Rocket Lab

“Mattershund being the largest, you know, sort of investor You know, in SpaceX, Coastal Ventures being the largest investor in Rocket Lab, and then in some ways more recently, you know, the only equity owner in OpenAI other than Microsoft.”

“Capital markets enable you to do things you couldn't do in private markets. Buying Iridium. Like we could have never, ever done that as a private company.”

“Like, Iridium, you know, adds profitability to the entity straight away. It also buys us time to put up a new constellation.”

“I think, you know, what I'm looking forward to in the next six to 12 months, you know, getting that, that Iridium deal all tucked in and onto the next, and you know, we, there'll be a series of, like, transformational things that I, I've got my eyes on that I …”

“You know, I've always viewed the large space companies are going to have the ability to build on their own satellites and launch them. And if you're beholden to someone else providing you all the critical components and you, your ability to scale is governed b…”

“Sometimes it's easy to start something from scratch and formulate it in a way that best makes sense. Than to try and integrate with a whole bunch of rules that don't fit.”

“Well, it doesn't feel like anything's changed because if you take our first real product being the Electron launch vehicle, everything in that launch vehicle we design and we make. So every engine, every avionics box, every piece of software.”

“I think it would be very difficult to go and play in the broadband market. I think, you know, you see the amount of capital that's required to be successful there.”

“Our SDA contract was a great example where, you know, we won an eight hundred million dollar contract, and there was two other primes that also won contracts, But actually that turned into over a billion dollar contract for us because the primes needed our stu…”

“And there's one plane one plane every three days that we have to worry about.”

“Now, if you make heavy structures, Then you have to make super high performance engines. So you'd be lazy on your structures and like really difficult on your engine, or you can be really lazy on your engine and really difficult on your structures.”

“Like, we don't buy companies that are, like, startups that maybe they'll do something one day. It's like, you have to be Proven and successful, and then you're the right kind of target for us.”

“Everything is a giant engineering compromise in the rocket world, and if you fill a room up with engineers from every discipline, if one of those engineers from one of those disciplines is happy, you have failed. Like, everybody needs to be equally as miserabl…”

“Being a public company really enforces that discipline of profitability and profitability is survival. You know, the rockets and satellites, and it's all cool, but at the end of the day, it's all for nothing if your economics aren't there and you're not comfor…”

“Our government customers mainly around the haste missions, where we're really keen to see you know, us go into very discreet locations to do some of that testing. So it sort of, it was driven from a requirement from the customer that can you build this mobile …”

“No nepotism in the Beck family whatsoever. No, they have to go on path, chart their own paths. There's absolutely not.”

“We're prime on two national security programs right now.”

“Like, you know, Solero Solar, never had a solar panel fail in orbit in 40 years. Doug Sinclair and reaction wheels, same again. PSC, never had a failure, separation system failure.”

“I said, look guys, we need to be able to turn this vehicle in 24 hours, which is, I'll admit, is a stupid constraint, but what that constraint did is it drove a whole bunch of really, really important design decisions like, you know, propellants, engine lights…”

“Well, I mean, we, you know, pretty much put nearly a billion dollars of backlog you know, in the books had record revenue and you know, a whole bunch of growth everywhere, and acquisitions, and yeah,”

“The Flatellite is actually a really important platform for us, because that will be the platform that we scale future, our own future constellations off.”

“The launch LC-I is a very unique position that we can launch sun-synchronous, and also sort of out to mid-inclination out of the one site.”

“If you have a small launch vehicle and you turn up to a large launch pad the reality is that you know, the fees don't change, and when you're trying to sell a rocket for, like, eight million dollars, you can't have a million and a half dollars worth of launch …”

“We recently did their launch for the Space Force, the rapid call-up launch, and they gave us 24 hours to Call, you know, integrate a satellite into a rocket, push it out to the pad and launch. You know, we did it in 16 hours and 42 minutes.”

“The optimum aerodynamic shape looked inappropriate in my view.”

“And then, you know, now we make over 2000 reaction wheels a year.”

“The Archimedes engine is black, I make them paint them black, because it looks cool. There's no logical, I mean, I can come up with an emissivity reason why they should be black”

“In 2009, we launched our first suborbital rocket called Aotearoa. And we were the first private company in the Southern hemisphere to reach space. Not all, but just into space.”

“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 happen…”

“You know, for example, the Electron rocket, I think it was under a hundred million dollars and 80 people put the first rocket into orbit.”

“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 generally what that means is we always have a mission to Mars or a mission to another planet in, in the clean room there.”

“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…”

“That, 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 it was a crazy, crazy mission.”

“There's no such thing as a small acquisition. Ironically, like, some of the smaller companies have consumed vastly amounts more time than some of the bigger companies.”

“And with like, 80, I think we had a total capitalization of under a 100,000 New Zealand dollars, which is like 60,000 US dollars at that point, so.”

“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 goi…”

“There's one engine made and shipped out every day. So, you know, there's over 930 engines that have been to space.”

“So what you've been walking up is the Archimedes production line, so this line right now can produce one engine every eight days”

“The upper stage engine produces a certain amount of thrust, and you have to, you know, manage that thrust for the acceleration of the upper stage. It just so happens that coincidentally is the ideal amount of thrust to land a rocket. So, you know, you need one…”

“Like, the big space companies of the future are gonna all look a little bit the same. They're gonna have their own rocket, because access to space is key. They're gonna have their own ability to build as many satellites as they need, and they're all gonna have…”

“That was the old Virgin Orbit facility, and you know, there was over a hundred million dollars worth of asset in that building, And we managed to buy the whole thing for sixteen million dollars.”

“This is, I would say is the first engine that is just not designed to be like that. It's designed to be like the most benign engine that you could possibly imagine so that you can just run and run and run and run and never even think about it.”

“At least by mass the vast majority of all of our engines are three D printed and we have some really, really unique processes in here as well.”

“The design requirement for the vehicle was turn in 24 hours, which was a, you know, absurd design requirement, but it drove a whole lot of really good decisions.”

“There's probably about 10 people that run this whole shop. So it's all automated.”

“If our job was just to make a, you know, an expendable launch vehicle, we'd be there now. We'd, we'd be launching Neutrons flat out.”

“Mississippi got two engine test cells, and that runs 20 hours a day, seven days a week. So it's just firing, firing engines all the time.”

“So, you know, the qualification burn time for an Archimedes engine is one hour. So the engine, you know, has to do 40 starts and run for one hour.”

“It's the second most frequently launched rocket in the world, ah, behind the Falcon nine.”