Rocket Lab Founder Peter Beck's vision for the space industry's future

As the founder and CEO of Rocket Lab, Peter Beck is a familiar face to anyone in the space industry. But the company's ambitions go far beyond its popular Electron launch vehicle. Today, we're bringing you an interview from TechCrunch Disrupt when Devin Coldewey sat down with Beck to discuss his belief that to thrive, perhaps even to survive, space companies will have to become fully integrated one-stop shops. Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes over at Simplecast. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:11Rebecca Bellan?

  Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Rebecca Bellan and this is usually when you would hear our Friday news roundup, but naturally Disrupt has us doing things a little differently. I'm actually here now in the green room at Disrupt, which is probably why you hear some background noise, but by the time you hear this, we'll be flying home from Disrupt. For those of you who came out to SF, thank you. And for those of you who couldn't make it, check out the episode before this one to hear Kirsten, Margot and Devin's live show. It was so much fun and I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. Speaking of live shows and equities, Devin Goldaway, today we're bringing you an interview Devin led on the space stage with Peter Beck, the founder and CEO of Rocket Lab. The pair dug into Beck's belief that to thrive, perhaps even survive, space companies

• 0:54Rebecca Bellan?

  will have to become a fully integrated, one-stop shop. Let's take a listen.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Thanks for joining us, Peter. We've talked so many times over the years. It's always a pleasure. Before we really get started, though, I think for anybody who is worried about this, what's the over/under on a Neutron launch this year?

• 1:10Speaker 02

  This year?

• 1:10Speaker 01

  This year?

• 1:11Speaker 02

  No, next year.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  Next year, for sure? Okay. Just making sure. But let me ask you this, though. Let's say, assume everything goes perfectly well, first trip, up and down. What does that open up for you as a company? What do you get the green light on as soon as you make that successful trip? What do you do the next day and you're like, all right, go on this, go on this?

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, the purpose of Neutron is really twofold. One, it's to try and break up the kind of medium launch monopoly that it is today. And then the other kind of element is to launch your own stuff. Once you have the first launch, it's a great milestone, but actually, that's the easy bit. Rocket number 20 is like 20 times harder than Rocket number one, because by the time you get to Rocket number 20, you know, it's all built off work constructions by technicians and all through a production system. Rocket number one is lovingly built by all the engineers.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Lovingly? But the other ones aren't?

• 2:02Speaker 02

  No, they're all built lovingly, but you might take an hour to check a bolt rather than, you know, 30 seconds.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  So as Kirsten mentioned in our little intro, it feels like Rocket Lab has grown into something much bigger. Obviously, it's much bigger than it used to be. What is the final form you're aiming for here? We're sort of like, I don't know, four, a quarter of the way there, three quarters of the way there, 5%. What is the final form and how do you get there?

• 2:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's funny because the plan was always to be an end-to-end space company. And I think a lot of people think that we built Electron and then we pivoted into building satellites and whatnot. But actually, the second ever Electron that was launched on the kick stage, there was recesses all around that kick stage for solar panels to turn that into a satellite. So the plan was always to build this end-to-end space company. And I think if you fast forward five to 10 years from now, that's what all large space companies will look like, all the very large ones at least. And that's born out of the fact that look, launch is a great business. It's super lumpy. It's super hard. But what launch really is, is the enabler for something much, much larger. And I think everybody can see it playing out in real time. If you take our friends over at SpaceX, for example, with

• 3:11Speaker 02

  Starlink. If you want to put a competing platform up with Starlink, you have to be able to build your satellites at scale, which means you need, you know, fully vertically integrated component systems and the ability to build satellites at scale. But more importantly, you need to launch at scale. You need to be able to launch at a particular economic point at a particular scale to be successful. And I think space companies and service companies will really start to blur in the future.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  What do you think is the closest we've gotten to a full-service, full-stack space company in the past?

• 3:44Speaker 02

  I think it's relatively new. I mean, generally, you focus on being a launch company or you focus on being a satellite company. Generally, you don't fuse the both. A rocket is a giant engineering compromise and a satellite is a giant engineering compromise. So when you have the ability to kind of blur those two, you end up with an interesting design point.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  But in the past, I mean, we've had, of course, very large aerospace companies that have, you know, done launch, they do satellites, you know, Boeing or something like that in the in the seventies or eighties, or the companies that contributed in Apollo and Mercury. Did anybody ever even come close to really being soup to nuts?

• 4:16Speaker 02

  Well, probably on the government side. I mean, you could argue that, you know, Lockheed and Boeing, you know, they all hadn't launched vehicles at one point in time and they were building satellites at one point in time. But it's very government focused, like they're government contractors, you know, supporting Apollo missions and GPS and a whole bunch of national security. But I think the difference now is it's commercial.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, and a company is just saying, literally, we're going to do whatever we want from start to finish. And that will be, we control every aspect of it. But not every aspect. I'm actually interested in your experience dealing with the many, many, many legacy and niche companies, the specialty rod makers and widget makers of the world that have powered the space industry quietly as component makers and what have you for decades. I'm curious about your experience with them. Are they the kind of like super specialists where you're like, wow, these guys really do make the best, you know, fasteners? Or are some of them a little long in the tooth?

• 5:09Speaker 02

  So I think the thing with the space industry is it's all at subscale. There is a tremendous number of small shops that, as you say, build exquisitely beautiful things. But if you turn up and you say, look, I need a thousand of something, their heads just explode. And the space industry is kind of, it's scaling now at a rate that's never been scaling before. And a lot of these, you know, small companies really, really struggle to scale. And then you have the legacy providers as well that kind of fall in the same camp. That's one of the things that we've kind of focused on. I mean, when we went to go and build our first satellite, I remember the very first thing that we went to go and order was some reaction wheels. And we rang up Doug Sinclair and said, Doug, we like your reaction wheels. Can we buy some reaction wheels? And he said, yep, sure, Pete, but I've closed my order book. So it's going to be a year until we can supply you some

• 5:53Speaker 02

  reaction wheels. And I haven't got a year to do anything. Like a year in Rocket Lab is like eternity. So we said, okay, Doug, that's great. Can we come up with a different kind of deal? And we ended up buying Sinclair. And, you know, Doug's team used to build 150 reaction wheels a year. And this year alone will produce over 2,000 reaction wheels. So what we We've kind of done is if you if you took a satellite and you laid it out on the stage here, we pointed to all of the bits that were subscale or they really sucked. And then systematically went after all of those bits and bought the best in class or we created our own technologies as well and then scaled them. So, you know, Solar was another good example where, you know, Solero is a legacy solar cell manufacturer. You know, they did the James Webb Telescope and all the Mars stuff, so super cool company,

• 6:38Speaker 02

  but just not really that scaled. So we went in there and painted all the walls black, put some Rocket Lab logos up, some snack machines in the corner, pulled down all the cubicles and said, let's go. And then now, you know, we're the largest solar cell or space grade solar cell manufacturer in the world. So that's kind of systematically what we've been doing to try and create some scale in an industry that that really suffers from from scale.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  It necessarily needs a bit of capital to, you meet one of these legacy companies that have been around for 20 years and you say, um, I'm gonna do this myself. But then you're like, well, that's gonna cost me $30 million. You know, how do you judge when to buy and when to build and when to sort of thread the needle?

• 7:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, you know, something like Solar has a tremendous amount of a moat and a barrier. Like, these are, you know, semiconductors, decades and decades of government funded research. That's not an easy thing to kind of jump in. And then on the other side of the equation, you know, we built some spacecraft for NASA recently called Escapade, and there's one or two legacy titanium sphere manufacturers in the US. So we went to one of these legacy suppliers and asked them to build these titanium tanks because they're very thin-walled, very bespoke, and it got crazy fluid control devices inside them. Anyway, we still haven't got those tanks and the spacecraft are finished and ready to launch. And that was an example where these legacy suppliers just were terrible, absolutely terrible.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  And we ended up developing a new 3D printing process for these thin-walled titanium tanks and then E B welding them together and doing all these sorts of things. They didn't cost any money at all. That cost no capital at all. But now we can build, you know, thin-walled titanium tanks in any shape and size we want. You know, it's horses for courses. Some things have big technology moats that are super scary and other things look scary but use different approaches. You can, it doesn't cost any money at all.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Is there any upside to being a supplier for titanium spheres now? Now you're the leading supplier of spheres or other shapes made of titanium? You can be that guy?

• 8:29Speaker 02

  You could be that guy. I mean, uh.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Are you that guy?

• 8:32Speaker 02

  I'm not sure that's the most exciting business in the world. But nevertheless, it's super critical. And then for us now, as we look at building interplanetary stuff or big balls of Delta V in orbit, you can just take that whole tank section, which is the longest lead time item and quite often very expensive and just delete it.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  So let me ask you about the interplanetary spacecraft type things. When you get a contract, say, okay, we need to build a spacecraft. Maybe it's your first spacecraft. How do you start building up that team? How do you stand that team up? Who's your first hire?

• 9:02Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, don't underestimate the importance of not understanding how big a bite you've taken off, because I think if you sit down and write down everything on a piece of paper that you would have to do to achieve some of these things, then you'd never start. A good dose of kind of skepticism and arrogance is super helpful.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Writing this down?

• 9:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Skepticism, arrogance. Good.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. But I mean, you know, look, Capstone was a great example of that. For us, it was our first interplanetary, well, first deep space mission. And we had a good understanding of theoretically, theoretically it was, it was possible, but we had to develop crazy new stuff to be able to, how to execute that. The team at Rocket Lab does, you know, is about 2,000 or just a little bit over 2,000 of us now. So, you know, there's a good cross section of experiences and talents. So put a team around something and we can really get stuck in.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  So let's talk a little more about the spacecraft style of things and the interplanetary missions, because these are just, it's so fascinating. And I know that this is a passion of yours as well. It's like you want to build something to go to, any, any planet really will do. And you've already sent over Capstone and we got escapade. Coming into this as like a fresh, like you had not made a spacecraft before you made Capstone.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  What were some of the lessons you learned along the ways, like coming as a, as a, with a totally fresh perspective to this, knowing like, oh, well, obviously we built them like this and this and this, and this is how you build a spacecraft. So we'll take the lessons from the last 50 years of spacecraft building. And then you get into it and you're like, oh my God, why did anybody ever do it this way? What was, what were some of the experiences you've had like that?

• 10:33Speaker 02

  I don't want to upset any spacecraft people, but spacecraft are way easier to build than rockets. They really are. Now, deep space stuff is a little bit more challenging because you've got a whole bunch of radiation and nasty environment to kind of deal with. But at a higher level, they're a much more passive, simpler thing to do. You know, there was a lot of learnings. I remember sitting in a design review for Capstone and one of the GNC team was doing all of the the trajectory calculations. And that particular mission was really difficult because we're using a whole bunch of weak boundary effects to get to the moon. We did seven orbit raises around the earth to finally shoot off for our TLI to the moon. And each one of those orbit raises, we had to do a complete tidy up of the trajectory from the last, you know, correct for all the errors. And so the GNC team had 24 hours to redesign a trajectory to the moon.

• 11:19Speaker 02

  You know, the first trajectory that they designed to the moon took them about a month. And we had to get that down to 24 hours. So every 24 hours, we'd iterate on this trajectory. And I remember we had to allow for the solar pressure, you know, the photons hitting the side of the spacecraft and altering the trajectory just from the sunlight.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Really? Okay.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  Because that was enough to cause this issue. And then, you know, it's a relatively small disturbance. You think about engine shutdown transients where the engine, you command the engine to shut down and there's a transient as the engine shuts down. And characterising that transient so that you don't end off way out in deep space. Because when you're, you know, when you're at the earth and you've got to time it with the moon, that's not trivial.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  Have you found that physics-based simulators have become more useful in the last few years? Gotten a little better?

• 12:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the maths hasn't changed, but I guess some of the tools around have.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  On the team thing, I forgot to ask, is there a lot of competition for talent right now? If you're, everybody's thinking about building spacecraft, but you gotta, you gotta build up that team, is there competition?

• 12:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, look, there's always been competition for talent for as long as I can remember. Our sales pitch is, is like, if you actually want to build shit that goes to space, come work for us. And it's amazing, you know, the amount of companies that, that have cool ideas and build cool stuff in the lab, but don't actually get to fly it. Always a lot of competition for talent and the statistics for Rocket Lab aren't particularly good. It's twice as easy to get into Harvard than it is to get into Rocket Lab. So the, the threshold is super, super high for anybody to get in, but.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  You have legacy admissions? Just if I know somebody like you, I can get in?

• 12:43Speaker 02

  No.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Thanks for coming out. So, tell me a little more about the spacecraft that you are most personally excited about. The mission that you are most personally excited about, like the elegance of the design, or how complicated the lunar injection, you know, process is. Obviously, you're proud of that, and rightly so. So, what are you hyped for?

• 13:04Speaker 02

  Well, actually, it's a mission that's completely unfunded, and it is a small financial drain on the company, and that is-

• 13:10Speaker 01

  Small, small financial-

• 13:11Speaker 02

  Very small, very small. It's a nights and weekends project, and that's a life-finding mission to Venus. And that, for me, is, you know, I'm personally very passionate about that, because I think one of the biggest questions that we can ask and answer in the universe is, are we the only life in the universe or not? So, this mission is designed to specifically target the clouds of Venus. There's a very interesting sweet zone about 50 kilometers off the surface of Venus, where there's believed that, I mean, the conditions are just good enough that there could be life there. And this mission is designed to go there, and it's a completely private mission. Like I say, it's a nights and weekends kind of project. You know, we're using the kind of the basis of the capstone bus to get us there, and then we separate off a probe once we arrive at Venus, and that probe has around about

• 13:54Speaker 02

  250 seconds of time to interface with the Venusian atmosphere. And we have a nephrometer instrument in there that's basically designed, you know, to look for life. So, it's kind of like a go/no-go instrument for life.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  Green light, red light. So, it's a very rudimentary, because the, you know, the telemetry stream that we can get back from a little probe entering the clouds of Venus back to Earth is a pretty narrow stream. Super cool project. The probe is like a Jules Verne-looking thing. It's just really neat. We certainly hope we can get that one away soon.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, that sounds interesting. I know it's, Venus is pretty hairy. It's no picnic going to Venus. It's nasty out there.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  It's nasty, yep. But it is, I think it's a much more interesting planet, not to choose favorites or anything, but a much more interesting planet than Mars. Mars, politically, is excellent, because you can put a footprint on the surface of Mars, and that wins heaps of votes. But Venus, you know, you're never putting a footprint on the surface of Venus, but I think Venus as a planet is a lot more interesting.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  Now, since you brought up politics, I wasn't gonna ask this-

• 14:51Speaker 02

  I did not mean to bring up politics.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  Don't worry. Well, look, seriously, though-

• 14:55Speaker 02

  That is another rocket for you, not my job.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  It's all right. It's done. It's done. Look, I'm just, I'm gonna ask you, this is, it is a bit of a sensitive topic, but your fellow spaceman, Elon Musk, has been acting on it in sort of a partisan way. Do you think that's good business?

• 15:08Speaker 02

  He can do whatever he wants here. I'm just a guy from New Zealand trying to build a rocket. Yeah.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Very fair, very fair answer.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Do you get to go in and actually poke around on this? Is this weekend and afternoons? When do you do this project? Do you get to go in there and poke around with the thing? And say, "Make this bigger, make this faster"?

• 15:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, probably about 30% of my time. I'd like it to be much more, but 30% of my time is where the range. So it's super fun to be very hands-on. But I'm still the chief engineer of the company. So probably about 50% of the time, I'm deeply involved in all the main engineering decisions within the company. And 30% of the time, I actually get to get my hands dirty. I think a lot of people worry when I turn up, but I'd still like to get my hands dirty. And then the other 50% of the time is just useless rocket CEO stuff.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Like this?

• 16:01Speaker 02

  No, this is wonderful. This is great use of time.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  So one of the consequences, it seems, of building a full-stack rocket company or a space company is that you're free to launch as many things as you want if you can afford it. We've obviously seen that with Starlink. They're offering a service and it's all very cool, but people are concerned that there is going to be a proliferation of many different constellations in various orbits, and this is going to make things more complicated. How do you see this playing out? And do you think the coming verticalization of space companies is going to contribute to that?

• 16:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is, for sure. And it is a real concern. It's something we've been very vocal about, and everybody, all the nations of this planet need to come together at some point and come up with a set of rules, some space traffic, if you will. Now, unfortunately, as a race, we don't seem to be very good at projecting things forward and then doing something about them before they happen. So I think more likely what will happen is there'll be some kind of incident in orbit, and then we'll all get together and make a set of rules. But you're right. I mean, China has a 30,000 satellite constellation. There's a couple of 30,000 satellite constellations here in the US. Europe will have the same. Every emerging space nation will put up their own assets. So it will get busier and busier. And I can remember with Electron, we used to have a three-hour launch window, very

• 17:19Speaker 02

  sedate, lazy three-hour launch window that we could go and fly. And then some of these constellations start to get populated, and it got down to three minutes at one point. And then we went back to the FAA and developed some new modeling techniques, and it's opened that window back up. But it just shows that if you did nothing, then you'd be down to three-minute launch windows.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  So what would such a, you know, traffic monitoring system even look like? I mean, you must have thought, you've thought about this a lot. What would the basic, if you were the, you know, lord of space, uh, which maybe you'll get a chance later on. If you were the lord of space, what would you, what would you set up? Would it be like, oh, only 10,000, you know, in this?

• 17:55Speaker 02

  It's actually really simple. I mean, it's just transparency, but there's a lot of reasons why a lot of people don't want transparency. Because at the moment, if you think about all the models, if your spacecraft is not creating any maneuvers, then it's very predictable. So it's here and then 90 minutes it's back around here with an orbit position and so on and so forth. So it's actually very predictable. The challenge is, is when, you know, all the computer models start to break, if you actually, you were here and then you make a maneuver and then in 90 minutes' time, you're no longer here, you're over here. And if you're continually moving your spacecraft, it becomes mathematically impossible to predict the conjunctions. So the only way you get around it is complete transparency. So all of the governments and with all of their assets and all the commercial assets would just have to, you know, provide all the TLEs and where they are in orbit and the conjunctions could be computed.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  And you'd have to also add an ion 10 to burn here to get to here. And then that's, it's mathematically computable.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  So when you, when you're talking with defense and these people, is there any tension there with the question of like, well, if we're gonna, you know, as a country, be doing our own thing, because we have our own reasons, just like any other country or sovereign nation, to not disclose for defense or intelligence purposes? Is that something that as the actual creator of the hardware, you need to negotiate with these people? Or is it just, it's in the contract or it isn't or what?

• 19:12Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, we're not operating the spacecraft. So, you know, we'll deliver the spacecraft to the customer and then they're responsible for the operations of it and their orbit and, you know, the mission that they intend to carry out with that. So it's not something that we, we certainly have any, any kind of, you know, responsibility over. But, I mean, you know, look, at the end of the day, I don't want to paint the wrong picture. I mean, space is big and, you know, you could take all of the spacecraft that are in orbit right now and they'd fit in like a football paddock. So, you know, it's crazy. The challenge is that the closing speeds or the conjunction speeds are just super high.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And the little visualizations we always see are kind of misleading because the dots are so gigantic.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're like the size of countries.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. But you will be operating more as time goes on. How do you make that operating piece work? Building something like that up from scratch? I'm sure SpaceX has something to say about it. Amazon's going to be getting into this. But you're about to have this 18. You're not going to be operating that one. But you will be operating one soon. What does it look like building up that kind of oversight mechanism?

• 20:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's pretty straightforward, to be honest with you.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Is that something that hasn't changed so much in the last like 50 years?

• 20:14Speaker 02

  Not so much. I mean, right now, as I mentioned before, there is no kind of international rules that everybody has to log in and comply by. So there's a lot of panicked 2 o'clock in the morning calls to other people about conjunctions that still occur.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  So really, we just need better phones. Call each other better.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  Yes, and space traffic management, yep.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  Do you want to talk about the documentary at all?

• 20:34Speaker 02

  Can do.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  If you haven't seen this documentary, Wild Wild Spaces. It was a very interesting profile view and our friend Chris, Chris Camp. I'm just trying to...

• 20:42Speaker 02

  So just be clear, I did everything I could to stay away from that documentary.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  Wait, what?

• 20:47Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, so every opportunity with Ashley, we tried to convince him that this was a bad idea, so...

• 20:54Speaker 01

  And that's why you should definitely watch it, because it's very interesting. But was it, did it make you uncomfortable having people like around? Or did you just disagree with the thesis of the documentary?

• 21:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, look, we're just about building rockets and spacecraft. So the amount of access that we gave the team was just a few interviews and bits and pieces now and again, so there wasn't tremendous amount of access. But to Ashley's credit, he came over to New Zealand and just stalked us for like months on end and parked outside my mum's house, I think. So he was well dedicated to the...

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a work ethic. That's great. Well, we'll talk about getting us access, better access. We'll make a better documentary. So you talked about spending a little time with a wrench in your hand. I think that's great. When I think of Rocket Lab, I've been covering you guys for a long time. I think of the very early days and seeing the pictures, you guys out in the forests and, I don't know, forest, it was, you know, launch stand somewhere. And really just like grease monkeying the things together. Do you miss those days at all?

• 21:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, whenever I get the chance, try and be back on the tools. I mean, I was lucky to spend a few weeks at CENUS with the, you know, the Archimedes team just recently on getting that first hot fire over the line. And yeah, it was super fun to get back on the tools.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  Was it hard, though? I mean, back in those days, was it fun? Was it hard? Was it both?

• 22:04Speaker 02

  It's like type 3 fun. Like super hard and then you look back on it and you think, yeah, that was quite fun. Yeah. But I mean, nobody, I don't know. I'm not sure you get in this business to have fun. I think it's, it's, it's rewarding, but less fun.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I've got a, I've got another panel here in just a second, but I'd like to get your thoughts on this, this whole market that they're pursuing. They're doing a full reusable, so stoked space is going to be doing a full reusable thing. Inversion space is doing targeted reentry of assets and cargo. Does that strike you, is this, is this a realistic future where we're, you know, dropping cargo on, on target or a full reentry for, you know, small rockets and stuff like that?

• 22:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there's, there's bound to be some high value things that it makes good sense to return because they're always, you know, it's going to have to be high value because it's going to cost a lot to do. We were lucky to win the, the VADA contract where we built a spacecraft that hosted VADA's capsule and they, they made some high value pharmaceuticals in that capsule and then re-entered it and landed it in the Utah desert and that's super cool. So I think, I think for, you know, particularly high value things, there's going to be a down mass market. How, how big that market is, not exactly sure, but.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  Are there any interesting new markets like that that you would be curious about exploring as a, as a, as a full stack company when you have a little more freedom to try some interesting new things?

• 23:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're always looking at crazy stuff. We have people who, whose job title is like crazy shit thinking. So we, we're always, we're looking at that cool stuff and it's amazing the experiments and the bits and pieces that quietly fly in electrons now and again.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  Well, I'm glad to hear you're doing crazy shit. Well, I think that's all the time we have for today. Thanks again for coming out. All with a pleasure.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  Thanks, David. Cheers.

• 23:44Speaker 03

  Equity is produced by Teresa Loconsolo with editing by Kel. Bryce Durbin is our illustrator and we'd like to give a big thanks to our audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch Audio Products. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.