The Small Company Disrupting the Rocket Industry
The story of Rocket Lab
Peter Beck was born in the town of Invercargill, towards the southern tip of New Zealand. Growing up he was always good at making things with his hands, and had a big passion for rockets. When asked about his dream job, he replied that he wanted to design and build rockets when he grew up, but his school counselors viewed that as an overly optimistic goal and discouraged him from going down that path. After high school he started working for the government agency Industrial Research, where he made a connection that would later make his dream possible.
After years of working at Industrial Research Beck wanted a change. He decided that working as a rocket engineer at a place like NASA wasn’t quite for him, so in 2006 he ended up starting his own rocket company and named it Rocket Lab. While working on superconductors and smart materials at Industrial Research he met a man named Stephen Tindall, who would later invest an undisclosed amount of money into Beck’s company Rocket Lab to help it get started.
The Rise of Rocket Lab
It was never Beck’s ambition to launch giant rockets carrying huge payloads or a full crew to a distant destination like Mars. Rather, he enjoyed seeing a rocket from design to successful launch, no matter how big or powerful it was.
Ātea-1
To start, Beck and his team designed and constructed an extremely small rocket by today’s standards, known as Ātea-1. The rocket itself only weighed about 60 kg, which is about 132 lbs. It could only carry 2 kg or about 4.5 lbs to a height of roughly 150 km, about 93 miles above the Earth’s surface.
In November of 2009, Rocket Lab performed a successful flight of its Ātea-1 rocket, earning them the title of the first company in the Southern Hemisphere to send a rocket to space. Soon after, Rocket Lab and the Operationally Responsive Space Office of the U.S. government agreed to a contract where Rocket Lab would test and design a launch system for small satellites called CubeSats in exchange for a sum of money.
Electron
With funding from the U.S. government and other corporations such as Lockheed Martin, Rocket Lab pursued the construction of a larger rocket, one that would be known as Electron. With a height of 18 meters or 59 feet and an ability to take 300 kg or 661 lbs to low Earth orbit it’s certainly capable of more than its predecessor the Ātea-1.
The Electron has been Rocket Lab’s flagship since its first flight in 2013. It’s made 21 launches to date and successfully deployed a total of 105 satellites into orbit. In 2018 Rocket Lab announced an audacious plan to increase the reusability of their lower stages by catching them with helicopters. Since then, there’s been a successful test of the procedure but it has yet to be implemented on actual missions.
Doing this efficiently and effectively could lead to reduced cost for Rocket Lab, allowing them to either gain a higher profit margin from flights or attract more customers by selling launches for less.
Besides reusability, Peter Beck and Rocket Lab are very concerned about the buildup of space debris and aim to burn all portions of their rockets in the atmosphere if they cannot be retrieved. This is unlike most other companies focused on launching satellites, who tend to leave portions of rockets floating in space.
Future Plans
Rocket Lab started from humble origins, with a man determined to build and launch rockets. However, there have recently been large developments for Rocket Lab, including the announcement of a new rocket and missions to other planets.
Neutron Rocket
Essentially the big brother to Electron, Rocket Lab’s Neutron rocket will be able to carry almost 27 times the payload to low Earth orbit, as well as 1,500 kilograms or 3,300 lbs to Mars or Venus. It’s a bit over twice as tall as Electron, with a height of 40 meters or 131 feet.
Neutron was designed to deliver many satellites at once to space, and possibly at some point in the future to be used for human spaceflight. Many companies or governments don’t want to launch just one or two satellites, but rather a large network of them called constellations. This is where Neutron would be advantageous compared to Electron, because it can ferry a whole network of satellites to low Earth orbit in one flight.
Missions to the Moon and Mars
In February of 2020 Rocket Lab announced a contract with NASA to launch a satellite to the moon in preparation for their lunar gateway, part of the Artemis missions to the Moon. In addition, Rocket Lab announced in June of 2021 that they had won a contract from NASA to send two satellites to Mars in 2024.
To do this, they plan to use their Neutron rocket but will need another source of power to send the satellites on a trajectory to the red planet. Beck and Rocket Lab plan to use a newly designed spacecraft called Photon. It is called a “satellite bus” and essentially meant to transfer satellites to destinations outside low Earth orbit. It will get NASA’s CAPSTONE satellite to the Moon and get their two ESCAPADE satellites to Mars.
Missions to Venus
In addition, Rocket Lab plans to send their own probe to search for life in the clouds of Venus in 2023. They are not contracted by any government agency to do this, but Beck says that the condition of the Venusian surface is important to know about because of how similar it previously was to Earth’s surface.
Today, the surface of Venus is boiling hot with an average temperature of about 450 degrees Celsius or 850 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt lead. Additionally, the pressure is so immense that at the surface it’s over 90 times the surface pressure here on Earth. This is because of a serious greenhouse effect that occurs due to an incredibly thick atmosphere filled with carbon dioxide.
However, Venus wasn’t always this way. Scientists believe that at one point it was very much like Earth, but as carbon dioxide built up in the atmosphere it began trapping the heat from the Sun, and thus rapidly increasing the temperature and pressure. Beck wants to look at Venus as a cautionary tale of what could happen to Earth if we’re not careful in limiting the number of greenhouse gases we emit into the atmosphere.
Interestingly, about 50 kilometers or 30 miles above the surface of Venus lies a region in the clouds with similar gravity, pressure, and temperature to that on Earth. Some scientists think that if life formed on Venus when it was more temperate it could possibly have adapted and migrated to the clouds in the more hospitable zone. Thus, Beck and Rocket Lab are interested to see if microbial life could be living in the clouds of Venus.
Conclusion
The story of Rocket Lab is one of teamwork, ingenuity, and determination. Peter Beck is a living example that with hard work anyone can achieve their dreams. Rocket Lab was never meant to be sending satellites to Mars or Venus, but it’s prospered beyond belief to become a company full of incredibly complex engineering.
Beck found a niche in the rocket launch market, being able to send smaller payloads into low Earth orbit at a price more appealing to smaller companies or government organizations. In August 2021 Rocket Lab completed a merger with Vector Acquisition Corporation and has since gone public, now trading on the Nasdaq.
The merger will assist Rocket Lab in growing their business and should see the continuous production of Electron rockets and Photon spacecraft as well as new technologies currently in design such as the Neutron rocket. Rocket Lab is a perfect solution for launching smaller satellites, but they are looking to expand to more than that. It’s possible that in the future they will rival the likes of SpaceX and Elon Musk in the venture of private spaceflight.
