All About Space speaks to the CEO and founder of Rocket Lab about the company’s successes in 2019, what the future holds in its collaboration with NASA and how SpaceX’s Starlink could impact astronomy

Interviewed by Lee Cavendish

All iamges © RocketLab

INTERVIEW BIO

Peter Beck

Peter Beck founded Rocket Lab in 2006 and still operates as CEO. He grew up in the city of Invercargill, New Zealand, developing a passion for rocketry. This passion led to the creation of his company and its influential Electron rocket, with Peter at the helm as the company’s head visionary and chief engineer.

He has been given many awards back in his home country of New Zealand, receiving the Cooper Medal, presented by New Zealand’s Royal Society, New Zealander of the Year and New Zealand EY Entrepreneur of the Year. He has also received the Meritorious Medal from the Royal Aeronautical Society.

Rocket Lab had a very successful 2019, with six successful launches, and you managed to build your American base. How do you look back on that year personally?

2019 was a solid year. 2020, at least pre-COVID, was going to be a much bigger year. I’m super proud of the team last year. Like you say, we got six vehicles away, which put us in place for being the fourth most launched rocket in the world [that year]. This year we were planning to double that, and we’ll see if we can still hold to that plan.

We’ve got the first flight of our Photon satellite platform. We acquired a satellite company with similar components and we’ve moved much further down the road for recovery as well. So 2020, even though it’s early days, is shaping up to be a really big year, but I’m super proud of the team for 2019.

To come along so quickly in just a year is a massive achievement. What do you put that down to?

Relentless execution by a very dedicated team. That’s all it comes down to. I think Rocket Lab’s approach is really good. We try to strike the balance between spending time in analysis and spending time on testing. It is striking that balance - if you spend too much time on one side, like analysis, it will take years and years and years to build anything. If you spend too much on the other side, in testing, and you just keep blowing stuff up, you don’t move forward. It’s finding that middle ground where there’s an optimum point and you get the maximum development.