Right back to that example I gave you of that engine blowing up.

28:41Nobody's jumping around and screaming. Everybody just gets to work.

28:44Peter Beck:I remember you said we make the Ferrari of rockets. And you really care about design and you really care about beauty. You really care about function and all this stuff. What's your philosophy around building beautiful, amazing products that work? And then why does it matter to create things that are great? Well, it comes down to my belief that if you build something beautifully, then you've taken pride in what you've done. If you've taken pride in what you've done, then chances are you've looked a little bit deeper than your own work. And if everybody is building beautiful things, if somebody doesn't build a beautiful thing, then it becomes really, really obvious.

29:21and you know generally if you build beautiful things they work it's very rare that you build something that is just beautifully executed and beautifully thought about that's just a piece of crap it doesn't happen that often whereas I'd say if you build a piece of crap it's like it's a it's a miracle or it's a win if it works so and I honestly believe it takes no longer to build something beautiful and nice than it does to build you know throw something together it's a piece of crap, especially by the time you spend all the time, you know, you know, going back and rebuilding bits because clearances weren't right or, you know, you know, code wasn't right or whatever.

30:00So, um, so I don't, I don't think it takes, it takes any longer, but, um, we used to have a saying on the wall that, that make everything you do a work of art. Um, because you know, if it doesn't work and looks like crap, you've got nothing, but if it doesn't work and looks beautiful at least it looks beautiful so um so you you know this the it's it's a it's an ingrained culture and it doesn't it just doesn't apply to hardware it's like code it's software uh it's the facilities you're in it's like you know we're we're here to build beautiful things we're not

30:32Peter Beck:here to you know make crap who are the people or or things that have like inspired you on on that kind of philosophy and trying to create beautiful products? I don't know it's probably probably just my upbringing like you know as a as a child where that's what we were always expected to do you know we were you know very practical kids we were building go-karts and and building these kinds of things and whether it was be my father or my brother or anything like you would know if you built something that was rough like the whole family would go that's a piece of shit why did you build like that so there was like a you know an expectation and a pride that everything that came out of the Bix garage was beautiful how do you marry those two philosophies of you both are going to junkyards to find some little piece of you know something that you can kind of salvage yep for a few hundred bucks while also like creating the initial prototypes while also understanding that the finished version is going to be like this gorgeous thing yeah well i mean uh if you clean a fitting it looks exactly like a brand new fitting so you're not compromising anything um in that respect and um so and that you're putting a new ferrule on it so that's a bit that's doing the work so so i think i think you know they're not they're not separate they're not separate things and um you know uh a piece of art that's that's done by a an artist that sells for$500 versus something that sounds for$5 million, I mean, they're still beautiful.

32:07So you don't need to equate like a price tag to beauty and quality of engineering.

32:13Peter Beck:I remember you mentioned that the most stressful part of your life is launch day. Yeah, I hate launch day. I'm not even sure if you like enjoy launch day. No, I completely do not enjoy launch day. What was it like 2009 when you guys launched your first rocket or test? And then also, you know, 2017 when you tried to make the first orbital attempt. The first flights are a little bit different. I mean, you want everything to go well and you're willing everything to go well and you've done everything you can to make everything go well. But it's a logical kind of understanding that it may not go well.

32:50It probably won't go well. Yeah. So, yeah. So flight ones, that's not so bad. That's not so bad because that's a test. it's worse later on. And the more you do, the worse it gets. Because, you know, it's still an extremely complicated vehicle and system and stuff, you know, even for the best of us, stuff goes wrong, right? You know, whole country's vehicles. I'm counting on you. Yeah. Well, all country's vehicles also fail now and again. So it does happen. But I don't know. It's just I feel an immense sense of responsibility to our customers to our shareholders, you know, people buy a rocket to deliver their payload to orbit.

33:35They don't buy a rocket to deliver their payload to the ocean. So, you know, I just feel a tremendous sense of responsibility to, you know, to make sure that their experience and their mission is delivered exactly right. And I think, you know, that's part of the Rocket Lab culture is every single person in this company takes the delivery of their thing or the end solution incredibly seriously. So, you know, whether it's a reaction wheel to a customer or an entire spacecraft or an entire mission, you know, we really care here. Like when we deploy a satellite into orbit, you know, I think most people would think that our job is done, yes, and we all just go home.

34:15But everybody's hanging off, waiting for the customer to tell us we've had a successful contact of our spacecraft. You know, it's not our part of the mission, but we just want that mission to be successful so badly that, you know, I don't think anybody in mission control, you know, has a sigh of relief until our customer comes back to us and said, yep, we've made contact with our spacecraft. And the whole thing is successful for everybody. It really sucks when our customer forgets to tell us because there's like 100 people sitting back here going, did the customer make contact or not? Even though our mission is over.

34:48Peter Beck:What was the most stressful day of the last 20 years? Oh, man. You know, for me, it's like when something has gone wrong. I mean, like a launch anomaly is just like this place is a morgue. Like it is, you know, if you're like a psychologist, you come in here, you'd make a killing because, you know, after a launch failure, it's just really tough. Really, really tough because everybody is so invested in all of that. There's this wonderful line, which is like entrepreneurship in its best form is basically going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm. And I feel like every company that succeeds over time becomes very good at basically experiencing failure, learning from it quickly, and then moving on and just focusing on the next thing.

35:40Yeah, no, I'd say that's absolutely true. Yeah. and you know failure happens in all forms and like there's big big public failures and then there's there's like you know someone's been working on this piece of hardware for the last three months and it goes to the vibe table and forced to bits like you know you still got to go home and they're like that didn't work if it wasn't if it wasn't for the prize of the space industry I doubt anybody would do it because it's just and when I say the prize I mean the prize is like if you work on a launch vehicle, seeing a rocket fly. Like, you know, people will just absolutely work their ass off and then a rocket will fly and they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's go do it again.

36:20Like it's just like this adrenaline hit that you get that keeps everybody going. If there wasn't that kind of, you know, almost climax of event, then whether it be a rocket or a spacecraft being launched or whatever, I'm not sure everybody would do this job because it is, you know, it is, it is just, it's just constantly tough.

36:40Peter Beck:For the first like 12 years of the company, you're basically an R &D organization where you just needed to design something that actually worked and, you know, show that it worked. And then in like 2018, you make the first orbital success launch and suddenly that shifts. And I remember you mentioning that basically once you have a product that works, now the job is to go and sell it and like actually get customers and actually start scaling that up what was it like transitioning from a company culture of just designing developing iterating to something that's actually scaling up rocket production and shipping yeah that's a good that is a good question um you know in a previous life uh among other things i was a production design engineer so i know what good production really looks like um and uh i would say it's taking a product from an R &D standpoint and into full volume production is a whole different set of skills and a whole different set of pain.

37:38And there was times during the electron scale up that it was just incredibly, incredibly painful because it was difficult to get all that DNA built within the company. But I look back now and it's just such a core strength across the whole organization um you know and i think any every startup goes from that right to developing their their first widget or thing and then scaling it i mean those scaling challenges are real

38:07Peter Beck:this like idea of production hell um and you know you finally have the thing that works and suddenly the biggest fire is no longer making the thing work it's just scaling the production the thing that works what was it like kind of going through production hell like for rockets yeah it was just like that. Like you can ask anybody there, it's just like that. It's production hell. But I would say that it's not as hellish as it could have been because we designed that vehicle from day one to be produced. So it's not like a bunch of engineers got together and said, let's just see if we can make a rocket.

38:38It's like, let's see if we can make a rocket that will be producible. So, you know, Electron, as far as a launch cadence, scaled faster than the Falcon 9. So from first flight to 50 flights, you know, we are faster than a Falcon 9. And from 50 flights to 100 flights, as long as we keep doing what we're doing, we'll be faster as well. So it was designed very intently to be producible. And then you can say that for just about, you know, certainly Neutron, it's even better.

39:06Peter Beck:But for all of our other satellites and products as well. How do you kind of think about designing something initially that is going to be like expendable and then when do you decide to make the call on like let's work on this massive new project in order to make reusable rocket and like how do you actually again shift the company culture back or not necessarily shift the company culture but shift back into the gear of just building the first iteration of that thing yeah i mean it's not it's not that not that hard really um you know because we do a lot of new stuff all the time um and uh you know we spent quite a lot of time with Electron and Electron's reusability program learning so much.

39:44So I'd say, you know, the muscle memory was there pretty strongly already. But no doubt, you know, we took a lot of learnings from Electron and then, you know, and a lot of the team from Electron and ported them directly over to Neutron. So, yeah, I mean, Electron is a great product, but if we look at, like how we've gone about Neutron, it's just so much better from a production standpoint.

40:10Peter Beck:What about it is better? Well, it's just, firstly, it's less mass sensitive than Electron. Like Electron, every gram counts. So you have to do a whole bunch of things that are from a production standpoint that are suboptimal, but from a mass perspective are critical. Whereas Neutron, we don't have that same constraint. And it's just really nice stuff. Like all of the fluid systems are just built completely off the rocket and then just assemble in as, you know, boom, boom, boom, boom systems. Whereas, you know, on Electron, you're literally having to bend tubes, you know, to pipe stuff in. And then same with electrical systems, you know, the whole electrical system, the complete electrical system is built off the rocket.

40:51And then just one day it gets installed in the entire rocket. Whereas you're not, you know, you're not pulling cables up and down the rocket like you are in Electron. So there's just a whole bunch of stuff that we could do with Neutron, which is way better.

41:03Peter Beck:I think you asked Ashley that you wanted to meet Elon or have dinner with him. And then I think in 2017, you actually did have dinner with him. What was that dinner like? And I remember you said in an interview with him that it may not have been useful for Elon to know that you guys were as serious as you were. Well, you'd have to ask Elon. But yeah, no, I mean, we had kind of at that point, we'd launched a few. And the thing I took away from that is like these companies are the same. Like same problems, same everything. This rocket's big, mine's small, same, same. Like it was very, very, very similar.

41:44But I mean, yes, for sure. Sometimes it's better to just remain off the radar than on the radar.

41:51Peter Beck:If you could go back and not do that dinner, would you? No, I mean, we would have, we scaled anyway. And so we would always be on the radar. When you look out today and you think about the biggest bottlenecks in your mind, what are they? We always have a challenge of feeding talent to the machine. You know, the bar to get into Rocket Lab is extraordinarily high. And I think, you know, everybody says, every CEO says, oh, we've got the best team in the world and all the rest of it. I mean there is a lot of people that are from a lot of other space companies that um that you would respect that just don't make the grade at Rocket Lab so um so the bar is extraordinarily high and we make no apologies for that and then even when you're in you know through the bar or under the bar or over the bar or whatever um no bar no longer involved um like the expectations is super high, super high.

42:46And this place is not for everybody, that is for sure. So, you know, we're just growing so fast, like keeping great talent fed to the organization is I'd say one of the biggest throttles.

42:58Peter Beck:How do you actually like maintain that bar? Like I know Jeff Bezos has this idea of he wants to constantly improve the bar over time so that any new hire is basically like the best hire that they've made in the history of the company. And then over time, it just becomes like this impossibly high standard of quality of human how do you kind of maintain that yeah well it's a great question because you know sometimes um you know a manager will just be so overwhelmed with how much they've got to do they just want a pulse just give me a pulse and um and you know the the recruiting process just it's it's pretty rigid about you know that and also i would say that generally you know enough managers have made enough bad um hires where you know that yeah this person's not exactly what i need and they're not they're not quite bought into the mission and the the culture but you know hey they'll be fine and then you know they're they're not they're not putting in the hours or they're working from home all of a sudden and then they get self-selected I mean, so, you know, it's ultimately not successful.

44:05Peter Beck:If you had to think about the perfect day for Peter Beck, what does that actually involve? Like, what do you do during that 24-hour period? Perfect day? I don't think there is such a thing. I mean, the reality is that I'm the chief engineer, I'm the CEO. My job is to fix it. That's pretty much it, right? and also think forward and grow the company and all those kinds of stuff. So the perfect day would just be to successfully solve a whole bunch of problems. That's when I go home at the end of the day the happiest. It's like, yeah, we finally nailed that or this is a great idea, let's go after that.

44:47Those are the best days. It's when you grind on a problem and you just still don't find a resolution. Those are the tough times.

44:56Peter Beck:What have been the favorite days for you so far? I don't know. To be honest with you, I'm not a very retrospective person. It's just like, what is the next day going to throw at me? So, I mean, look, I mean, there's always great days when we have a really successful launch. I mean, I think one of the more impactful launches for me was our first NASA launch. Because, you know, as a kid growing up, my dream was to go and work for NASA. and I had like this little space shuttle that used to sit on my desk at home, you know, and then it sat on the top of my computer when I started my career at work and that space shuttle still sits on my desk today here at Rocket Lab.

45:35And that was kind of the thing I would look at, like I'm going to do that, I'm going to do that. And, you know, when we actually got to launch a NASA mission and there's a whole bunch of people in mission control wearing NASA T-shirts and high-fiving us and doing it successfully, that meant a lot. It's like that was a big tick.

45:55Peter Beck:I think the first time that you came to America, you like went and talked with a bunch of VCs. Yeah. And there was this day where you came out of a very successful meeting with, I don't know if it was Vinod Khosla or, yeah. And you just like went home and like bought an American flag. I did. Yeah. I went to Whole Foods. Whole Foods. Yeah. It was the nearest supermarket I could find. Yeah. What did it feel like coming to America? What was different about that, like Silicon Valley? Just so invigorating and exciting. Because the great thing about America is anything is possible. Like if you've got a dream and you've got the energy to go and do it, you can do it.

46:34And that is the magic of America. And how crazy was it that a guy from the ass end of a little country can turn up to America and raise a bunch of money to go and build a rocket. Like, it's nuts. And that is an amazing thing about America and also Silicon Valley and venture capital. And like, there's nowhere else in the world you can do that. Like, I mean, if you look at Europe and, you know, why is Europe not as entrepreneurial as America? And it's because you don't, it's not that culture of belief in the culture of we can give it a go and we can make it successful and rah, rah. You know, it's a very much a subdued culture.

47:17It's like, well, don't screw that up and that might fail and all that rest of it. And I think, you know, if you look at the historical developments and why they always come from America, it's because people can just have a crack. And even if it turns to custard, the crazy thing is you can go back to exactly the same person and have a crack on something totally different again, and they'll back you. And that is the magic of America.

47:39Peter Beck:When you were on the flight over, what were you thinking? Well, I knew nothing about how near this worked. I knew nothing. I mean, so I gave myself three weeks to come home with a check or be run out of town. And that was my philosophy. And coming from New Zealand, everybody told me, it's like, oh, Silicon Valley venture capital, that's like a shark tank. And then you're just going to get eaten up and spit out and ripped off. And it's like, nah, not at all. That wasn't your experience? No, no. I mean, quite the opposite. it. And, you know, I spent the first week just figuring out how the game is played because I knew absolutely zero.

48:14So this is where I went around a bunch of, you know, startups and tried to figure out how the game is played. And, you know, in the second week was figuring out who I wanted to talk to. And the third week was I only pitched to three VCs in the end. There's only three VCs that, you know, I felt I wanted to work with and I felt that would get it. And we came home with a check.

48:34Peter Beck:What did Vinod say to you in that meeting? Well, Vinod had invested in Skybox, which was an imaging company that was ultimately bought by Google for half a billion dollars. And Vinod had felt, and that whole team had felt the pain of launch. Like they were launching off Russian ICBMs. So, you know, when I turned up and said, I'm going to build a rocket, there was zero question about whether it was a market or not. Absolutely zero question. Like we 100 % understand there's a massive market here. Yep. The only question I guess was, could I pull it off? And I didn't come there with a dream and only that.

49:14I came there with a successful flight, a sounding rocket to space and a whole bunch of stuff. And I came with a complete one-tenth scale set of plans for the whole rocket, blueprints. And I rolled them out all along the partner's desk in the boardroom, this whole like one-tenth scale blueprint of the rocket. And I had a pump in my hand. And it's like, here's how we're going to do this, guys. So, yeah, I mean, it's lucky enough to convince Vinod that it's worth a go.

49:47Peter Beck:Was there any moment in your head where you weren't sure whether or not the money was going to be there or this was something like a problem that was tacklable at all? Well, at the risk of sounding arrogant, no, because I think if you believe that, then you wouldn't wake up in the morning. I think a successful entrepreneur is an optimist to their core, because if you're not, then if everybody else is telling you it can't be done and you believe it can't be done, then it's never going to be done, is it? So, no, I think you, I mean, you have to temper that with the reality of some of the things.

50:23And I think this is where maybe the balance is good, is like half of my brain is completely entrepreneurial just wanting to go for it. And the other half is like this conservative engineer. So, you know, you fuse those two things together, you know, you get what you get.

50:41Peter Beck:What's been the biggest evolution of your own internal philosophy on how you operate the business and just operate day to day over the past couple of years? It would be interesting to ask somebody else that question because in my mind, it feels like exactly the same. I don't feel like I've changed my management style or my expectations of people or the way we run the business has changed at all. You know, there's certain things that change because they have to, like you're a publicly traded company, so you have to do some things differently. But you'd have to ask somebody else, because at least to me, it just feels like this is the way that it's always been done.

51:22Peter Beck:SpaceX and Elon decided to go public. And for a very long time, for more than 20 years of the company, he was like, I don't even know if SpaceX will ever go public. Yeah. Because he didn't know that public market investors were the type of folks that would be interested in experiencing failure like that. How did you make the decision to go public in the first place? Well, for us, it was always part of the plan. Because it's for a selfish reason and a non-selfish reason. so you know the the selfish reason reason is you know the only thing my parents ever said to me is we don't care what you do as long as you have impact so choose something in your life that you can have impact and you know contribute to the human history basically so you know for me that was that was space and I think that that you can have a meaningful impact but I measure impact and not just like a blip in history.

52:19I measure impact in a long, consistent thing over a long period of time.

52:24Peter Beck:Like an enduring thing? Totally enduring. And one of the reasons why I was very adamant to take the company public was a public company, if you do it right, that is a fact. Many generations of Rocket Lab can go by and this company can be successful for a very long time and by default have impact and then I've done what I was supposed to do. So that's super important. And also being a public company, it really enforces the diligence and the rigor to be successful. If you're a private company, especially if you're a private company and you don't have problems raising capital, then you're just fat and happy for ages until you're not.

53:10And there's no like extreme pressure. Like forcing function. or extreme pressure to develop a product, to get it profitable, to make the company sustainable. Like, you know, there's a lot of checks and balances and a lot of pressure as a public company to make sure that those things become true. And those things ultimately, you know, create longevity. And then, you know, as a spinoff, then they also, you know, create value. So, you know, I had a lot of investors invest in the company and, you know, want to return that value back to them. and any venture capitalists that invested in the company, we've made their whole fund back, which is great.

53:50And also the staff have done really well and all of our investors. So our obligation is to continue to grow the value of this company, which I think is important as well. So like I say, I kind of view it as slightly selfish that I want to build this company that way, way outlives me and can go on and have a long, long impact.

54:12Peter Beck:Is there any decisions that you make with that kind of understanding of this multi-decade year in this, basically until the day that you die, understanding the back of your mind that you might not make if you weren't planning on trying to create this super enduring institution almost? Well, I mean, if you look at this, there's a lot of space companies out there where if their founders and leaders die, I think you would have to question whether or not that company would continue. I think Elon's one of them. I think the keeper of the soul of those companies is Elon and the second that he leaves.

54:45Yeah, well, I mean, there's more than that as well. I mean, there's others there as well. And I just didn't want to be one of those companies. I mean, I want this thing to go on forever. So, you know, that's kind of, you know, a critical point. And I'm also a realist. Like, you know, there'll be a point in time where, you know, there's other people that can run this company better than I can or I just get too old and I'm, you know, I'm like that guy trying to log into his laptop and not been able to do it because it's... So, you know, everybody that comes to this company knows that you have a finite period of time at Rocket Lab.

55:23And that finite period of time might be that you just get exhausted and you want to do something else. or there's other younger, better people that are better than you and you'll be replaced. And the same goes for me. Like there'll be a point in time where there's a better person to run this company. And, you know, I want to make sure that when that happens, this thing doesn't stop.

55:41Peter Beck:If you have a whole bunch of cash in your bank account, it's pretty easy to graph, you know, how long do we have as far as runway goes. But when do you want to be like a profitable business so that you just are like operating off of, you know, you're able to make these big bets and you're completely like with the understanding that your other bets that you've made have succeeded and they're able to fund them? Yep. Well, it's a complex question. And the answer is as soon as possible, because that ensures survival. If you're making money, you will live. If you're not making money, eventually you will die.

56:11So it's survival. Now, you have to play that carefully because, okay, Rocket Lab could be profitable instantly if we just stop developing Neutron. But Neutron unlocks an entire massive opportunity with us building our own constellation and ultimately deploying our own infrastructure and orbit. It's all about risk versus reward. So do you want to have a little company that's profitable and may survive, or do you want to have a much bigger impact and make some investments in these much bigger capabilities? So we're very black and white and impassionate about these sorts of things for us. You know, we don't make decisions based on, you know, feelings and those kinds of things.

56:58It's very much impassionate. You know, we're trying to build profitable, we're trying to build value, which ultimately builds longevity. But, you know, we do also, you know, happy to make the decisions and take the risk to make big investments like Neutron where we can see the outcome of that investment is just going to be like orders of magnitude of scale of company.

57:22Peter Beck:One of the things that Elon did is he just kept on working on basically this idea of launch costs up to orbit or like mass to orbit and then getting the cost down. And then eventually he basically just filled his own supply where now like Starlink is the best business in space, period, end of story. How do you kind of think about figuring out which business to build in space when you're just absorbing all of your own supply? Yeah. Well, for the longest time, I've always said it's going to be really blurry in the future of what is a space company and what is not a space company, especially the big ones.

57:54Like the big space companies of the future, they're going to be blurry. And I think if you looked at SpaceX right now, what is it? Is it an AI company? Is it a communications company? Or is it a space company? But the one thing that sure is shit, if you have the ability to put infrastructure in orbit and you have the ability to make that infrastructure that it is in orbit, then your ability to deliver a service or a solution down on Earth is vastly superior to anybody else. That experiment has been run. That experiment to us is always super obvious. And I think that is clearly where we're tracking.

58:32And I think if we have this another interview in 10 years time, there's going to be a select few of really large space companies that provide a critical part of infrastructure and backbone and orbit. And 100 % of them are going to have their own ride to their own rocket. 100 % of them.

58:50Peter Beck:You had to fast forward five or 10 years out, and you said, just best guess today, what the vast majority of your launch is, like what payload they're carrying, what would that be? What is that business that you create? Yeah, we don't talk about that. Oh. No, look, I mean, we don't talk about it for a number of reasons. One, it's just too early. So, you know, there's no, I'm a very methodical person. So I like to finish one thing before I start the next. And the most important thing is to get Neutron to orbit and get that vehicle scaled. Then we have the capability to deploy whatever infrastructure we need.

59:28You know, we've been methodically building capability in our space systems division to the point now, whether you want to go to Mars, whether you want to go to the moon, whether you want to do national security, the most exquisite thereof, we can do it all. Like, piece of cake. There is nothing we cannot build now in orbit. So, you know, we've put all those building blocks in place.

59:50Peter Beck:You're basically building optionality. 100%. The only thing that we've got left to do is to get a neutron finished. Then we can talk about what infrastructure we'll end up building in space. In 2012, Mark Zuckerberg and Paul Graham were talking together on stage. and I think Facebook had just gone public and their stock was down like 50 % or something like this. And Paul was asking him basically the question of, do you like it when everything is working or do you like to be underestimated? And Mark basically said, I love being underestimated and people not really knowing what I'm capable of. What is your favorite state?

1:00:23Peter Beck:Is it being underestimated? I like everything working, 100%. No, screw that. Yeah, no, I don't need to be felt as the underdog or anything like that. No, I like everything coming and working. Absolutely. What does the scale up of Neutron look like? Yeah, so we'll do a first launch and we'll do a splashdown of that. And that'll give us a really good sense of where we're at with the program. And then all going well, if the program's going well, then we'll slip the barge under the next one and we'll try and stick a landing. And then Neutron will scale a lot faster than even Electron scaled because we've just put in place both from a design perspective but also just from a manufacturing and infrastructure perspective, we're just so far further ahead than we were with the likes of Electron.

1:01:09I mean, you know, the design decisions that we made, carbon composite structure using AFP, automotive fibre placement machine, like it's just nuts how quick we can make a tank or make structures with that machine. It's just, yeah, and how cheap we can do it. So, you know, we've chosen various kind of, you know, paths that that are just infinitely scalable i remember starship initially it was going to be

1:01:35Peter Beck:this like carbon fiber basically structure and then they swapped it to like a special alloy of steel dust dance yeah yeah are you doing anything new on like the material side yeah absolutely yeah i mean um so it's a it's a complicated um so a rocket is a giant engineering compromise um like if we're if we're having a design review and all the all the subsystems are in a room together and one of them is happy, then something's gone wrong. Like everybody should be equally as miserable because everything is a giant engineering compromise. And carbon is, strength to weight ratio is just vastly superior to any other material.

1:02:13Like it's four times better than stainless steel, for example. For the same strength, it's one quarter of the weight. But with that comes other challenges. And we've been able to solve these challenges through a lot of this automation with AFP machines. So, you know, the structures of Neutron are just absurdly light, which is, you know, which enables you to, you know, take pressure off other areas like rocket engines. Our rocket engines don't have to be like on the limit of grenades. They can be backed right off and just sort of, you know, a relatively unstressed engine. And that's because, you know, we've had, our structures are so light that, you know, we can back some performance off the propulsion.

1:02:56Peter Beck:What's been the biggest unlock over the past like 20 years that you wouldn't have expected, like most unexpected thing that have happened? Well, there's lots of things. There's both from a technology standpoint and also I would say capital because it is a big one, because we're always in this position where we have vastly less resources than our competitors. and even as a public company, that is true. But as a public company, we've been able to harness the capital access that we have and just look how fast this business has grown. Year on year, it's just crazy. Not just organically, but inorganically, we're able to acquire capabilities and grow those as well.

1:03:42So the line here is fairly vertical with respect to that. So, you know, going public was a great capital unlocker for us to go and, you know, really, really grow. I mean, we went public with one product and now we have hundreds and we're building, you know, complete as a prime contractor for the U.S. government on national security. So a lot of that was unlocked by, you know, having that ability to access that capital.

1:04:10Peter Beck:I've gotten this overwhelming sense of just relentless optimism from you and from just the team in general. What is the importance of having just extreme optimism? Well, I mean, I think, I think, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's absolutely critical. But I think what a boring person if you're always down. I mean, like, would you want to work with somebody who is just like took the negative side of the angle? I mean, never. But the thing is, most people aren't like you just constantly. have a smile on your face every time I see you. Yeah, well, I mean, I'm having fun. So it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not anything other than that.

1:04:48But no, I think, I think there's a lot to be optimistic about. Like this is, we're doing fun stuff and we're doing big stuff that's important. So I don't, not sure how you could be anything but an optimist in this, in this industry. And I, and it probably, to be fair, it probably does attract optimists because, you know, the rocket gods are trying to crush you every every chance they get so you have to you know you have to be a little bit a little bit sunny side up