Who is the most successful entrepreneur in the commercial space industry? Most people would say Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, a company valued at more than $200 billion in late June, according to Forbes.
But New Zealander Peter Beck is also part of the conversation. Rocket Lab, the company he founded and runs, celebrated its 50e commercial rocket launch in June, reaching that milestone faster than SpaceX. (A few days ago, it extended its streak to 51, with the launch of an Electron rocket that launched a satellite into low Earth orbit for a Japanese company.)
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If Beck gets much less attention than Musk, it has something to do with his personality type.
“I’m an introvert by nature, so it’s unnatural for me to want to be ‘in the spotlight.’ And I think Elon is the opposite,” Beck tells Deadline. “And if you’re optimizing for maximum attention, then that explains a lot of his decisions. Ultimately, I’m trying to have maximum impact on the planet, and I think you’re on the planet for a while, and ultimately the success of your time on the planet is judged by how much impact you had on the number of people you could have. So I don’t optimize for attention, I optimize for that.”
Beck steps out of the introvert’s natural comfort zone to star in the new HBO documentary Wild Wild SpaceThe film directed by Ross Kauffman explores the remarkable mix of minds trying to put Musk and some of his fellow space-obsessed billionaires through their paces.
“We’re never going to outspend Elon Musk. We’re not going to outspend Richard Branson, and we’re not going to outspend Jeff Bezos, and that’s our competition,” Beck notes. “The only way to win is to think harder. And sometimes, when you don’t have the resources, you have to come up with more innovative ideas.”
One of Rocket Lab’s innovative ideas is the development of the Neutron rocket, a 131-foot-tall behemoth that will support large payloads and human space travel beyond Earth’s orbit. It is designed as a direct competitor to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. Despite its name, Rocket Lab sees itself as much more than “just” a rocket maker. Last year, it won a half-billion-dollar contract from the U.S. Space Development Agency to build 18 spacecraft as part of a constellation of military satellites.
“What we’re trying to build here at Rocket Lab is something really unique. We’re trying to build an end-to-end space company,” Beck explained. “If you look at the really big space companies of the future, they’re not just going to be a launch company or a satellite company. They’re going to be a company that provides a service to a person, a government, or a company. And that’s where we’re going to get to as quickly as possible.”
As seen in Wild Wild SpaceBeck achieved everything he did without the benefit or need of a college education. He grew up in Invercargill, New Zealand in a middle-class environment (unlike Musk, who grew up in great wealth).
“I was lucky that from my earliest memory I knew exactly what I wanted to do and that was that I wanted to work on rockets and work in space,” he recalls. “And the original plan was to go work for NASA, but as an untrained engineer and a foreigner, that wasn’t feasible. So the only logical solution was to just do it myself.”
Without the encouragement of his mother, a teacher, and his father, a museum director, he might have ended up in a much more boring profession.
“I remember when I was in high school, the local school invited my parents to a family meeting with the careers counselor, because the careers counselor thought my ambitions were totally unrealistic and that I should go work in the local aluminum factory as a welder,” he says. “I was just lucky that I had parents who didn’t put limits on your ambitions.”
Wild Wild Space explores how SpaceX has become crucial to U.S. defense as a major Pentagon contractor (it was awarded a $1.8 billion contract “for a powerful new spy system involving hundreds of satellites with Earth-imaging capabilities,” according to a Reuters report earlier this year). As such, Musk wields considerable influence over U.S. foreign policy and has inserted himself into geopolitics by dictating certain terms under which his Starlink satellite system can be deployed. Is it healthy for the world’s richest person (a man often branded a megalomaniac by critics) to have acquired so much influence? Beck is hesitant to attack Musk, but offers a measured assessment.
“I think the obvious truth is that anyone who has any sort of [an] unmanageable amount of power, sometimes it works out well and sometimes it works out badly,” he notes. “I think it’s become pretty clear in my industry that it’s been described as an unintended monopoly. And I can assure you there’s no accident to it. And that’s fine. He’s a very, very tough businessman and that’s fine, but I don’t know of any monopoly that has survived the test of time. And so we’re trying to at least partially balance the system with our big Neutron rocket. And there are a lot of people and a lot of customers who are very happy to see that happen.”
Musk’s SpaceX suffered a rare setback in July when a Falcon 9 rocket failed to properly launch a satellite. The company said it traced the cause to “a tear in a sensor line for a pressure sensor attached to the vehicle’s oxygen system.” Yet another argument for not leaving the commercial rocket business to one company. Another lesson from that failed SpaceX mission? Launching a rocket, whether you’re SpaceX or Rocket Lab, is extremely challenging.
“Every day we wake up and go to work and we fight with physics. And that’s just the nature of the job. Somewhere between 1 and 3 percent of the total weight of the rocket is actually the payload that you’re lifting. A rocket is 92 percent fuel, 2 or 3 percent payload, and the rest is structure. And fundamentally, it’s just very, very difficult to do and there’s zero margin for error,” Beck said. “There’s just incredibly small safety margins. You’re in an incredibly tough environment and everything has to be 100 percent perfect 100 percent of the time, and that’s really hard to do.”
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