Rocket man

Peter Beck never went to university. Before Rocket Lab, New Zealand would have been considered one of the last places on the planet to enter the ‘space race’. Tracing how this extraordinary business managed to get lift-off should both surprise and inspire you.

In 1967 an Invercargill engineer achieved the seemingly impossible task of setting the world land speed record on the salt flats of Utah after years of perfecting his classic Indian motorcycle.

Burt Munro’s story was brilliantly conveyed in the 2005 movie The World’s Fastest Indian, starring Sir Anthony Hopkins.

Fast forward to January 2018. Another Invercargill-born engineer achieves another seemingly impossible goal – officially entering the orbital launch business when his Electron rocket, launched from Mahia Peninsula, successfully makes orbit, enabling the start of a programme to launch satellite payloads for major clients worldwide.

As with Munro’s detractors, there were those who thought it couldn’t be done. But in the mind of Peter Beck, founder, CTO and CEO of Rocket Lab, it was never a case of if he would achieve his goal, always a case of when.

As it turns out conquering space has been Beck’s ambition from a very young age. He grew up in a family with strong engineering roots – a family where ‘thinking big because nothing’s impossible’ was always encouraged.

“We were always encouraged to do the biggest possible thing that you can do,” he recalls. “Things that will have a real, significant and positive impact on the world. My ambition was always space.”

Many people will be surprised that Beck never went down the path of university study. The man who heads up an innovative space-race enterprise with no university degree? How can that be?

“I started off doing a trade in toolmaking, but for me, it was always about the rocket,” explains Beck. “The trade gave me the hand skills to build what I needed to build.

“The plan was always to go to university, but to learn the trade first. I think the best engineers are those who have both the theoretical and practical knowledge. I started off on the practical journey and then I did my apprenticeship, and as soon as I finished my apprenticeship, I got promoted into the design office.

“After work, I would go and build rockets.” 

After completing his apprenticeship at Fisher & Paykel Beck’s university plans were ditched and he subsequently secured a job as a project engineer for a superyacht company, where he schooled up on project management. It also taught him a lot about how to manage different kinds of people – from multi-billionaire owners through to the guy on the shop floor.

After hours he kept building rockets. 

He then went on to work for Industrial Research Limited (IRL), a Crown Research Institute which later merged into Callaghan Innovation, where he learnt about the deeply technical parts of some of the systems he wanted to create. It’s also where he met Sir Stephen Tindall, who has invested more than $150 million in fledgling businesses, and was impressed by Beck’s ambitions.

Once again, all the time, Beck kept on building his rockets.

Then in 2006 he left IRL to launch Rocket Lab.

“Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if you go to university or not – you can end up in the same place. You just have a different approach to getting there.”

“In regard to the lessons I learned along the way, I think there are two ways you can learn,” reflects Beck. “One way is to go to university and learn about how to learn. Or, you can go and do it in an industry and achieve exactly the same outcome.

“Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if you go to university or not – you can end up in the same place. You just have a different approach to getting there.”

Selling the hard sell

Looking back, 41-year-old Beck admits securing financial backing for his rocket business was a hard sell. New Zealand had zero space heritage. Rocket Lab required a bilateral treaty, an entire regulatory framework, “enormous amounts of investment” and the world’s only private launch pad. ‘Hard sell’ is an understatement.

“If you wrote everything down at the start, you’d have said it was largely implausible to do,” says Beck. “But, I went to Silicon Valley and met with only three people. I gave myself three weeks to be run out of town, or come home with a cheque, and I came home with a cheque.

“What got us over the line was the fact that we had developed a viable, achievable solution to a real industry problem.

“It’s important to remember it’s not just about the money, it’s about the team investing in your business. Building your investor network is just as important as any kind of team you’re building, backing any discipline.

“Rockets are a capital-intensive business, but we’re now seeing revenue from booking flights and we’ll be cashflow positive this year.”

Today Rocket Lab is growing at breakneck speed. When NZBusiness contacted Beck in June the company was employing around five people a week. It has quickly grown from a relatively small R&D business into a multinational corporation.

While Beck and his team have to deal with multiple challenges, he says the biggest daily challenge is simply managing growth.

Of course, additional stress is associated with the launch of each US$5.7 million Electron rocket. There’s a lot riding on it – not least of which the ten tonnes of liquid oxygen and kerosene needed to get the rocket into orbit in just nine minutes.

“Every time you roll that rocket out, you’re on display to the whole world,” says Beck. “It’s not like you can develop a product on the back blocks of the laboratory and if things don’t go well, no one will know about it. You’re on show 100 percent of the time.

“From an engineering perspective, you’re doing the most technically challenging thing you can do. There is nothing harder than going to space.”

So how does he deal with stress and stay on top of everything?

“You just have to deal with it,” he says. “You reach a certain level of stress and you don’t go past it. You can keep piling more and more on the top and it doesn’t make any difference.

“There’s so much hanging off a launch because in every launch you [have the responsibility of] a customer’s spacecraft.”

Married with two children, Beck acknowledges his strong family support. “I prioritise, and I accept that when you’re trying to do something as an entrepreneur, that this is your life.

“You just have to accept it. This is what comes with the business and you need to keep your eye on the objective you’re trying to achieve.”

Technically challenging the launches may be, but the technology deployed in each rocket, built at the company’s HQ and production facility in California, is state-of-the-art – complete with 3D-printed engine components and battery-driven fuel pumps. Keeping a tight lid on costs and overheads is one reason why Rocket Lab can put satellites into space for a fraction of the price of the overseas competition.

Progress vs expectations

While the casual observer may think Rocket Lab has exceeded all expectations in terms of progress – it hasn’t even matched Beck’s personal expectations, and people who know him well will understand why.

“I wanted to be further along than this because the small satellite industry needs better access to orbit right now,” he says. “I would have liked to have been here five years ago, but it takes time to build that network, the capability and credibility.

“In saying that, if you look at all the other metrics, we are ahead of the game by a long shot. If you look at SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch history you’ll see they launched one a year for the first four years. Rocket Lab is going to do five launches this year. It took SpaceX five attempts to get on orbit, and us only two.

“We’ve grown the company to a billion dollars in under four years and that’s not bad! So, if you look at the metrics we are doing really well.”

One thing’s for sure – Beck is extremely grateful for the level of support he’s received since he started Rocket Lab. “The New Zealand Government and US government have been very forward-thinking in listening to what we needed to do to open access to space and build the regulatory frameworks that will support that. Beyond this, the support of the team, their families, investors and our board has been invaluable.”

He says it takes a village to get a company like Rocket Lab to where it is today.

“There’s not one person who deserves thanks more than anyone else. It’s a combined thanks to the team because you can have a vision and you can raise money, but ultimately you hire the team and the team is what executes.

“So, my biggest thanks goes to the Rocket Lab team!”

Go big, go global

With Beck steering what is generally considered one of New Zealand’s most high-profile entrepreneurial enterprises, it’s only natural that he gets asked for advice by other young aspiring entrepreneurs. He says the best business advice he ever received was that if you want to take your business global, then focus on the American dollar.

“Go after the big problems that require big solutions and big markets. It doesn’t make any difference if it’s a little business or a big business – it’s the same level of hard work.” 

“My best advice is to go big – go after the big problems that require big solutions and big markets. It doesn’t make any difference if it’s a little business or a big business – it’s the same level of hard work,” he says.

In New Zealand, we don’t go big enough, take on the big problems, or build the big companies. We seem to just stop once we get to Australia.”

Knowing what he knows now, would he have done anything different along the journey?

“There would have been things I could have done differently, but I certainly don’t reflect [on them] and wish I’d done things differently. I think all those things shape you and you learn from them. So I have no regrets.

“Would I do it exactly the same again? Probably not, but I’m not upset in any sense that I’ve done things the way I have.”

Beck was recently named one of the winners in the 2018 Kea World Class New Zealand Awards (see sidebox), which prompted NZBusiness to ask him what he’d like to be remembered for from his lifetime’s work.

Somewhat surprisingly he doesn’t want to be remembered for anything. “I don’t care if people remember me or not. What I’d like is to use my lifetime to increment the planet and our species forward a little bit,” he says.

“My view on the world is that you’re put on the planet and you have such a short amount of time to achieve something. It’s a ridiculously short amount of time. So, if I can play a role in improving life on Earth and helping humanity that little bit, that’s good to me.”

Beck says he’s just getting started.

“This is the beginning for me. The goal for 2018 is just to streamline production and get the launch cadence up.

“Beyond that, you’ll have to wait and see.”

Written by Glenn Baker, editor of NZBusiness.

An honour to be honoured

At the 2018 Kea World Class New Zealand Awards held at Auckland’s Viaduct Events Centre, Peter Beck was one of ten outstanding Kiwis and friends of New Zealand acknowledged for their help in defining this country’s reputation on the world stage.

In his acceptance speech Beck paid tribute to the other winners, and to the unique ways New Zealanders solve problems.

The innovative way his team designed Rocket Lab’s rocket engine quickly caught the attention of the world’s largest rocket manufacturer (Lockheed Martin), he told the audience.

He recalls the time they sent a team to New Zealand to perform due diligence on how the engines were produced. All was going well, but then the visiting technicians requested one final test to see how the engines would perform in a simulated space environment where temperatures are extremely cold.

While the Americans went off to begin work designing a multi-million dollar refrigeration plant, Beck sent one of his team to make a purchase at the local service station.

Two hours later they demonstrated the engine in the test cell and everything worked perfectly.

Later they revealed that the team member who’d gone to the service station had filled his entire vehicle up with party ice, which was subsequently packed around the engine to simulate space!

“That typifies Kiwis,” says Beck. “We see right through problems and solve them in innovative ways.”

Beck also made reference to the rhetoric around how successful Kiwi businesses end up offshore. “Often the rhetoric is ‘oh, we’ve lost another one. But that’s incorrect.

“We should be celebrating that we didn’t ‘lose one’ – rather, we created another global New Zealand Kiwi.”

Pictured below:         Accepting the Kea award from ASB’s Vittoria Shortt.