Peter Beck On The Future of The Space Industry: Interview Highlights and Discussion
[Music] hey guys it's Dave happy Friday welcome back to the channel I hope you've had a great week today I wanted to take a look at the latest interview from Peter Beck he was actually talking to Ashley Vance the author of the when the heavens went on sale book that I've been talking about recently I actually just finished it myself I found it very interesting a lot of stories about the early days of Rocket lab Planet labs and a lot of these other companies that we were all following very closely including Astra as well and uh really what they were getting into during this interview was a lot about the future of the space industry and where they see it going rocket Labs place in it and what they're trying to accomplish over the long term so I just wanted to bring you some of the most important Clips or what I thought was the most important as well as give you my thoughts on that the link to the original interview will be down in the description below please do check that out and support the original Channel as with all these interviews I uh provide to you guys it's definitely very important to support the original creators before we get into that though if you haven't already I hope you'll consider subscribing with the link down below as well any like and comment always helps out with the algorithms thank you guys so much in advance with that out of the way let's take a look at Peter Beck's latest interview all right let's Jump Right In and hear what Peter and Ashley have to say I mean you can say execution it's amazing to me to watch people who've done this before still struggle like on the one hand it's rocket science we know this is hard on the other hand um rocket lab you had a group of 20-somethings there really had never built a rocket before you did not go to college for this you were designing dishwashers at one point um you know that's probably similar though but I mean you guys have clearly figured something out that that just got all that right um and it's it's still sort of a mystery to me yeah well I think I think it's um building the right team setting the right Vision um building the right business around it um being being kind of very deliberate about how you build your company as well as building the rocket um and um I'm sure there's a little bit of luck thrown in there too but at the end of the day I've generally found if you say to somebody you know we have a motto at rocker lab do what you say you're going to do and everybody gets measured against that and generally if you say that I'm going to go and do something and then you actually go and do it that builds good trust and if you continue to to do that all the way through then you build a good company so perhaps uh not the most uh important in terms of news for Rocket lab but I found that clip very interesting and I thought you guys might too if you haven't really looked into the history of the company which uh goes much deeper in the book but fascinating story really how they started up in New Zealand with really no Aerospace industry there Peter Beck didn't go to any sort of college or university for this sort of stuff he just loved it so much and read and learned everything he could about it and dove into all the Hands-On stuff eventually uh as was mentioned there working on dishwashers and going from that to rockets and this group of 20-somethings with no real experience has really succeeded where uh everyone over in the United States and had all these access to extra resources people like Astra and all them have really struggled so it's really an amazing story and uh just also talking about doing what you're say you're gonna do I really appreciate that as an investor because when they give projections I really need to be able to count on it something when I'm looking at other companies I can't always do especially after this back craze when all these companies were projecting crazy high numbers and not getting anywhere near hitting them with rocket lab uh generally pretty trustworthy on their guidance and doing what they say they're gonna set out to do in Space the first big businesses so far have been Communications satellites and imaging satellites yep and this is like the entire premise so far of like what this is is hanging on to a large degree um you know I'm just so curious about is that do you see that as being enough for the next 10 15 years do you think something else has to come along and you know what might those things yeah yeah yeah yeah I think about this a lot because um you know there's always the promise of the industry and and all the market studies that predict you know depending on which Market study you can pick up between one and two trillion dollars is like a factor of era of 100 um of how large the market will be in 2030. but I think some of the the key factors for me that are that are more more confident than ever I you're seeing like real fundamental use cases from really large companies I mean obviously uh you know elon's got starlink and that's kind of proving its worth uh Amazon I've got the Kuiper which is kind of the equivalent um you've seen now uh um you know apple with their e91 service uh Voyage into space and that there's there's enough kind of real use cases from real companies that um it's it's it's kind of a little bit obvious now that that is going to proliferate but all that stuff is really Communications at its core I mean do you think so for people who don't know I mean there's you know we went from 2 500 satellites like three years ago in low low earth orbit to about 10 000 today we've been on this suddenly exponential curve after it had been like this for for 50 years huge chunk of that is communication satellites I just always sort of think I could see the near term but but like does that stuff make money and then what comes next otherwise the air starts to come out of the room pretty quick yeah no I think I think I think that's a fair cool one and and um in in the last I would say 10 years you've seen a tremendous amount of venture capital flow into various space business models and and some some have been pretty successful and others you know not so successful but I think with any new frontier there is a certain amount of throwing them out of the wall and seeing what what sticks yeah and and you know we went through that process along for a long time and like I say now you've got like Amazon building a hugely large constellation to service their customers and yeah it you can kind of loosely characterize it as comms but I mean Amazon actually have a purpose it's not it's not just to sell internet to people it's like it drives their business model and actually improves their business business model that's why they're doing it that uh particular clip was pretty interesting to me because I've been trying to puzzle out uh what the next stage of growth for the low earth orbit satellite industry is obviously as they mentioned before starlink Amazon even one web these are all Communications and even you can throw in like radio uh television this is all Communications when you get down to it and I was kind of trying to think to myself is that the the biggest area of the future obviously there's also Earth Imaging with the likes of one web black sky and a lot of others but uh what what areas rocket lab going to play in right when they eventually come out with their own satellites and it sounds like here Peter Beck is still very confident in the future of communication satellites in low earth orbit and the the wide range of use cases they may have so perhaps that is somewhere that rocket lab will get into in the future I was a little worried about competing directly with starlink at some point but it seems like such a wide range of communications satellites that hopefully they can find a niche and Communications at least right now is is the big booming industry and I think it's been proven now especially with starlink and the subscriber numbers continuing to grow that this will be a very profitable business for the future so interesting to see Peter Beck's thoughts on that and uh you know talking about Amazon several times I I've said repeatedly that I think we're gonna see a lot more deals between Amazon and Rocket lab going forward and the fact that he talks about it a lot I think does uh provide a hint in that direction do you think I mean some people Beyond Communications they talk about manufacturing you just did a really interesting thing where you partnered with this company called varda that's making a bioreactor a pharmaceutical Factory in orbit so that that's manufacturing this idea that you can make chemicals in molecules in space that are different from Earth um there's a talk about you know moving data centers up into orbits and and reducing pollution on Earth just having them be solar powered do any of these applications jump out to you as the most likely or yeah I mean I'm not so sure that um launching data centers into orbit is better for the environment than keeping them on the ground um but uh you know an inverter sense um it's it's just physics right and chemistry there's a fundamental if you're in a zero-g environment you know Crystal proteins grow differently and in the search for for kind of new and more exotic things that's a unshackling you know that production process from gravity is pretty game changing um and you know at the moment it's really only been until now that you can do that as a startup at any kind of level of scale prior to you know even 10 years ago you just wouldn't do that 100 million dollars just to yeah yeah just to try like you know for some tens of millions of dollars and I know that sounds a lot of money in some senses but for some tens of millions of dollars you can have a crack at a really big thing yeah that's an extremely interesting Mission rocket lab did with farta they recently announced that they successfully began the manufacturing process of those pharmaceutical crystals in low earth orbit on the platform using rocket Labs Photon so once they're done making those they will re-enter's atmosphere and we'll get to see the results so that could be a potential business line for the future and Ashley here just really trying to pin Peter down on what other than Communications could be like a next big area I do think the data center one is a little bit more interesting than I guess Peter uh talked about if you can have you know a satellite getting solar power 24 hours a day instead of 12 hours a day it can just sit in orbit doing all that compute work and just getting the solar power not creating any Emissions on Earth maybe there is something to be said for that not something I've looked into too closely but at least in concept it sounds like an interesting idea but doesn't seem like that's anything rocket lab is working on right now um if we could just pull up a slide for a second where we pulled the audience before this I found this fascinating I just I'm not trying to hock my book but I wrote a book that's kind of the opposite of the results of this this poll I mean to me the most interesting you know the most activity the most money is not tourism it's not Mars it's in low earth orbit where the number of satellites um is increasing exponentially what do you make of what do you make of that though that the public thinks tourism you know is where this is is heading well I think as opposed to sort of industry and business it's a masterful piece of marketing from Virgin Galactic yeah uh but I know it's more seriously I think I think a lot of people kind of like the idea of going to space and human space flight is always been the draw card right I mean it is it is a totally different thing to watch a rocket going up to watch a rocket going up with a human on board there's this orders of magnitude different and that's that's the kind of the romance of space it's not a lot of sense so it's not totally surprising that that everybody wants to have their trip so yeah still on this topic of uh future use cases of space and obviously he's pointing out that space tourism a lot of the general public believed would be the next big thing although I do think that was a bit of a leading question the way it was phrased saying like the future of space travel and if you put travel in your head then tourism is kind of obviously where some people might go but yeah Mega constellations really the big one right now space tourism is just barely a fraction of a fraction just getting off the ground I don't have a lot of confidence in that area whether it's you know a blue origin a Virgin Galactic not really something I'm super keen on investing in right now but it's interesting to see where the public thinks things are going versus you know where things have actually been going and really hope you know we don't see Space Warfare in terms of like weapons going and being used in space that would really I think be the beginning of the end of uh you know monetizing low earth orbit for all these satellite constellations so historically you in SpaceX have been quite different SpaceX makes large Rockets you you made a smaller rocket SpaceX does do humans you guys have not focused on that you know moving forward you're making this rocket called Neutron that is going to compete quite directly with spacex's falcon 9. at the same time SpaceX is making a even larger rocket called Starship um you know dealing with Elon competing with Elon is comes with his with its challenges yeah I'm just very curious if you see SpaceX moving forward now as your most direct competitor and and how you keep Pace with this company that seems to have somewhat of a head start yeah I mean look we in in summer space a lot of people want want to kind of play that that card but I guess we we're on our own our own mission our own journey and and at the end of the day everybody focuses on the rocket like it's the exciting Red Stick roaring in the sky the reality is I'm trying to build a big like long-lasting durable space company and I think the space companies of the future are going to have their own rocket they're going to be able to build their own satellite and they'll have an application or a series of applications or infrastructure in orbit and I think that's that's the in-game here is that is if you if you have your own rocket and you have you can build your own spacecraft then you can do things in orbit that nobody else can do so in in that sense you know um SpaceX has has kind of um you know focused in on internet and space and and you know I'm moving quickly to try and prove that business model is going to be successful or not but I think um you know ultimately there's going to be a number of those and the companies that can go to orbit at will um are the ones that are going to win I can't wait till we find out more about rocket Labs constellation obviously Neutron's coming along well they already have the capability of building out satellites as we're seeing with a lot of their contracts and their own Photon spacecraft as well so they're really getting to that goal that Peter was talking about I don't think we're going to see an announcement on what their own satellites are going to do and be until more like 2026 I would imagine when Neutron is flying and they have the capability to go ahead and put them in orbit so they don't announce something way far in ahead but uh yeah he does seem to think there's room for more players there and kind of pushing back that you know it's either them or SpaceX saying that they're on their own journey and you know doesn't really have to be one or the other that's a success you know historically we've only had rocket companies we've only had satellite companies you've been a software you're talking about something much bigger than that um you know how many players are there like that well I mean hopefully there'll be two um but do you think that's how do you think this is like a two two company race or it's more than that look I think I think it'll be more than that but I don't think it's going to be 10 I think it'll be relatively small because the reality is that um launching a rocket and building a rocket and going to orbit is just an assault on physics and it's really difficult to do and it doesn't really matter um you know you can have better compute and you can have better you can have ai you can have all the rest of it at the end of the day it's it's 1.1 to 1.2 times safety factor or margin on every single thing in the vehicle and um you know materials if you look at a rocket engine the combustion efficiency of a rocket engine hasn't really changed since 1962. we just we just you know increase the pressure but the actual combustion efficiency hasn't changed so we kind of maxed out on chemical propulsion and on physics and and on materials and a long time ago so most of the stuff you see is kind of tweaks around the edges or um you know in in kind of uh elon's scale is is you just build bigger and bigger Rockets um so you know I think this is It's fundamentally always going to be super super difficult to do so as I was listening to this I was trying to think of who would be the second person to have their own rocket launching their own constellation into orbit and I couldn't think of anyone off the top of my head really outside of Rocket lab because the two seem very separate so of course Amazon's Kuiper is going to be launched by Blue origin and they both have that Jeff Bezos connection those are still technically two very separate companies and uh Amazon doesn't seem to have entry any interest into doing their own rocket blue origin at least right now doesn't seem to have much interest in building out their own satellite constellations and then a lot of the other satellite operators we're seeing right now are really not touching launch they're just staying away so rocket lab seems like the the clear second uh company that is going to be launching their own satellite constellation which will hopefully give them an advantage in the future again depending on how that blue origin connection with Amazon works out if Amazon maybe even acquires them one day or uh that's a very curious um relationship to me between those two companies let me know down below how you think about them do you almost consider them the same entity or you know completely separate what is your next launch and you know when is it and what will you guys be doing um you know what I don't know and I think that's that's the definition of success that I don't know no but um your ages I agree it used to be this this all or nothing yeah all or nothing I'm probably in the next I mean we're launching you know every couple of weeks in general so yeah probably in the next couple of weeks there'll be another another launch vehicle that's uh that's ready to go they're kind of cool to see uh how you know him not knowing when the next launch is kind of like a proof of success because early on when you're getting going with a rocket company especially you know the fireflies Astros version orbits all the rest the CEO you better believe knows exactly when that launch is gonna be and you have like a massive part of the future success of the company hanging on that launch that's no longer the case for Rocket lab they have their launch reliability down the Cadence is picking up we're starting to launch almost every two weeks right now so uh times are good for electron launch anyway and that's just another sign of it that was the last clip we had from this interview let's go ahead and wrap up the discussion so yeah I thought this was a particularly interesting and timely interview because I've been trying to puzzle out what rocket lab is going to be aiming for with their own constellation and a lot of the questions in this interview were about the future of the space industry whether it's still all Communications whether we're looking at some tourism creeping in there data centers up there drug manufacturing maybe then there's you know satellite debris deorbiting old satellites space tugs different types of communications and then obviously we can't forget Earth observation but it does seem like Communications will continue to have the bulk of the business and will be the cash cow for the near future always love to hear from Peter and his thoughts on the future of the company really uh you know continuing to hand on where they're going long term but I really just want to get some firm details on our future constellation uh kind of tough to hear about it but not know any of these details let me know if you have any thoughts on Rocket Labs constellation and when it will be announced what it will do in the comments below thank you so much for watching I hope you guys have a great weekend if you haven't already hit that subscribe button hit that like button down below it'll help me out a lot and I will see you in the next video goodbye for now [Music] thank you
2023-07-16 04:31
