Peter Beck

We went away and designed and built, you know, not one, but two spacecraft that are currently on the way to Mars for, you know, to complete NASA's mission.

Prior to that, that would have been a NASA internal project and, you know, it wouldn't have been a commercial thing.

So even stuff like, you know, deep space interplanetary missions are now available

now been outsourced commercially.

And some of that is that, you know, the commercial market has established itself, but also, you know, the skills and expertise have been distributed and capital has been allocated so that commercial companies can actually go and do those sorts of things.

Well, I mean, firstly, NASA wouldn't employ me, so I didn't really have too many options.

So the only viable option open to me was to start my own company, and I just happened to live in New Zealand.

Now, Rocket Lab these days is a global company.

In fact, the vast majority of the company is not in New Zealand.

There's still an element here, for sure.

you know, the vast majority is everywhere else.

But I mean, in simple forms, you know, I started building rockets when I was a kid, right?

So it was always something I wanted to go and do.

And, you know, I went on a bit of a rocket pilgrimage one year to the United States and I learned a couple of really important things.

One, NASA wouldn't employ me.

I'm a foreign national with no university degree.

It's hardly the top of the list, is it?

But the other thing I learned is I went around and visited a bunch of the little startup companies in the Mojave Desert and whatnot and looked at what they were doing.

And what they were doing was absolutely no different to what I was doing here at home.

So I'm like, hang on a minute.