Peter Beck

But the thing is, the most difficult thing to do and the most transformational thing you can do is have access to orbit.

That's the biggest problem you have to solve in all of this.

You know, spacecraft are difficult, but not nearly as difficult as, you know, gaining access to orbit.

That's the real disruptor here.

It's not anything else.

So that's kind of where we started.

And then as we started to build our own satellites internally, you know, we placed some orders for some components and, you know, the lead times associated with them and the cost associated with them really, really took us back.

And we're like, well, how can anybody be disruptive in this industry when it takes 12 months to get a star tracker, just a simple star tracker?

So, you know, not surprisingly, that led our first acquisition of Sinclair Interplanetary.

And we sort of never looked back from that point.

And the best way to describe what we've done there is literally lay a spacecraft out or satellite out on the boardroom table.

and then just systematically point to all the bits that really suck and then go after each one of those and either build that technology internally or we'll go and buy the best company that currently makes that technology and not just stopping there but actually doing it at scale.

So that kind of gives us a really healthy ability to just think of it like a storeroom of parts that you can just go and pull off the shelf to build almost anything you want.

And then the next leg of space systems, I mean, there's really three kind of internal mandates that I set forward when we started space systems officially.

And that was, one, everything that goes to space should have a Rocket Lab logo on it.

Don't care if we built it, don't care if we launched it, but everything that goes to space should have a Rocket Lab logo on it.

Preferably the biggest logo that you can fit on the component.

And then secondly, we want to build spacecraft, but not interested in just building boring spacecraft that lead nowhere.

They have to be very strategic spacecraft that, you know, ultimately fulfill the end vision.

And then the third one is like, you know, building applications or infrastructure in orbit that kind of feeds into.