Rocket Lab HQ Tour with Sir Peter Beck | Factory Tour: Part I

Factory Tour 1 of 2: We went inside Rocket Lab with Founder & CEO Sir Peter Beck for a behind-the-scenes look at how one of the world’s leading space companies actually builds. In the first part of our Rocket Lab factory tour, Peter takes us through the company’s Long Beach headquarters, mission control, satellite manufacturing, spacecraft testing, electric propulsion, and NASA’s LOxSAT program. Along the way, we trace Rocket Lab’s evolution from a tiny New Zealand startup with less than $100,000 NZD in capitalization to a global, publicly traded space company spanning launch, satellites, spacecraft components, propulsion, defense, and interplanetary missions. Peter breaks down Rocket Lab’s capital-efficient culture, why he took the company public, its acquisition strategy, the hidden moat in spacecraft components, and his goal of building a multi-generational space company that continues long after he’s gone. We also get into Rocket Lab’s earliest rockets, Khosla and Bessemer’s first investments, NASA’s CAPSTONE mission to the Moon, the search for life on Venus, and what Peter believes most new space companies underestimate. This is Factory Tour 1 of 2. In Tour 2, we head inside Rocket Lab’s propulsion & engine facilities. Peter Beck: https://x.com/Peter_J_Beck Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊 YouTube: https://youtu.be/RTcF6jqrTYs 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 • Brex https://brex.com/sourcery—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery • Applied Aerospace http://applied-ad.com/—As global competition intensifies, strategic leadership demands space and defense technologies that deliver enduring national capabilities. At Applied Aerospace & Defense, we unleash the power of advanced manufacturing with unmatched scale and agility. Visit:applied-ad.com/ https://applied-ad.com/ • Turing https://turing.com/sourcery—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery • VCX https://fundrise.com/vcx—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com http://getvcx.com • Deel https://www.deel.com/sourcery—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery • Public http://public.com/sourcery–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets https://public.com/generated-asset, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc https://www.sourcery.vc/ Disclosure Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time. 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Touring inside Rocket Lab's HQ (01:44) The origin story (07:14) Too much Capital can kill a startup (09:03) Why Rocket Lab decided to go public (10:45) From Rockets to an entire Space Ecosystem (15:11) Where Escapade and CAPSTONE were flown (18:08) Inside the Electric Propulsion Lab (19:58) Inside the Thermal and Shock Testing Facility (21:45) Inside the NASA LOxSAT project (24:00) Up Next: Inside the Engine Lab

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If you turn up tomorrow and say I want to build a thousand satellites, good luck. The CAPS own mission to the moon, we did for NASA a few years ago that was done out of here.

• 0:07Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 0:08Speaker 00

  Yep. The Electron rocket was under a hundred million dollars and eighty people put the first rocket into orbit. These particular missions are very difficult missions. They're like twelve year lifespan, operating in nasty, nasty radiation. And they're missions that just cannot fail. We have thirteen acres of factory around the world.

• 0:24Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 0:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. So this is a pretty small piece of Rocket Lab.

• 0:26Molly O'Shea?

  Is there anything we haven't seen, we're not allowed to see?

• 0:28Speaker 00

  Lots.

• 0:29Molly O'Shea?

  We just saw a tiny version.

• 0:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 0:41Molly O'Shea?

  We are here today at Rocket Lab in Long Beach with Sir Peter Beck. Thanks for having us.

• 0:48Speaker 00

  Oh, thanks for coming.

• 0:49Molly O'Shea?

  So what are we gonna see today?

• 0:51Speaker 00

  Well, we'll try and show you a little bit of Rocket Lab. You know, we're spread across the entire United States and Germany and New Zealand and a little bit in Australia. So there's a lot to see, but we'll show you headquarters here, a little bit of satellite manufacturing and some engine developments.

• 1:06Molly O'Shea?

  Amazing. Let's walk through. You have one of the coolest entrances I've seen.

• 1:11Speaker 00

  So does it, does it remind you of anything? This is how I test how much of a sci fi nerd you are.

• 1:15Molly O'Shea?

  Star Trek?

• 1:16Speaker 00

  No. It's probably a little bit old. It's two thousand and one Space Odyssey.

• 1:21Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, that's exactly, that's what I was, yeah, that's exactly what I was getting at.

• 1:25Speaker 00

  The best sci fi movie ever made because it's the most accurate. But this bit is supposed to remind you of the bit where they shut down the hell nine thousand computer, you know? Don't do that, Dave. You know, it's, it's like that.

• 1:38Molly O'Shea?

  Do you have any other inspiration of sci fi movies in here?

• 1:41Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:41Molly O'Shea?

  No?

• 1:42Speaker 00

  Just the one, yeah.

• 1:44Molly O'Shea?

  Well, when we walked in here earlier, we were kind of stuck to the timeline because it's jam packed with so much stuff. There's so much going on. So it might be cool to walk through some of that and kind of show what you have in the lobby area. It seems like a showcase.

• 1:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, like any, any company, it's like the twenty year overnight success. So started the company in two thousand and six down in New Zealand. And sort of between two thousand and six and two thousand and nine, we were, we were like our own little technology development house. And in two thousand and nine, we launched our first suborbital rocket called R T O one. And we were the first private company in the southern hemisphere to, to reach space. Not all, but just into space.

• 2:28Molly O'Shea?

  Just three years after starting.

• 2:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, yep. And then, and, and with like eighty, I think we had a total capitalization of under a hundred thousand New Zealand dollars, which is like sixty thousand US dollars at that point, so.

• 2:40Molly O'Shea?

  Wow. And to think there's billionaires starting companies now that don't actually reach space.

• 2:44Speaker 00

  This is, this is true, yeah. I mean, I think, I think one of the, the, the success stories of Rocket Lab has been, we have this saying, well, it's actually, we stole it from Ernest Rutherford, and that's why the engine is called Rutherford is. He's, he said, we have no money, so we have to think. And that's kind of the ethos of the company. We came from very humble beginnings and, and I'm, you know, on that rocket actually is like swag lock fittings that I'd salvaged from a junkyard.

• 3:12Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 3:13Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, because I could only afford the, the ferrels, not the cost of the fitting. So I would get the, the fitting from the junkyard and buy the three dollar twenty ferrels to put in it and recondition it into a fitting, you know? So it was, it was seriously, you know, constrained stuff. But from that adversity comes good ideas. And then in two thousand and ten, we won some work with, with DARPA and developed a new kind of propellant and propulsion system. Did a, did a little instantizer rocket launch UAV. And then two thousand and thirteen is really where we started to grow up. So that's when I, I, when out of New Zealand, I came here to the United States and started raising our first venture capital.

• 3:55Speaker 00

  So Cozla Ventures were the first, first folks to put in some venture capital into the entity. And at that point, we flipped from being a New Zealand company into a US company. And Cozla put five million dollars in for, for the, for the series A round, which, you know, at that time for me, that was the most insane amount of money imaginable.

• 4:15Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 4:16Speaker 00

  But for that, you know, we got our first three D printed Rutherford engine hot fired and proved, proved out a whole lot of composite structures and stuff. Then did the B round in two thousand and fourteen with, with Bessemer leading that. And then two thousand and fifteen, we broke ground on a launch complex one in New Zealand. So that's, you know, was the very first private orbital launch site. Two thousand and sixteen, we finished it. Two thousand and seventeen, we launched our first vehicle and we raised our D round, which was a, became, we can, you know, a unicorn at that point. That's when, that's.

• 4:49Molly O'Shea?

  Big deal.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  Then things started to move a bit, yeah. And then two thousand and eighteen, we launched three rockets. And probably, you know, the, the fourth rocket in the, in, you know, in the stable, their number four was one of the, I guess for me personally, one of the, the more satisfying ones. Because, you know, prior to this, I was, you know, a kid sitting in New Zealand dreaming, working for NASA. Like I had this little plastic space shuttle that would sit in my desk beside me. And then when I started, you know, my career in, in engineering, it used to sit on the top of my toolbox and then the top of my laptop and so on and so forth. And, you know, I never, never really got to be employed by NASA, but I got to launch their payloads. So that was.

• 5:32Molly O'Shea?

  And you couldn't be employed by NASA because you didn't go to college, right?

• 5:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I was objectively too dumb. And, and also a foreign national, so foreign national, no degree, you know, it wasn't looking good.

• 5:45Molly O'Shea?

  How does that bleed into the culture here? I've heard that you're an eight wire or wire eight type of person.

• 5:51Speaker 00

  Oh, no, it's a New Zealand saying, number eight wire. I actually personally hate it.

• 5:55Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 5:55Speaker 00

  Because it means, it means, well, it's got two connotations. In, in New Zealand, it means to, you know, to bodge stuff together. And I'm the opposite of a bodge stuff together kind of guy.

• 6:04Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 6:05Speaker 00

  But it's kind of subliminal meaning is more making do with not much, which I think is technically accurate.

• 6:12Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah. So how does that, even from the beginning, how does that bleed into the culture today?

• 6:19Speaker 00

  Well, today, you know, if you look at what we achieve with the amount of capital resources that we, that we expend, it's, it's always, you know, pretty significantly better than, than most people. You know, for example, the Electron rocket, I think it was under a hundred million dollars and eighty people put the first rocket into orbit.

• 6:37Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 6:38Speaker 00

  You know, at that, at the time, our nearest competitor was Virgin Orbit, and that was funded by, you know, Sir Richard Branson. And in the end, I think Richard put one point two billion dollars into that company before it ultimately went bankrupt with a, you know, a handful of launches under their belt. So, so yeah, we, we, we are never the most well financed, although as a public company, we've certainly, certainly, you know, much more endowed than we ever have been. But I mean, it's, it's sort of hard baked into the culture here that, you know, everything is, is, is ground right down to the, you know, the very last, last bit.

• 7:14Molly O'Shea?

  There was an interview we did where someone mentioned that startups often die from indigestion of funding.

• 7:22Speaker 00

  Totally, absolutely. If you look at, if I look back and think of, you know, lots of startups that I've seen or been involved with, the ones that have failed most spectacularly have been the ones that have been funded the most well. You know, the most significantly.

• 7:37Molly O'Shea?

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• 8:21Molly O'Shea?

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• 9:03Molly O'Shea?

  So as we walk through the timeline, there's a really interesting point where you just, twenty twenty one, you go public and you make a ton of acquisitions. So what, what kind of was the process for going public here? And how do you see that happening to today with, with everything that's going on with SpaceX?

• 9:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there was a couple of reasons to go public. One kind of logically and one kind of like almost, well, sort of logically, but personal. And I think being a public company teaches you extreme discipline. Like you can't be messing around as a public company and, and, you know, wasting capital and not delivering. So, you know, the company has always had a really strong culture of delivery, but as a public company, it's just even much, much more intense. And then you sort of the personal reason why I wanted to take the company public is I'm trying to build a multi generational space company. And so many companies in this industry are defined by their founders or, you know, a small group of people.

• 10:01Speaker 00

  And if you have to ask yourself, like, when they ultimately, you know, kick the bucket, what happens to those companies? And, you know, the only thing that my parents ever said to me as I was growing up was have impact. Have the most amount of impact in the, in your lifetime. So you can have, you know, amount of impact when you're alive. But if you can, you know, keep that impact going after you're dead, then you, you know, by proxy, you have much, much larger impact. So the idea here with going public is enforcing that discipline so that when I'm long gone, this thing just keeps going and going and going and going. Whereas a private company, it's like, you know, if the founder, CEO and all of that just carves it one day, then what truly happens to those companies?

• 10:45Molly O'Shea?

  It's interesting because this is when you start making a heavy amount of acquisitions, which has become one of the defining factors, factors of the company as you build out the entire platform. Like you're not just a launch company, and I think that's a big misconception.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:00Molly O'Shea?

  You do a lot of components and space manufacturing and that kind of thing. So how do you see the evolution of Rocket Lab as we look through this entire timeline and what goes forward?

• 11:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, it seems to just be a constant exponential ramp up. That's certainly what it feels like. And, you know, to your point, 2021 was a very busy year. We went public and acquired three companies. Don't recommend that. That is really painful. But, you know.

• 11:30Molly O'Shea?

  Why? Because of regulatory stuff with each acquisition?

• 11:32Speaker 00

  Well, so anytime you acquire a company, it's like, you know, you go out to a used car lot. They're going to hate me for this analogy, but you go out to a used car lot and you look around, a nice little polished car, and it all looks great and it's all shiny. And then, you know, it's not until the drive home that you realize that like the visors squeaking, the wheels rumbling and all of the things that just aren't quite right.

• 11:54Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  And so, you know, there's no such thing as a small acquisition. Ironically, like some of the smaller companies have consumed vastly amounts more time than some of the bigger companies. So it's just a lot of work to integrate a company in and, you know, aggregate all the financial systems and get the culture where you want it. It's just a huge piece of work. So doing three at once was just, that was not fun. But ultimately, it was great. We got there in the end. But, I mean, to your point, I think people focus on the rocket because it's the big, you know, firework in the sky and everyone gets emotional and it's all very cool. It's hard to get emotional about a reaction wheel, you know, a little, or a Star Trek

• 12:39Speaker 00

  or a little component that goes into a spacecraft. But the reality is that, you know, launch is a huge mote, but all of these spacecraft components are huge motes as well. Because, you know, it doesn't matter how much capital you've got. If you turn up tomorrow and say, I want to build a thousand satellites, good luck. Like it's just not happening because the supply chain is so small and fractured. So we saw that, you know, to get to this end to end space company in our vision, we needed to own all the components that go into the spacecraft so that we could literally build any spacecraft we want.

• 13:13Molly O'Shea?

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• 13:58Molly O'Shea?

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• 14:40Molly O'Shea?

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• 15:11Molly O'Shea?

  So we have mission control in here as well?

• 15:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, one of five. So this is generally for satellite operations. You know, sometimes we'll do launch vehicle stuff in here as well, but it's mainly for satellite operations. So, you know, this is, this mission control has seen some really cool missions, you know, a couple of spacecraft escapade on their way to Mars. That was all controlled out of here. The Capstone mission to the moon we did for NASA a few years ago, that was done out of here.

• 15:41Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 15:42Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 15:43Molly O'Shea?

  You did it out of this location?

• 15:44Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 15:44Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, wow.

• 15:45Speaker 00

  And New Zealand, actually, both, because it was a, you know, it was a 24/7 operation. So each control room would just hand off to, it was one of the advantages of having things in opposite hemispheres. It's like it's always sunshine somewhere. So, yeah, no, it was really good.

• 16:00Molly O'Shea?

  Did you discover anything on the moon that you can't share, but you're going to share today?

• 16:04Speaker 00

  No, no, no aliens, no, no. That mission was actually the very first part of the Artemis program. So we went into a really weird orbit that the gateway mission was going to go into to prove that that orbit was stable. So it was a crazy, crazy mission. In fact, that's the Capstone spacecraft behind us. That's the engineering number two.

• 16:25Molly O'Shea?

  That one went to the moon.

• 16:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, not that one, because the one that went to the moon is about five million miles, you know, in a, almost a heliocentric orbit around the sun. So that's a spear one.

• 16:37Molly O'Shea?

  R I P.

• 16:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's like contact, you always build two, you know?

• 16:41Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 16:44Molly O'Shea?

  So the headquarters, we have this like cool lobby, we have mission control. What are we going to see behind these doors?

• 16:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, so behind these doors are some of our satellite manufacturing. So we have a number of programs being built in there. We always like to have a really cool program, not that they're not all cool, but a particularly cool one. So generally what that means is we always have a mission to Mars or a mission to another planet in the clean room there. But, but yeah, we'll go on through here and you can see some of the satellite manufacturing that's going on.

• 17:15Molly O'Shea?

  You have a super special dream mission of Venus, right?

• 17:18Speaker 00

  I do, yeah.

• 17:19Molly O'Shea?

  So what's that about?

• 17:20Speaker 00

  In short, it's about, you know, can we find life in the universe? Because I think that's probably one of the, one of the biggest questions as a human species that we can answer, right? Is like, are we the only ones in the universe or not? And Venus has this really unique cloud layer about 50 kilometers in that in theory can at least support some kind of life. And there's been traces of phosphine gas found in there. Phosphine gas only comes from organic symbiosis. So the mission is to go there and actually see if we can detect life.

• 17:53Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah. I am late to the game on this movie, but I recently watched Project Hail Mary.

• 17:59Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:59Molly O'Shea?

  Somehow I'm obsessed with it.

• 18:00Speaker 00

  There you go.

• 18:01Molly O'Shea?

  When are you going to start using astrophage for your propulsion?

• 18:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, that would be good. Well, I'll tell you what, burning dinosaurs is not getting us there, that's for sure. Yeah.

• 18:08Molly O'Shea?

  And so you guys, I think in here you're doing some electric, is that what I?

• 18:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this is one of our spacecraft programs. So you can see some of the buses in the background for a particular customer. And, you know, this is a production line, so you start at one end and sort of move over to the other end. And if you have a spacecraft, and that little tent is the electrical propulsion integration assembly and test in there. So it's where we integrate these little electric thrusters.

• 18:40Molly O'Shea?

  And what's the use case for electric thrusters?

• 18:43Speaker 00

  Good for station keeping, a little bit of orbit raising, and, you know, just avoids having tremendous amounts of chemical thrusters onboard, yeah. Yeah, these particular missions are very difficult missions. They're like, you know, 12-year lifespan, operating in nasty, nasty radiation, and they're missions that just cannot fail.

• 19:03Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 19:03Speaker 00

  So I think there's always a big difference between, you know, sort of low Earth orbit missions that have a short duration and, you know, are allowed to fail. Most of the stuff we do is like super hard, you know, defense-related or interplanetary and stuff like that where you just can't have stuff fail.

• 19:24Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 19:26Molly O'Shea?

  We just passed by one of your vending machines.

• 19:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:28Molly O'Shea?

  What is in that? I just saw some tape and some electrical components.

• 19:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, not chips.

• 19:35Molly O'Shea?

  What is that?

• 19:36Speaker 00

  Well, it just makes it easier for the staff if they need, you know, various bits and pieces, you know, consumables for the spacecraft build. Rather than going to a store room and having to stand in line and asking for somebody, you can just go to the vending machine and get it. It's just way faster.

• 19:50Molly O'Shea?

  That's innovation.

• 19:51Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  I'm sure if you ask them, they'd rather chocolate bars, but.

• 19:58Molly O'Shea?

  So, okay, so we have this big, huge facility behind us. Are we allowed to talk about this?

• 20:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this is a thermal model of one of our spacecraft that we built for a customer. So it gives you a sense of sort of some of the scale here. These are just aluminum blocks to represent thermal masses. So, you know, something like this, we'll build the complete spacecraft and then we'll go into thermal vibe and shock testing. And, you know, before we actually start to put the real one together.

• 20:30Molly O'Shea?

  Where do you do all your testing?

• 20:32Speaker 00

  It's all done in this facility. So in there, we could go in there, but it would take forever to get you booted up into, you know, extremely flattering gear. But there, there's shock testing and environmental testing and functional testing in there.

• 20:47Molly O'Shea?

  So we're in just one of how many buildings on this site?

• 20:52Speaker 00

  Three buildings on this site. And overall, I did the calculation, we have 13 acres of factory around the world. Yeah. So this is a pretty small piece of Rocket Lab.

• 21:03Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 21:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:04Molly O'Shea?

  So you have New Zealand, you have here, you have Virginia.

• 21:08Speaker 00

  Yep, we have Albuquerque, Tucson, Arizona, and a whole bunch of stuff in Middle River. You know, that's where the neutron rocket is being built. And then Toronto in Canada. And then Germany, Monarch in Germany. And, oh, I'm blanking on a whole bunch, Stennis, Mississippi. So, yeah, all, yeah, a whole bunch of places.

• 21:35Molly O'Shea?

  How many employees are in this LA facility?

• 21:38Speaker 00

  I think it's about 800, yeah, thereabouts, over the two campuses.

• 21:43Molly O'Shea?

  That's a lot.

• 21:45Molly O'Shea?

  Are we allowed to look in here?

• 21:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:47Molly O'Shea?

  I always have to ask, you never know.

• 21:48Speaker 00

  No, I know, but you have to look in here, this is beautiful.

• 21:52Molly O'Shea?

  This is beautiful.

• 21:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this is a project we're doing for NASA called LOXAT. So that big, like, Christmas bauble on the top is actually a sphere full of liquid oxygen. So we're helping NASA figure out how to store liquid oxygen on orbit for very long periods of time, which is super important if you're going, you know, into planetary and doing long-duration missions.

• 22:15Molly O'Shea?

  People are now trying to mine that on the moon.

• 22:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, it's, beats having to carry it there, I guess, so, yeah.

• 22:24Molly O'Shea?

  Are you excited or are you hopeful about the moon, the lunar programs?

• 22:28Speaker 00

  Oh, look, I mean, I'm like any space geek, I'm super excited. But I guess where we play in the moon stuff is we provide a lot of components and systems to other folks doing the moon stuff. And that's mainly because there's a bit of whiplash there, like, America's going to the moon, no, no, no, now we're going to Mars, now we're going to the moon again, now we're going to Mars. And, no, no, this time we're really going to the moon. And that's, that's fine, but when you're a moon company, that just plays havoc with your balance sheet. And you're just, you're just swinging around all over the place. So we get to play in these, in these programs, but we like to play at a system level rather than a mission level.

• 23:06Molly O'Shea?

  What do you think the biggest mistake is that these new entrants to the space ecosystem? Apparently, the space economy doesn't actually exist.

• 23:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:14Molly O'Shea?

  But what do you think the biggest mistakes people, new entrants, are making into the space ecosystem?

• 23:19Speaker 00

  That's a big question because there's so many different facets of it. I would say more generally, just the underestimation of how hard it is, but also, you know, making sure that the most amount of failure, I'd say, is because people don't build reliable stuff. And it's easy to, to, to kind of rush it and throw something on orbit. But I think the distance between putting something on orbit and putting something on orbit that can last 12 years or go to a planet, that, that gap is just massive. So, you know, if you want a valley of death, that's, that's kind of it.

• 23:59Molly O'Shea?

  We're just about finished at this location. Is there anything we haven't seen we're not allowed to see?

• 24:05Speaker 00

  Lots.

• 24:05Molly O'Shea?

  A lot? We just saw a tiny portion of it.

• 24:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, we have a lot of, a lot of national security programs, so, you know, these are, these are sort of the missions that we can, we can show you.

• 24:16Molly O'Shea?

  Bummer.

• 24:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:18Molly O'Shea?

  Damn.

• 24:18Speaker 00

  It's still pretty cool.

• 24:19Molly O'Shea?

  It's really cool. I'm not, I'm not knocking it, it's really cool.

• 24:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:22Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, so now we'll go over to the Engine Propulsion Lab.

• 24:25Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 24:25Molly O'Shea?

  Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once-a-week top deals and tech headlines email, and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.