Interview with Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck
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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.
That was Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck. I'm Motley Fool producer Matt Greer. Now, Rocket Lab is an aerospace company with a launch business and a space systems business, and it has become a big business. Motley Fool co-founder and CEO Tom Gardner and Motley Fool analyst Seth Jason recently talked with Peter Beck about the business of Rocket Lab.
We're so pleased to be spending this time with Sir Peter Beck, the founder and CEO of Rocket Lab. Before going into our conversation, I'll just share, I don't know how familiar you are with The Motley Fool, but when we recommend companies and often put our own skin in the game with our members, we do so with a five-year contract. a minimum holding period generally, and ideally multi-decade holding period. So we like to assess the long-term vision and mission strategy and performance of the business. And obviously, we don't want to put you in a position where you're having to give any forward-looking statements. So just deny any of our long-term questions that you can't answer, but just letting you know that we really are most interested in the very long-term.
And our greatest investments, which is not unusual for people throughout their lives, are the ones that they held the longest period of time. Now, I love my low cost basis of $25 a share right around there for Rocket Lab. But Seth Jason, who's here, and Lou Whiteman, who can't be here today, both recommended the stock. and owned the stock since it was below $5 a share. So a lot of our Motley Fool members have gotten in some early low positions with the business. But I think, Peter, we'd love to hear you just outline the main components of Rocket Lab, maybe beginning with space systems, since it's easy to overlook the segment, or many may view Rocket Lab as a launch company. Can you just a walking tour of the business, please?
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.
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