In this episode, Jeff Dance speaks with Sir Peter Beck, founder and CEO of Rocket Lab, to discuss the future of space innovation. They explore the evolution of Rocket Lab, challenges in the space industry, the importance of scaling capabilities, and the potential of AI and computer vision in enhancing space operations. Sir Peter emphasizes the necessity for global collaboration in space traffic management and envisions a future where space technology seamlessly integrates into everyday life.

Jeff Dance: In this episode of The Future Of, we’re joined by Sir Peter Beck, who is the founder, president, and chief executive of Rocket Lab. Today we’ll be exploring the future of space innovation. Sir Peter, welcome to the show.

Sir Peter Beck: Yeah, and I’m pleased to be here.

Jeff Dance: Thanks for joining. From New Zealand. Which part of New Zealand are you in?

Sir Peter Beck: So our factories are here in Auckland and the launch site is over on the East Coast. So about a two-hour helicopter flight or an eight-hour drive.

Jeff Dance: Amazing. Beautiful place to be. Having been in helicopters in New Zealand doing some heli-skiing is just mind-blowing, the terrain you have there. So you’re blending a lot of amazing things together.

Sir Peter Beck: Yeah, you know, it’s a good way to go.

Jeff Dance: I wanted to start with a little intro for people that haven’t heard of Rocket Lab or Sir Peter. Sir Peter Beck is the founder, president, and CEO of Rocket Lab. And Sir Peter has led the development of Rocket Lab’s satellite launching rocket, Electron, which is, as of April 2025, has launched 63 times and is now the second most frequently launched US rocket. Congratulations.

He’s also an adjunct professor in aerospace engineering at the University of Auckland. In 2024, Peter was made a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to the aerospace industry, business, and education. He’s also been presented with numerous medals, like the gold medal from the Royal Aeronautical Society. You have a really impressive background.

As far as Rocket Lab, it was founded back in 2006, correct? And it’s a global end-to-end space company delivering launch services, spacecraft, satellite components, and on-orbit management. So really interesting company as we think about the future of space. So grateful to have you on the show. 

Sir Peter Beck: Great.

Sir Peter’s career journey

Jeff Dance: You know, why space? There are not many people in the industry. We work for a couple of space companies, but there aren’t many of them. I know it’s a growing industry. What kind of drew you to this career early on and has kept you so dedicated to it?

Sir Peter Beck: Well, I mean, the space industry is raucously difficult and, you know, like a lot of entrepreneurial endeavors, it’s also very, very painful. So you have to have some level of passion to kind of endure it, if you will.

For me, one of the youngest childhood memories I actually have is standing outside with my father, and he would point to the night sky and say, well, all of those stars, the majority of those stars are suns and a lot of them have planets around them, and there could be somebody standing on that planet looking back at you.

And that was the moment I realized this is really quite interesting, and this is where I have to spend my time. So I was very lucky that I knew from some of my youngest memories exactly what I wanted to do and was able to guide my career to doing exactly that.

Jeff Dance: Yeah, congratulations. You have an interesting kind of evolution as you think about your career and kind of where you started to where you are now. Not many people get into this opportunity. What do you think kind of helped catapult you into being both a founder and CEO of a successful company in space?

Sir Peter Beck: Well, my original plan was to go to the US and work for NASA. But as a foreign national with no aerospace degree, that proved very troublesome. So really, I did the only logical thing that you could do, which was go back to my home country and start a company. So I can’t say that the original design was to go and start a company. It was just the only pathway that I could see that would get me to where I wanted to go.

Jeff Dance: Fascinating. NASA is a good place too, but we need more organizations around the world, given where the future of space is going. That’s great. We noticed that Rocket Lab was selected to provide the hypersonic test launch capability and kind of other services to both not just the UK government, but also the US government. Tell us more about that.

Sir Peter Beck: Yeah, so the Electron rocket, which is our small orbital class rocket, has been very successful in delivering hundreds of satellites to orbit. And we were tapped on the shoulder to try and provide this new capability, which is a suborbital capability, to test hypersonic platforms and programs and those kinds of things. So it’s really taking a product that we already had and extending it on to provide these useful services.

Space innovation strategy

Jeff Dance: That’s great. It’s interesting looking at your company because you guys do more than one thing as it relates to space. There’s the satellites, spacecraft, the subsystems. So you’re not quite like in a singular thing. Your website says that you’re transforming the way we use and access space. Tell us more about your strategy with tackling it from multiple angles.

Sir Peter Beck: Yeah, some days I wake up and wish we just did one thing, but the reality is, you know, we’re trying to build an end-to-end space company. And what does that mean? Well, what that means is typically the space industry is very bifurcated, and you have little companies doing very bespoke, unique things all at subscale. And that’s all great if you’re building like one or two things a year and launching them.

Jeff Dance: Mm-hmm.

Sir Peter Beck: But when you’re trying to build a constellation of hundreds or thousands of spacecraft, then that becomes very, very challenging. So our view is that launch is the enabler. Having the keys to space is really the most important thing. So that’s why we have our Electron rocket and soon-to-fly Neutron rocket. But very quickly thereafter, if you can combine the ability to launch stuff and also build the satellite at the same time, then it becomes a very powerful way of deploying infrastructure to orbit really, really quickly. So we said, OK, we’re going to build satellites as well.

One of the first things we did was we laid a satellite out on a component level, out on a boardroom table, and then asked everybody to point to everything that was deficient, either from a technology perspective, supply chain perspective, or cost perspective. And I can tell you there was almost no component left that wasn’t being pointed to. So as we started to go through that, we methodically went out and did a couple of different things.

One, we either acquired the best technology and the best companies, and then subsequently scaled those to an ability to produce at scale. Or we started off our own internal R&D programs with the ultimate same end result of providing scale. Because generally, if you go to the vast majority of the space industry and you order a thousand of something, you just watch people’s heads kind of spontaneously combust because that is a number that is just not common within the space industry. But as you think about where the space industry is going in the proliferated LEO architecture, as in putting up a bunch of satellites to provide services to all of us down here, then somebody has to be responsible for the ability to scale the satellites, the components that go with them, and the launch.

Is SpaceX a space company?

My prediction of the future here is that it’s going to become pretty blurry about what is a space company and what is a services company. Take our friends over at SpaceX right now. Is SpaceX a space company or is it a communication services company providing internet? It becomes pretty blurry pretty quickly. But the one thing that’s true there is that if you have the ability to build the infrastructure and deploy it through launching it all by yourself, then it creates a capability and a moat that unless you have that capability, it’s very difficult to compete with.

So we’ve just sort of, in traditional Rocket Lab style, gone through and about this in a very methodical way, picking off each bit of technology and each bit of capability one after the other to ultimately build this end-to-end space company, which is unique in the industry.

Who are Rocket Lab’s competitors?

Jeff Dance: Yeah, it’s special. I think, you know, at Fresh we’re an end-to-end innovation company with, you know, these engineering services, design services, software services, but it’s our competitive advantage, but it’s also our weakness in that there’s a lot that we’re tackling at once. But when you have a really challenging innovation problem and you can bring all that stuff together, it’s hard for anyone else to compete, you know? And I would echo what you’re saying in the same way. It’s like you have all those services. You can not only build the satellite, you can launch them, but then you can manage them. You know, you’re providing all that complexity and simplifying it for your customers essentially, and bringing all that complexity in-house. I definitely see the value, and it’s pretty compelling. Tell me more about how you guys differ from some of the other players in the space. You mentioned SpaceX. Who are some of the other major players in the space that you guys are competing against, and are any of them providing the full end-to-end services that you guys are providing?

Sir Peter Beck: Yeah, from an end-to-end perspective, there’s not really anybody, right? But in kind of various component levels, there are some competitors, some very robust competitors, and then just some things there is just not.

I mean, take space solar as a good example. I mean, there are three providers of space-grade solar cells in the entire world. One in the US, us in the US, and one in Europe. And between these three companies, they provide all of the space-grade solar cells for the world. And we’re now the largest in all of that. But there’s an example where there’s really only two competitors. And that’s not uncommon, given the complexity and the scale and the nature of some of these things.

Whereas some other components, like reaction wheels, for example, there are probably about a dozen companies that are all providing that particular product. The space industry is a weird industry because we’ll go head to head with a prime on a big space mission, and then if we don’t win, then that prime turns around and orders a whole bunch of components from us, and we’re now teammates.

And we are teammates, we work as a team. So it’s kind of “competitor mate” in the industry where you can be in kind of raucous competition and then the next day we’re having a kickoff meeting and we’re best of friends.

What are the biggest challenges in the space industry?

Jeff Dance: Well, that’s really interesting. And I would imagine it requires a lot of that, given all the challenges that the industry faces. You mentioned one just being so few suppliers of these solar cells. What are some of the other, you know, we’ve heard, you know, in space, obviously, there’s the extreme costs that are coming down with, you know, with companies like yourself. But there’s the legal side. There’s the sustainability side. We talked in a previous episode, we talked about all the space debris that’s up there.

You know, there’s some of the technology side from unreliable kind of communications or limitations, but what do you see as some of the biggest challenges that the space industry is up against?

Sir Peter Beck: Yeah, when you put it like that, it’s a little bit depressing. I wish it was a bit easier, to be honest with you. But, I mean, look, what we do is really hard. Like the space environment is nasty. Think of the nastiest environment you can and then make it a bit worse. So, you know, it’s a really, really difficult thing to go and do. And, you know, the old saying “space is hard” is, you know, even today, proven to be absolutely true.

Jeff Dance: Right. Yeah.

Sir Peter Beck: But I think one of the biggest challenges in the space industry is not really the technology. It is just the ability to scale because it has been a cottage industry for so long that the industry really hasn’t built a good infrastructure supply chain and all of those things to be able to scale quickly. And that’s the one thing that I would say our customers come to us for. Scale and schedule is number one.

Jeff Dance: Mm-hmm.

Sir Peter Beck: Technology is number two and then price is number three. You know, and that will change over time, you know, the scarcity of launch, the scarcity of so many components and bits and pieces, you know, that’s the biggest challenge facing the industry right now.

Commercial communications

Jeff Dance: Makes sense. As far as the makeup of customers in the space and in your area, what is the mix between government and commercial?

Sir Peter Beck: Well, we like to hold sort of 50-50, so 50% government, 50% commercial. Now, a number of other companies can be 100% government or 100% commercial. But it’s fair to say that governments definitely are a large customer of this industry because a lot of the infrastructure that goes in orbit is government-related, whether it’s civil or defense. So certainly, government is a huge customer.

Jeff Dance:  Yup.

Jeff Dance: As far as near-term market opportunities, we’ve seen how quickly SpaceX, once they had stabilized their system, started to turn on a lot of commercial avenues of that capability. It’s been interesting that the everyday user now on their mobile phones are getting access to satellite reliability. People understand that the world has cell phone coverage but the percentage of the world that does not have cell phone coverage is much larger.

And so when you can put those cell towers in space, it changes the dynamic of coverage. It creates a lot of interesting possibilities for new businesses. So Amazon and Kuiper are kind of working on a similar network. We know there are companies in Europe that have been working on kind of similar things. I would imagine, you know, China and Russia are also thinking about how do we have our network that helps us in commercial, but also wartime, since this has now become a strategic advantage to the communication front. So I’m curious as far as some of the market opportunities you see that are really kind of hot right now for space.

Sir Peter Beck: Yeah, no, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. Obviously, commercial comms is a huge opportunity. And I would say we’re right at the very beginning of this, right? This is a very, very early execution of the system. I’ve always said that I think the biggest application in space hasn’t even been thought of yet. And with this kind of direct device comms and internet from space, it’s really been enabled by low-cost access to space. And that’s not going away anytime soon. And there’s more providers of that, including us, as an example of that. That just enables so much more. I think it’s, I guess the way, a good analogy to think about it is when the internet was first created, it feels like we’ve sent our first email.

Space traffic management concerns

Jeff Dance: Great. That’s where I think we are in the progression of what you can do in space. We’re at the baby stage of where it’s going. Yeah, very early stage. That’s fascinating. What’s fascinating about that future, and let’s get to that, is we can see some of these satellites. When Elon launched all these new satellites, you can see them. But the world’s a big place. We have how many hundreds of millions of cars do we have on the planet?

I’m curious, do you see the launch of so many more items having like a crowding problem up there? Or is this a non-issue, since the amount of space in space is so big? I’m just curious to ask. It’s maybe a dumb question, but interested in your input.

Sir Peter Beck: No, no, no, totally. It’s a great question, actually. So yes, space is big. If you took all the spacecraft that are in orbit, it would probably fit in a football paddock. There’s not that much metal flying around in orbit in the grand scheme of things. However, it’s also kind of like having a highway with zero rules.

Jeff Dance: Interesting.

Sir Peter Beck: There are no traffic lights, no intersections. I don’t care if you’re going up the road or down the road, cross the road, doesn’t matter, just go. And when the highway is not busy, then the chances of you t-boning somebody is pretty low. But as the highway gets busier and busier, those chances continue to increase until it becomes inevitable. There is going to have to be…

Jeff Dance: We need traffic control in space as well.

Sir Peter Beck: A global space traffic management system. Just like aviation, you just set rules on the motorway. So that has to happen.

Now, the challenge for everybody is, unfortunately, it’s a little bit of a human condition to wait until something turns to a crisis before doing something about it. And it’s not like just the US can put this in place because everything is going around the planet every 90 minutes. There’s no option to stop and detour around a certain country; you are going over every country. So all countries, the whole globe, must get together and agree on a set of rules and norms that would enable space traffic management. Then I think it’s no problem at all. But until that happens, we are literally on the highway, somewhat blindfolded, going full speed.

Jeff Dance: Is that something you’re going to tuck into your responsibilities in end-to-end space management? Is there a body? Is there some sort of organization that’s trying to bring these countries together?

Sir Peter Beck: Yeah, because I’m the guy who’s going to create a global agreement. In saying that, though, I did go to the UN a number of years ago and talked about this. And it was singularly the most awe-inspiring and depressing thing at the same time because it was great that it was awe-inspiring that all the countries turned up to talk about this. So clearly, everyone recognizes it’s a global issue.

Jeff Dance: Yeah.

Sir Peter Beck: And everybody read their own pre-prepared statements. I was chairing a panel on this, and everybody read their own pre-prepared statements. At the end of it, I said, “Let’s just have a whiteboard session and sort this out,” and there was a deafening silence. I realized that within the UN, a global outer space rule hadn’t been agreed upon since the 1970s when the Outer Space Treaty was signed. So it’s not an area that has been successfully conjoined and agreed on over history.

Jeff Dance: It seems like something ripe for conflict. We can contemplate using it for military purposes; countries are thinking more from a military perspective. Not that they haven’t used it for intelligence for a long time, but it seems like if there are no rules and we’ve got these strategic assets up there that cost a lot of money, then bumping into each other accidentally or maybe on purpose could be a place that’s ripe for conflict without more unification.

Sir Peter Beck: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like I say, I think I’ve sort of resolved myself to waiting until there’s a big enough issue that everybody agrees. Yeah, it’s time to talk about this now.

The future of space innovation

Jeff Dance: Interesting. Let’s start hearing more about the future, at least talk more about the future. We’ve talked a little bit about today, some of the challenges, some of the incredible things you’re doing to kind of bring this together for companies and for markets. What do you envision?

As we think 10 to 20 years ahead, you talked about the need for unification for rules. I would say that’s something that sounds really important for 10 to 20 years from now, hopefully sooner. What other things come to mind from your perspective as we project forward?

Sir Peter Beck: Well, I think overall, everybody will be more connected to the space layer in their everyday lives. Now, already, it already is, but most people don’t realize it. Whether it’s ordering a pizza, the reality is that’s come from space. Now that sounds crazy to say, but if it wasn’t for the GPS, your pizza would not have turned up at your house.

Jeff Dance: Hahaha, fair.

Sir Peter Beck: So everyday stuff we do relies on space infrastructure, but it’s hidden infrastructure, and it’s just not that obvious. Now, satellite comms have become a little bit more obvious because everybody knows they are talking to a satellite at least. But as that becomes normalized, I think we’ll look back and go, oh, remember those days when you didn’t have ubiquitous cell phone reception? Remember having to sit on a plane and just like the maximum you could do was an email.

All those things, it’s not five or 10 years away; this is like 10 months away. I think there will be significantly improved quality of life changes for many because of space infrastructure. Then there will still be all the hidden layers. The weather satellites up there are providing weather data to provide weather forecasts and all those kinds of things. I’ve talked about GPS, Earth Observation Satellites that are providing imagery and things like that that you may not realize, but will soon be integrated into many things. If you’ve got real-time imagery from space, then, for example, you could monitor all the traffic in a city and kind of predetermine traffic jams and all those kinds of things.

Jeff Dance: That’s cool to be able to say that, that everyone’s life will be able to improve. I think once you understand connectivity to information, and you can tap the world’s information no matter where you are, I don’t know what percentage of Earth isn’t covered by cellular service, but many issues arise when you’re in remote locations. Go ahead.

Sir Peter Beck: Well, if you look at the world and the distinguishing factors between the first world nation and the third world nation, it’s largely education. And if you can take an online Stanford course in a mud hut in Africa, then your quality of life is going to improve. Having that ubiquitous dissemination of information and knowledge is going to be great.

Jeff Dance: Exactly.

Jeff Dance: It’s one thing to have that knowledge available on the internet. It’s another thing to have that ubiquitously available on a device that’s inexpensive, to be able to tap into that information. That’s fascinating. One of the things we’ve been noticing with robotics, in particular, is how AI has been accelerating that. You know, we get excited by ChatGPT and how AI and deep learning have evolved. It’s been really fun to watch this year.

Sir Peter Beck: Exactly.

AI’s role

Jeff Dance: AI can delve much deeper into problem-solving and produce valuable analysis. But computer vision has been a game changer. I mean, it seems like with zero-shot learning, the ability to communicate a lot of information via computer vision to robots or cameras in general, the intelligence you can pull off a camera these days without extensive training is fascinating. I was curious how AI and computer vision tie into how things are accelerating in space and if you anticipate a lot of innovation as a result.

Sir Peter Beck: Yeah, totally. You can kind of divide that into on the ground creating, then in orbit. So from the in-orbit perspective, of course, you’ve got Earth observation satellites taking images and imaging the whole world every day. If you’re imaging the whole world every day, you can see a lot of things. That is the ultimate example for machine learning and AI to be able to build terabytes of databases every day and then just query. It’s like, I wonder what happened over here? Are there any changes in the forest today? Yeah, there were like 20 people cutting all these trees down this afternoon. You don’t have to go hunting for that. It’s just a query of a database, so that becomes very powerful.

Jeff Dance: Wow. So hold on a second. I just want to make sure I capture this. We can grab this large dataset on a daily basis, almost like a large language model. Then, because we have the AI of today as a conversational interface over that large database, we can query the changes of the world on a real-time basis. Is that a good synopsis?

Sir Peter Beck: Yeah, totally. You should have Will from Planet Labs on your show and talk to him about that. Because this is exactly what Planet Labs as a company is doing. So yeah, there’s tremendous power there to see insight for sure.

Jeff Dance: I cut you off though. Was there a second thought?

Sir Peter Beck: Yeah, so the other part is on the ground. And when every electron flies, there’s about half a terabyte of data that comes down from each flight. We have like 15,000 channels of data acquisition on that launch vehicle. So that’s a lot of data to ingest. If you’re just some poor engineer sitting at a desk and trying to compare, like, was that combustion chamber profile of chamber E9 the same as the last 60 flights, or was it different? You can do that, it just takes a lot of time. But being able to ingest that and just query through AI and then pull some insights out of that, that’s just one example for us where we’re deploying AI throughout our business and in more traditional places like finance and whatnot. But doing the things that we do will be even easier with AI, from coding and data reduction analysis and all those kinds of things. So I think it’s going to have a big impact.

Jeff Dance: I think the notion of all these sensors getting data and you producing that sizable amount of data, like how you take big data but then turn it into little data that is meaningful, right? This is where AI overlaps completely. Then tuning that to ensure you’re getting valuable insights so it’s not just noise. It takes some work, but that’s available today. It’s not like this isn’t futuristic technology. This is what we’re doing, essentially, right?

Sir Peter Beck: Exactly. And we’ve already employed it in some of those example data sets. It’s just stunning what you can achieve. What took some engineers days and days to do is now reduced to minutes.

Jeff Dance: That’s amazing. Does Sir Peter look at 30 different monitors up on the screen and analyze that in real-time, or do you just get a text showing you the four insights you need to be aware of because the AI harnessed all of that information?

Sir Peter Beck: Well, unfortunately, I’m a geek, so I’m down in the raw data still.

What types of engineers are in demand?

Jeff Dance: This has been really interesting. I have a few more questions to close this out. But one was around the people who will be in more demand in the future as we think about the space industry accelerating. Those who are interested in getting involved like you, who got involved at a young age, which is unique and has been part of this journey for a long time. What would you say to them as far as some of the types of engineers or specialists we’ll need in the future? And it could be more of the same, but…

Sir Peter Beck: Firstly, in this space, I think it goes for anyone starting out in their career, find your passion, right? Because there are going to be highs, and there are going to be lows. In the space industry, you work your butt off for months or years for one giant event that either goes spectacularly well or spectacularly bad. So it’s a digital outcome. You need to be very passionate about what you do. One area we continually struggle with is mechanical engineers, as an example. I’m sure AI will certainly help a mechanical engineer.

Jeff Dance: Mm-hmm.

Sir Peter Beck: There’s a blurry line, especially in the space industry, between good design, which is a blurred line between art and engineering or art and science. The very best designs look incredibly simple but have probably taken the longest to develop because that’s just what good design looks like. I think there’s always going to be a huge demand for that. Software and coding will always have some niche demand, but as we see over time, AI can do a great job of the more mundane tasks. And maybe it’s just me because I’m a mechanical engineer, and AI is a boom right now, but don’t forget, you need the hardware to do the software.

Jeff Dance: Yeah, I think it’s an interesting space. We’ve seen the tide turn a little bit on the demand for software engineering, given the acceleration of AI. Also, with market dynamics and tech companies, it seems like hardware has emerged as something that’s continued to be important and growing. Sometimes you see ebbs and tides between hardware and software. Still, it seems like we’re seeing more of an ebb towards some of the hardware-oriented companies, and that would go back to mechanical, obviously electrical as well, but some of the mechanical engineering fundamentals underpin good, innovative engineering.

Sir Peter Beck: Yeah, exactly right.

The biggest limiting factor

Jeff Dance: That’s great. Last two questions. What are some of the advancements in space technology that you’re personally most excited about? It could be something you’ve already said.

Sir Peter Beck: I’ll answer this in an odd way. The thing I’m most excited about doesn’t exist. We’ve spent some resources trying to figure it out, as have many others. But the biggest limiting factor for any space activity is that somewhere between 1 and 5% of the total mass of the rocket is the actual thing you put into orbit. If Earth’s gravity was just a little bit higher, we wouldn’t get anything to orbit. If the atmosphere was a little bit more dense, for whatever reason, it’s just possible. Whoever designed all this, if there was a designer, would be sitting back, chuckling away, going, I’ve just made it real hard for these guys, and they struggle. Earth’s mass was just a bit less; it would be much easier. But the reality is, we achieved combustion optimum efficiency back in the ’60s. There is no propellant combination you can put together to make a high-performing rocket engine. That’s it. Like hydrogen and oxygen, that’s your lot. With that, it’s like 1 to 5% total mass is the thing you put into orbit.

If we truly want to be a space-faring civilization and transit the solar system, we have to find a much better way than burning dinosaurs to get off this planet. Chemical propulsion works, but it just works. I’m rooting for the antimatter drive, the ion drive, or some other alternative, anything. Nuclear’s great. Nuclear’s awesome. You can get…

Jeff Dance: Hmm. The dark matter drive is nuclear? Is that a step?

Sir Peter Beck: The best you can get from hydrogen and oxygen engines is about 400 seconds of ISP. An ISP is a measure of performance or efficiency. A nuclear engine can get up into the thousands, which is great. It’s just a little bit of an issue that you have a nasty stream of radiation all the way to orbit, which is suboptimal. But in space, it’s a great technology.

Jeff Dance: That’s true. Right.

Sir Peter Beck: The hardest thing is getting off the planet. Until we really crack a different way of propulsion, you end up with comically large rockets to put relatively small amounts of mass into orbit.

What really matters

Jeff Dance: Comically large is an interesting way to look at it, but it rings true. That’s fascinating, very deep. Last question, what’s the most rewarding experience you’ve had in the industry so far? You’ve accomplished a lot, more than most people do in a very end-to-end way. It’s impressive. We’re excited to keep watching where you go. Looking back, what would you say has been one of your most rewarding experiences or accomplishments?

Sir Peter Beck: That’s a tricky question. It’s almost like asking me to talk about my feelings. So, I don’t know. The technology and the accomplishments are awesome. We went to the moon with a mission off Electron. That was amazing. We’ve rented capsules, and there have been many technology moments or spacecraft moments that have been amazing. But one of the most satisfying things for me is watching the team grow. I think back to when we were a bunch of graduate engineers kicking around in a small lab and those guys now are vice presidents running big parts of the company. They’re responsible for huge things and are amazing people. I induct everybody who comes into the company, and it’s always great doing it long enough because I’ve seen early-stage graduate engineers who you sort of know are just full of beans and going to make it happen no matter what. That’s one of the great things about Rocket Lab: you can start as a graduate engineer and end up as a vice president if you kick ass. So that’s super fun to watch.

Jeff Dance: That’s awesome. Technology is one thing, but the human side, the people side, and being able to watch people grow through overcoming challenges, hard challenges, really hard challenges, and seeing that grow into a successful business, congrats. Proud of what you’re doing and excited to watch what you guys accomplish in the future. It’s our pleasure to have you on this show. Grateful to Sir Peter Beck for what you’re doing, and your passion can be heard and felt. Congrats again, and thank you for coming on.

Sir Peter Beck: Cheers.