Peter Beck

So there's not a massive gulf between what I'm doing and what everybody else is doing.

So maybe I should just do it.

Some of my youngest memories are standing outside with my father, and he was an avid enthusiast in astronomy as well.

And I remember him pointing out to me that all those stars in the sky that you can see, most of them have planets around them, and on one of those planets there could be somebody standing there looking back at you.

And that moment for me was like, right, this space thing is bigger than anything.

So this is what I want to do.

And, you know, I had a natural propensity to engineering.

So you mix those two things together and, you know, what else are you going to build but rockets?

I mean, that's the obvious outcome.

So I was at school when it sort of got a little bit more serious.

So because the metalwork teacher would let me use the metalwork room at lunchtime and the weekends.

So, you know, that would have been probably 15, 14.

there's a little bit of a story in between there.

So I left school and pursued a tool and die making apprenticeship.

And the plan was to go to university, but in New Zealand, there's no aerospace courses or anything like that.

And I always felt that I can learn a tremendous amount by building things and having those hand skills to build the things that I wanted to build is really important.

So I did an apprenticeship in tool and die making, and it was at a company called Fisher & Paykel, which it's an appliance, a whiteware manufacturer.

And then, you know, no sooner I finished my apprenticeship, I went into the design office and did production machinery design and designed, you know, machines and robots and then into product design and then into analysis.

And then I went and worked at a super yacht company where I was a project engineer responsible for a 123-foot super yacht.

And that was really a formative part of my career because in the morning, you had to work and communicate effectively with some guys on the shop floor who were in some cases illiterate.