![]() All he talked about was building a durable and profitable business, and he has a very clear vision of all the steps it will take to get there.” “He didn’t talk about going to Mars or flying to the Moon. I was really surprised by the practical view Peter was bringing to the business,” said Adam Spice, the CFO of Rocket Lab, recalling his first meeting with Beck in 2017. “When you think of space, you think of extreme personalities-the Richard Bransons and Elon Musks type of people. Among his creations were a rocket bike, a pair of rocket roller skates and a jetpack.īeck’s enthusiasm for rockets can seem a bit obsessive, but people who have worked with him describe him as pragmatic and reasonable. Beck would spend his days working on production lines and machineries and nights experimenting with rockets and propellants. At the company workshop, he gained access to state-of-the-art machines and materials with which he could build more serious projects. Instead, Beck took on a tool and die-making apprenticeship at a local factory of Fisher & Paykel, an international appliance manufacturer. At the time, New Zealand didn’t have a space industry or a national space agency. In 1995, upon turning 18, Beck said he chose not to attend college because there were no university courses that could teach him how to build rocket engines. Much of Beck’s teenage years were spent in the workshop behind his parents’ house building water rockets and occasionally other things, including a rusty old Mini which he took apart piece by piece and then retrofitted with a turbo-charger. When Halley’s comet last crossed Earth’s skies in 1986, then nine-year-old Beck was the resident expert of Halley’s comet in his class, he said. ![]() “Unlike a lot of kids who wondered what they wanted to do when growing up, I knew from the beginning that I wanted to build rockets.”įrom as early as he could remember, every children’s book he picked up was about rockets, and everything he did outside of school was space related. “One of my youngest childhood memories is standing outside in the night sky, looking at the stars and just wondering,” Beck said. ![]() Beck said his father’s adventurous spirit imbued him with a love for space and machines at an early age and the confidence to pursue it. Russell Beck built New Zealand’s southernmost observatory at Invercargill’s Southland Museum and Art Gallery, where he served as director for 23 years. Beck’s late father, Russell Beck, was a gemologist and telescope engineer, and his mother is a retired school teacher. You make one wrong turn, you are toast.”Ī first-time entrepreneur with no college degreeīeck, 45, grew up in Invercargill, near the southern tip of New Zealand’s South Island, with two brothers in a family of engineers and educators. “Building a rocket company is like running through a maze at night with a shotgun at every dead end. Since then, Electron has been flown 30 more times with 28 successes, a rare rate for a commercially developed spacecraft.īut Beck has no time for complacency. Rocket Lab holds the record for successfully launching a rocket (the Electron) on only its second attempt, in January 2018. Small satellites were launched by either government-owned rockets converted from intercontinental ballistic missiles or large rockets that had extra room while launching other missions, said Caleb Henry, a senior analyst at Quilty Analytics, a space industry research firm.Ī growing number of rocket startups have emerged in recent years to fulfill this market void, but few of them have moved past the development and testing phases. Before Rocket Lab came along, there were very limited commercial options for this task. Rocket Lab specializes in lightweight, reusable rockets designed to launch small satellites into Earth’s orbit-a growing market in recent years.
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