RKLB Factory Tour: Satellites, Spacecraft & Mission Control

If you turn up tomorrow and say, "I want to build 1,000 satellites," good luck. 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.

Really?

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?

Lots.

We just saw a tiny portion of it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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

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.

Oh, that's exactly what I was—yeah, yeah, that's exactly what I was getting at.

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 HAL 9000 computer, you know?

Mm-hmm.

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 I started the company in 2006 down in New Zealand, and sort of between 2006 and 2009, we were like our own little technology development house. And in 2009, we launched our first suborbital rocket called RTL-1, and we were the first private company in the Southern Hemisphere to reach space.

Not all, but just into space.

Just three years after starting.

Yeah, yep. And then 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 swagelock fittings that I'd salvaged from a junkyard.

Really?

Well, yeah, because I could only afford the ferals, not the cost of the fittings. So I would get the fitting from the junkyard and buy the $3.20 ferals to put in it and recondition it into a fitting, you know?

So it was seriously, you know, 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 instantiser 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 Khosla 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 Khosla put $5 million in for the Series A round, which, you know, at that time for me, that was the most insane amount of money imaginable.

Yeah.

But for that, you know, we got our first 3D printed Rutherford engine hot-fired and proved out a whole lot of composite structures and stuff. Then did the B round in 2014 with Bessemer leading that. And then 2015, we broke ground on and launched Complex 1 in New Zealand.

So that's, you know, was the very first private orbital launch site. 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.

Big deal.

Things started to move a bit, yeah. And then 2018, we launched three rockets. And probably, you know, the fourth rocket in the stable, their 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.

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 an 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. And I'm the opposite of a bodge stuff together kind of guy.

Yeah.

But it's kind of submittable 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, you know, pretty significantly better than most people. You know, for example, the Electron rocket, I think it was under $100 million and 80 people put the first rocket into orbit.

Wow.

And, you know, at the time, our nearest competitor was Virgin Orbit, and that was funded by, you know, Sir Richard Branson. And in the end, I think Richard put $1.2 billion into that company before it ultimately went bankrupt with, you know, a handful of launches under their belt.

So yeah, we are never the most well-financed, although as a public company, we've certainly, you know, much more endowed than we ever have been. But I mean, it's sort of hard-baked into the culture here that, you know, everything is groundright 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 you look at, if I look back and think of, you know, 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.

Yeah.

You know, the most significantly.

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Yeah.

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, well, 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.

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, you know, a small group of people. And you have to ask yourself, like, when they ultimately, you know, kick the bucket, what happens to those companies?

And, you know, 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." So you can have, you know, an amount of impact when you're alive, but if you can, you know, keep that impact going after you're dead, then you, you know, by proxy, you have 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, you know, if the founder, CEO, and all of that just cuts 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. Like, you're not just a launch company, and I think that's a big misconception.

Yeah.

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?

Yeah, it seems to just be a constant exponential ramp up. That's certainly what it feels like. And, you know, to your point, 2021 was a very busy year. We went public and acquired three companies. Don't recommend that. That is really painful.

But, you know, we.

Why? Because of regulatory stuff with each acquisition?

Well, so anytime you acquire a company, it's like, you know, you go to a used car lot. They're going to hate me for this analogy, but you go to a used car lot and you look around the nice 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 wheel's rumbling, and all of the things that just aren't quiteright.

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, you know, firework in the sky and everyone gets emotional and it's all very cool.

It's hard to get emotional about a reaction wheel, you know, a little, or a star tracker 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 1,000 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 and our vision, we needed to own all the components that go into the spacecraft so that we could literally build any spacecraft we want.

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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 sends 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.

Yeah, and New Zealand, actually, both, because it was a, you know, it was a 24/7 operation, so the huge 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.

So, 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?

No, 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, you know, 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 number two.

That one went to the Moon.

Yeah, well, not that one, because the one that went to the Moon is about five million miles, you know, in an almost a heliocentric orbit around the Sun. So that's a spear one.

RIP.

Yeah. It's like contact. You always build two, you know?

Yeah.

So the headquarters, we have this like cool lobby, we have mission control.

Yep.

What are we going to see behind these doors?

Yeah, 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? Because I think that's probably one of the biggest questions as a human species that we can answer,right? It's 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. Phosphate 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, yeah.

So now I'm obsessed with it.

There you go.

I wonder if you're going to start using Astrophage for your propulsion.

Yeah, yeah, that would be good. Wow, I'll tell you what, burning dinosaurs is not getting us there, that's for sure. Yeah.

And so you guys, I think in here you're doing some electric. Is that what I heard?

Yeah, so this is one of our spacecraft programs. You can see some of the buses in the background for a particular customer. And, you know, this is a production line, so you start at one end and sort of move over to the other end.

And if you have a spacecraft, and that little tent is the electrical 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, you know, just avoids having tremendous amounts of chemical thrusters on board, yeah. Yeah, these particular missions are very difficult missions. They're like, you know, 12-year lifespan operating and nasty, nasty radiation.

And, you know, they're missions that just cannot fail.

Yeah.

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. 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.

Oh, yeah?

What is in that? I just saw some tape and some electrical components.

Oh, yeah, no, it's like supplies, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Not chips.

What is that?

Well, it just makes it easier for the staff if they need, you know, various bits and pieces, you know, 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.

It's just way faster.

That's innovation.

Wow. I'm sure if you asked them, they'd rather chocolate bars, but.

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, you know, something like this, we'll build the complete spacecraft and then it'll go into thermal vibe and shock testing and, you know, before we actually start to put the real one together.

Where do you do all your testing?

It's all done in this facility. So in there, we could go in there, but it would take forever to get your booted up into, you know, extremely flattering gear. But yeah, 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?

Three buildings on this site. And overall, I did the calculation, we have 13 acres of factory.

Really?

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 have Virginia.

Yeah, we have Albuquerque, Tucson, Arizona, and a whole bunch of stuff in the middle river. You know, that's where the Neutron rocket is being built. And then Toronto in Canada, and then Germany, Menarik in Germany, and, you know, I'm blanking on a whole bunch, Stinis, Mississippi.

So yeah, a whole bunch of places.

How many employees are in this LA facility?

I think it'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 LOxSAT. 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 beats having to carry it there, I guess, so yeah.

Are you excited or are you hopeful about the Moon, the lunar programs?

Well, look, I mean, I'm like any space geek, I'm super excited.

Yeah.

But I guess 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 no, no, this time we're really going to the Moon.

And that's fine, but when you're a Moon company, that just plays havoc with your balance sheet. And you're just swinging around all over the place. So we get to play in these programs, but we like to play at a system level rather than a mission level.

What do you think the biggest mistake is at these new entrants to the space ecosystem? Apparently, the space economy doesn't actually exist.

Yeah.

But what do you think the biggest mistakes people, new entrants, are making into the space ecosystem?

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, you know, making sure that the most amount of failure, I would 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?

Lots.

A lot?

Yeah.

We just saw a tiny portion of it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, we have a lot of national security programs. So, you know, 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.

Yeah.

Okay, so now we'll go over to the engine propulsion lab.

Yep.

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