Rocket Lab HQ Tour with Sir Peter Beck | Factory Tour: Part I

0:00Sir Peter Beck:If you turn up tomorrow and say I want to build a thousand satellites, good luck. It's a Capstone mission to the moon we did for NASA a few years ago that was done out of here. Really? Yep. The Electron rocket was under$100 million and 80 people put the first rocket into orbit. These particular missions are very difficult missions. They're like 12-year lifespan operating in nasty, nasty radiation and they're missions that just cannot fail. We have 13 acres of factory around the world. Yeah. So this is a pretty small piece of rocket lab. Is there anything we haven't seen we're not allowed to see?

0:28Sir Peter Beck:Lots. We just saw a tiny push in the queue. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:41We are here today at Rocket Lab in Long Beach with Sir Peter Beck. Thanks for having us.

0:48Sir Peter Beck:Oh, thanks for coming. So what are we going to see today? Well, we'll try and show you a little bit of Rocket Lab. You know, we're spread across the entire United States and Germany and New Zealand and a little bit in Australia. So there's a lot to see, but we'll show you headquarters here, a little bit of satellite manufacturing and some engine developments. Amazing. Let's walk through. You have one of the coolest entrances I've seen. So does it remind you of anything? This is how I test how much of a sci-fi nerd you are. Star Trek? No, it's probably a little bit old. It's 2001 Space Odyssey.

1:21Oh, that's exactly what I was getting at.

1:25Sir Peter Beck:The best sci-fi movie ever made because it's the most accurate. But this bit is supposed to remind you of the bit where they shut down the Howl 9000 computer, you know. Don't do that, Dave. You know, it's like that. Do you have any other inspiration of sci-fi movies in here? No. No? Just the one, yeah. Well, when we walked in here earlier, we were kind of stuck to the timeline because it's jam-packed with so much stuff. There's so much going on. So it might be cool to walk through some of that and kind of show what you have in the lobby area it seems like a showcase. Yeah well like any company it's like the 20-year overnight success so started the company in 2006 down in New Zealand and sort of between 2006 and 2009 we were we were like our own little technology development house and in 2009 we launched our first suborbital rocket called RTA-1 and we were the first private company in the southern hemisphere to reach space Not all, but just into space.

2:28Just three years after starting.

2:30Sir Peter Beck:Yeah. Yep. And then, and with like 80, I think we had a total capitalization of under 100 ,000 New Zealand dollars, which is like 60 ,000 US dollars at that point. Wow. And to think there's billionaires starting companies now that don't actually reach space. This is true. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the success stories of Rocket Lab has been, we have this saying, well, it's actually we stole it from Ernest Rutherford, and that's why the engine is called Rutherford. He said, we have no money, so we have to think. And that's kind of the ethos of the company. We came from very humble beginnings, and on that rocket actually is like swage lock fittings that I'd salvaged from a junkyard.

3:12Sir Peter Beck:Really? Well, yeah, because I could only afford the ferrules, not the cost of the fittings. So I would get the fitting from the junkyard and buy the$3.20 ferrules to put in it and recondition it into a fitting. So it was seriously constrained stuff. But from that adversity comes good ideas. And then in 2010, we won some work with DARPA and developed a new kind of propellant and propulsion system. Did a little instantizer rocket launch UAV. and then 2013 is really where we started to grow up so that's when I went out of New Zealand and came here to the United States and started raising our first venture capital so Kozla Ventures were the first folks to put in some venture capital into the entity and at that point we flipped from being a New Zealand company into a US company and Kozla put five million dollars in for the for the series a round which you know at that time for me that was the most insane amount of money imaginable yeah um but for that you know we got our first uh 3d printed uh rutherford engine hot fired and proved proved out a whole lot of composite structures and stuff then did the b round in 2014 with uh with uh bessemer leading that and then 2015 we broke ground on uh and launch complex one in new zealand so that's you know it was the very first private orbital launch site.

4:38Sir Peter Beck:2016 we finished it. 2017 we launched our first vehicle and we raised our D round which became a unicorn at that point. That's when things started to move a bit. And then 2018 we launched three rockets and probably the fourth rocket in the stable there number four was one of the, I guess for me personally, one of the more satisfying ones because, you know, prior to this, I was, you know, a kid sitting in New Zealand dreaming, working for NASA. Like I had this little plastic space shuttle that would sit in my desk beside me. And then when I started, you know, my career in engineering, it used to sit on the top of my toolbox and then the top of my laptop and so on and so forth.

5:26Sir Peter Beck:And, you know, I never really got to be employed by NASA, but I got to launch their payloads. So that was... And you couldn't be employed by NASA because you didn't go to college, right? Yeah, no, I was objectively too dumb. And also foreign national, so foreign national, no degree, you know, it wasn't looking good. How does that bleed into the culture here? I've heard that you're a eight wire, a wire eight type of person. What is that? Oh, no, it's a New Zealand saying, number eight wire. I actually personally hate it. Really? Because it means, well, it's got two connotations. In New Zealand, it means to, you know, to bodge stuff together.

6:02Sir Peter Beck:And I'm the opposite of a bodge stuff together kind of guy. But it's kind of subliminal meaning is more making do with not much, which I think is technically accurate. Yeah. So how does that, even from the beginning, how does that bleed into the culture today? Well, today, you know, if you look at what we achieve with the amount of capital resources that we expend, it's always pretty significantly better than most people. For example, the Electron rocket, I think it was under$100 million and 80 people put the first rocket into orbit. And at the time, our nearest competitor was Virgin Orbit, and that was funded by Sir Richard Branson.

6:44Sir Peter Beck:And in the end, I think Richard put$1.2 billion dollars into that company before it ultimately went bankrupt with a handful of launches under their belt. So yeah, we are never the most well-financed, although as a public company, we're certainly much more endowed than we ever have been. But I mean, it's sort of hard-baked into the culture here that everything is ground right down to the very last bit. There was an interview we did where someone mentioned that startups often die from indigestion of funding. Totally. Absolutely. If I look back and think of lots of startups that I've seen or been involved with, the ones that have failed most spectacularly have been the ones that have been funded the most well, the most significantly.

7:36This episode is brought to you by Brex, my favorite. it. You become what you spend on. And I refuse to spend my time on work that shouldn't exist. Expense reports, receipt chasing, and manual closes. The companies building what's next from Vercel, OpenAI, Anthropic, Granola, and Deepgram all made the same call. They all run on Brex. Brex is the intelligent finance platform that combines cards, expenses, and banking into a single stack with agentic finance built in. AI agents that handle expenses automatically, enforce policy before spend happens, and close your books in minutes. That's why Sorcery runs on Brex, so I can spend time on building and not busy work.

8:21It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com slash sorcery. That's B-R-E-X dot com slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. Bye. Turing is training the next generation of AI with tasks that require real expertise and real world judgment. That's why companies like NVIDIA, Anthropic, Salesforce and Gemini partner with Turing. Turing builds realistic reinforcement learning environments and data systems based on real operational traces. The kind of infrastructure Frontier Labs need to train superintelligence.

8:59Sir Peter Beck:Visit Turing.com slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. So as we walk through the timeline, there's a really interesting point where you just 2021, you go public and you make a ton of acquisitions. So what kind of was the process for going public here? And how do you see that happening to today with everything that's going on with SpaceX? Yeah, so there was a couple of reasons to go public. One kind of logically and one kind of almost sort of logically, but personal. And I think being a public company teaches you extreme discipline. Like you can't be messing around as a public company and, you know, wasting capital and not delivering.

9:39Sir Peter Beck:So, you know, the company has always had a really strong culture of delivery. But as a public company, it's just even much, much more intense. And then sort of the personal reason why I wanted to take the company public is I'm trying to build a multi-generational space company. and so many companies in this industry are defined by their founders or a small group of people and if you have to ask yourself when they ultimately kick the bucket, what happens to those companies? And the only thing that my parents ever said to me as I was growing up was have impact, have the most amount of impact in your lifetime.

10:17Sir Peter Beck:So you can have amount of impact when you're alive, but if you can keep that impact going after you're dead, then by proxy you have a much, much larger impact. So the idea here with going public is enforcing that discipline so that when I'm long gone, this thing just keeps going and going and going and going. Whereas a private company, it's like, if the founder, CEO and all of that just carks it one day, then what truly happens to those companies? It's interesting because this is when you start making a heavy amount of acquisitions, which has become one of the defining factors of the company as you build out the entire platform.

10:56You're not just a launch company, and I think that's a big misconception. You do a lot of components and space manufacturing and that kind of thing. So how do you see the evolution of Rocket Lab as we look through this entire timeline and what goes forward?

11:10Sir Peter Beck:Yeah, it seems to just be a constant exponential ramp up. That's certainly what it feels like. um and you know to to your point um 2021 was uh a very busy year we went public and acquired three companies don't recommend that that is is is really painful um but uh you know why because of regulatory stuff with each acquisition well so so anytime you acquire a company it's it's it's like um you know you go to a used car lot it's gonna they're gonna hate me for this analogy but You go up to a used car lot and you look around the nice, big polished car and it all looks great and it's all shiny. And then, you know, it's not until the drive home that you realize that, like, the visor's squeaking, the wheels rumbling, and all of the things that just aren't quite right.

11:54Sir Peter Beck:Yeah. And so, you know, there's no such thing as a small acquisition. And ironically, like, some of the smaller companies have consumed vastly amounts more time than some of the bigger companies. So it's just a lot of work to integrate a company in and, you know, aggregate all the financial systems and get the culture where you want it. It's just a huge piece of work. So doing three at once was just, that was not fun. But ultimately it was great. We got there in the end. But I mean, to your point, I think people focus on the rocket because it's the big firework in the sky and everyone gets emotional and it's all very cool.

12:34Sir Peter Beck:It's hard to get emotional about a reaction wheel, you know, a little, or a Star Trek, or a little component that goes into a spacecraft. But the reality is that, you know, launch is a huge moat, but all of these spacecraft components are huge moats as well. Because, you know, it doesn't matter how much capital you've got. If you turn up tomorrow and say, I want to build a thousand satellites, good luck. Like, it's just not happening, because the supply chain is so small and fractured. So we saw that, you know, to get to this end-to-end space company in our vision, we needed to own all the components that go into the spacecraft so that we could literally build any spacecraft we want.

13:13Wow. Enduring global leadership demands advanced mission systems and technologies. At Applied Aerospace and Defense, they unleash the power of precision manufacturing with unmatched scale and agility. Their customers can focus on innovation, knowing their production is backed by an undeniable heritage. Applied Aerospace and Defense, engineered for the edge, trusted to deliver. Visit AppliedAD.com. Today's episode is sponsored by VCX by Fundrise, the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. Learn more at GetVCX.com. Some of you may not have heard this yet, but our sponsor Public just launched something called Generated Assets, and it brings AI into investing in a way I've honestly never seen before.

14:04Here's how it works. You type in an idea like AI-powered supply chain companies with positive free cash flow or defense tech companies growing revenue over 25 % year over year. Public's AI then dispatches a swarm of agents that scan every single U.S. stock, evaluates them, and instantly builds a custom index around your thesis. What really stands out is how clearly it explains why each stock is included. And before you invest, you can even backtest your idea against the S &P 500, so you're making decisions with real context, not just guessing. And beyond generated assets, Public lets you invest in stocks, bonds, options, crypto, all in one place.

14:40They'll even give you an uncapped 1 % match when you transfer your investments over from another platform. If you want to build a portfolio that actually reflects your thesis, visit public.com slash sorcery. Paid for by public investing. Full disclosures in the description. Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes. Hire anyone anywhere. Get visas handled fast. And get back to building. Visit Deel.com slash sorcery. That's D-E-E-L dot com slash sorcery. So we have mission control in here as well.

15:15Sir Peter Beck:Yeah, one of five. So this is generally for satellite operations. You know, sometimes we'll do launch vehicle stuff in here as well, but it's mainly for satellite operations. So, you know, this mission control sent some really cool missions, you know, a couple of spacecraft escapade on their way to Mars. That was all controlled out of here. The Capstone mission to the moon we did for NASA a few years ago, that was done out of here. Really? Yep. You did it out of this location? Yep. Oh, wow. And New Zealand, actually, both, because it was a 24-7 operation, so each control room would just hand off to, it was one of the advantages of having things in opposite hemispheres is like it's always sunshine somewhere.

15:58So, yeah, no, it was really good. Did you discover anything on the moon that you can't share, but you're going to share today?

16:04Sir Peter Beck:No, no, no aliens, no, no. That mission was actually the very first part of the Artemis program. So we went into a really weird orbit that the Gateway mission was going to go into to prove that that orbit was stable. So it was a crazy, crazy mission. In fact, that's the Capstone spacecraft behind us. That's the engineering. That one went to the moon. Yeah, well, not that one, because the one that went to the moon is about 5 million miles in almost a heliocentric orbit around the sun. So that's a spare one. R.I.P. Yeah. It's like contact. You always build two. Yeah. So the headquarters, we have this like cool lobby.

16:47We have mission control. Yep. What are we going to see behind these doors? Yeah.

16:50Sir Peter Beck:So behind these doors are some of our satellite manufacturing. So we have a number of programs being built in there. We always like to have a really cool program. Not that they're not all cool, but a particularly cool one. So generally what that means is we always have a mission to Mars or a mission to another planet in the clean room there. But yeah, we'll go on through here and you can see some of the satellite manufacturing that's going on. You have a super special dream mission of Venus, right? I do, yeah. So what's that about? In short, it's about, you know, can we find life in the universe?

17:25Sir Peter Beck:Because I think that's probably one of the biggest questions as a human species that we can answer, right? is like are we the only ones in the universe or not and venus has this really unique cloud layer about 50 kilometers in that in theory can at least support some kind of life and there's been traces of phosphine gas found in there phosphine gas only comes from organic symbiosis so the mission is to go there and actually see if we can detect life yeah i am late to the game on this movie but i recently watched project hail mary oh yeah yeah yeah i'm obsessed with it there you go when are you going to start using astrophage for your promotion yeah that would be good well i'll tell you what burning dinosaurs is not getting us here that's for sure yeah and so you guys i think in here you're doing some electric is that what i yeah so this this um this is a one of our spacecraft programs so you can see some and some of the buses in the background um for a particular customer um and you know this is a production line so you start at one end and sort to move over to the other end and you have a spacecraft.

18:30Sir Peter Beck:And that little tent is the electric propulsion integration assembly and test in there. So that's where we integrate these little electric thrusters. And what's the use case for electric thrusters? Good for station keeping, a little bit of orbit raising, and just avoids having tremendous amounts of chemical thrusters on board. These particular missions are very difficult missions. They're like, you know, 12 year lifespan operating and nasty, nasty radiation. And they're missions that just cannot fail. So I think there's always a big difference between, you know, sort of low Earth orbit missions that have a short duration and, you know, are allowed to fail.

19:13Sir Peter Beck:Most of the stuff we do is like super hard, you know, defense related or interplanetary and stuff like that where you just can't have stuff fail. Yeah. We just passed by one of your vending machines. Yeah. What is in that? I just saw some tape and some electrical components. Oh yeah, no, it's like supplies. Yeah, yeah, not chips. What is that? Well, it just makes it easier for the staff if they need various bits and pieces, consumables for the spacecraft build. Rather than going to a storeroom and having to stand in line and asking for somebody, you can just go to the vending machine and get it.

19:48Sir Peter Beck:It's just way faster. That's innovation. Wow. I'm sure if you asked them, they'd be rather chocolate bars. So, okay, so we have this big, huge facility behind us. Are we allowed to talk about this? Yeah, so this is a thermal model of one of our spacecraft that we built for a customer. So it gives you a sense of sort of some of the scale here. These are just aluminum blocks to represent thermal masses. So something like this, we'll build the complete spacecraft and then we'll go into thermal vibe and shock testing before we actually start to put the real one together. Where do you do all your testing?

20:32Sir Peter Beck:It's all done in this facility. So in there, we could go in there, but it would take forever to get you booted up into extremely flattering gear. But there's shock testing and environmental testing and functional testing in there. so we're in just one of how many buildings on this site uh three buildings on the site and um overall i did the calculation we have 13 acres of factory around the world yeah so this is a pretty small piece of rocket lab oh my gosh yeah so you have new zealand you have here you virginia yeah we have albuquerque uh tucson arizona um and a whole bunch of stuff in middle river um You know, that's where the neutron rocket is being built.

21:19Sir Peter Beck:And then Toronto in Canada. And then Germany, Menarik in Germany.

21:28Sir Peter Beck:And I'm blanking on a whole bunch of Stennis in Mississippi. So, yeah, a whole bunch of places. How many employees are in this L.A. facility? I think there's about 800, yeah, thereabouts, over the two campuses. That's a lot. Are we allowed to look in here? Yeah. I always have to ask. You never know. No, I know. But you have to look in here. This is beautiful. This is beautiful. Yeah. So this is a project we're doing for NASA called LOCKSAT. So that big, like, Christmas bauble on the top is actually a sphere full of liquid oxygen. So we're helping NASA figure out how to store liquid oxygen on orbit for very long periods of time, which is super important if you're going you know interplanetary and doing long duration missions people are now trying to mine that on the moon yeah yeah yeah yeah well it's beats beats having to carry it there i guess so yeah are you excited or are you hopeful about the moon uh the lunar programs and well look i mean i'm like any space geek i'm super excited yeah but i guess um where we play in the moon stuff is we provide a lot of components and systems to other folks doing the moon stuff and that's mainly because there's a bit of whiplash there like America's going to the moon no no no now we're going to Mars now we're going to the moon again now we're going to Mars and I know this time we're really going to the moon and that's that's fine but when you're a moon company that just plays havoc with your balance sheet and you're just you're just swinging around all over the place so we get to play in these in these programs but we like to play at a system level rather than a mission level.

23:06What do you think the biggest mistake is that these new entrants to the space ecosystem, apparently the space economy doesn't actually exist, but what do you think the biggest mistakes people, new entrants are making into the space ecosystem?

23:18Sir Peter Beck:That's a big question because there's so many different facets of it. I would say more generally just the underestimation of how hard it is, but also So, you know, making sure that the most amount of failure, I'd say, is because people don't build reliable stuff. And it's easy to kind of rush it and throw something on orbit. But I think the distance between putting something on orbit and putting something on orbit that can last 12 years or go to a planet, that gap is just massive. So, you know, if you want a valley of death, that's kind of it. We're just about finished at this location. Is there anything we haven't seen we're not allowed to see?

24:05Sir Peter Beck:Lots. A lot? We just saw a tiny portion of it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, we have a lot of national security programs, so these are sort of the missions that we can show you. Bummer. Yeah. Damn. It's still pretty cool. It's really cool. I'm not knocking it. It's really cool. Okay, so now we'll go over to the Engine Propulsion Lab. Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.bc where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email and also go deeper on our podcast interviews subscribe to sorcery today and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on youtube spotify apple or wherever you listen link in description to sign up