Peter Beck

It is a raging cauldron of hell and conflict sometimes in my head because I'm half entrepreneur who wants to take extreme risk and then half engineer who by nature is extremely conservative.

Yeah, totally.

Well, I mean, I always like to talk about Rocket Lab as an end-to-end space company because, you know, it's sort of almost sort of bisected into two parts.

Like there's launch, which is, you know, the big roaring stick in the sky, which everybody gets excited about.

And then there's space systems, which is kind of less visually glamorous, but of course a huge part of the business.

But both of these elements are necessary to deliver on kind of the key goal here and the key mission of being end-to-end space.

And I think ultimately deploying infrastructure or services on orbit.

And if you're talking about the long term, it's my view that the biggest space companies in the future, it's going to be a little bit blurry about, you know, are they a space company or are they something else?

And, you know, just take our friends over at SpaceX.

Are they a space company or are they a telecommunications company at this point?

So it gets a little bit blurry.

But I think what is absolutely true is that if you have unfettered, rapid and reliable access to space and you can build whatever spacecraft you want to build, then your ability to deploy infrastructure or services from orbit is going to be way better than somebody else who doesn't have those capabilities.

So we're just sort of methodically going about making sure we have all those elements to ultimately deliver on that end-to-end space company goal.

So I know you want to talk about space systems, but I think it's always good to kind of wrap it in the context of why space systems even exists.

And

You know, Space Systems was really started very early on in the company's life.

And, you know, I often hear people saying, well, you know, launch wasn't big enough, so Rocket Lab pivoted to building spacecraft.

And that's just simply not true.

In fact, the second Electron vehicle that we ever flew had all of the recesses pre-cut into the kick stage for solar panels to turn that into a photon.

So it's been part of the plan from day one.