An Interview with Sir Peter Beck, Rocket Lab CEO
A transcript of our Pathfinder episode with Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck.
Stories about the companies building a ride to space.
A transcript of our Pathfinder episode with Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck.
Over the past few weeks—with growing confidence in the Starship program—SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell and Starbase General Manager Kathy Lueders have been publicly mapping out what to expect from SpaceX and Starship in the coming years.
SpaceX launched Starship on its sixth flight test yesterday but called off its Super Heavy booster catch attempt back at the pad, instead diverting the 233-ft-tall vehicle to a controlled water splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
The partnership’s first launch will be an ISR satellite for the Dutch military, which is expected to lift off as early as 2027.
“We see considerable opportunity to leverage RS1 … to enable a new type of research effort around missile defense technologies.”
The news comes as competing small satellite launchers Astra and Relativity are also seeking new funding for their launch vehicle development programs.
The rocket is expected to complete a test launch in 2025, and fly three commercial launches in 2026.
The rocketmaker has has raised more than $2B since 2015.
The solution—a telemetry relay system called InRange—uses Viasat’s geostationary satellites as the middleman to receive telemetry data from the rocket and beam it back to Earth.
“We didn’t punch it as far as we could, but what we saw was a much more stable, cleaner burn,” CEO Sascha Deri told Payload.
True Anomaly is building a spacecraft for VICTUS HAZE.