00:13:20 · Peter Beck, Ty Morse
[00:13:20] S0: Yeah. But that's kind of the... Also, you know, the the magic of the company is is we have now such a diversified group of folks that, you know, there's there's an expert for everything in the company. [00:13:31] S1: I know that you're very focused on trying to make as many parts of the Rocket yourself as you can. How do you think about, like, at what stage it makes sense to just vertically integrate versus trying to use something off the shelf if there is some supplier even a [00:13:43] S0: few? We would we would buy stuff off the shelf straight away versus doing it ourselves. Like, it's not a religion to be vertically integrated. It's just a necessity to achieve and deliver. [00:13:54] S1: You've been at this for now, like, twenty six years. What's the best example of Rocket Lab hustle?
00:13:54 · Ty Morse, Peter Beck
[00:13:54] S1: You've been at this for now, like, twenty six years. What's the best example of Rocket Lab hustle? [00:14:00] S0: Well, gave you that tank one there a moment ago, but, I mean, it's defined by a set of behaviours. I would say that, you know, the team is just totally relentless, and they're just relentless against execution. So, you know, there's nobody here, nobody survives here, if they just want to come here and work eight to five and cruise and then go home. That's just not the culture. We take on really difficult, meaty, important things that people care about. So, you know, I would just say it's engineering excellence and just, like, sheer dogged determination to execute. And, you know, when a lot of companies where it comes 05:00 and the problem's not solved, a lot of people go home. Not here. Like, you know, you can come to here at this facility, and you can drive past it any time of the night or the morning, and there's lights on. [00:14:55] S1: Is there any really good story that you have of having to basically, like, sleep here and fucking some bottleneck that you had over the past couple of years?
00:14:55 · Ty Morse, Peter Beck
[00:14:55] S1: Is there any really good story that you have of having to basically, like, sleep here and fucking some bottleneck that you had over the past couple of years? [00:15:03] S0: Oh my god, there's so many. I mean, like, in the customer room, there's beds and pillows, so, I mean, like, you know, for anybody to use. So, I mean, that happens all the time. The one thing I can think of, and as many years ago, is that we had developed this rocket engine, and it was a very unique rocket engine. And we had a bunch of really important people coming over from the propulsion industry to look at this engine, and we were doing the last test on a Friday afternoon, and we thought, oh, we'll just do this one last test before we put the engine to bed because these guys would turn up on Monday. So, we did this test and a hydraulic line was fatiguing. We didn't realize and it failed and the hydraulic line failed caused basically the valving sequence to be wrong and the whole engine exploded. And not only did it it was so good, it was such a good it's only a sort of a, you know, 500 pound engine, it's not a big engine, but it exploded so good that it just tore everything out of the test cell as well. Like, there was we just stood, walked back in there after it all's been sorted out, and there was just shit hanging off the walls and it was just total mess. And meanwhile these guys had just taken off from The States and they were on their way, you know, land. [00:16:17] S1: They're gonna land whether or not the engine is [00:16:19] S0: there? There's nothing left, no.
00:16:19 · Peter Beck, Ty Morse
[00:16:19] S0: there? There's nothing left, no. [00:16:20] S1: Right. [00:16:20] S0: There's not even a test cell. So, you know, we're all standing around and, like, there wasn't one person that said, Oh, no. Or not one person said, Well, that's us, screwed it. People just said, Okay, well there's some titanium back in the shop I'll get back there now and we'll start machining and then you know the electrician is like yep okay I've got some Cat five cable we'll start rewiring this and we'll do this and everybody just got to work and the next day I got a call from the guys that were coming to visit us and they said well actually we landed here on Saturday, Saturday morning, so we're all feeling good so why don't we just come down to the test cell and we'll start work right now?' We're like oh no, you'll be jet lagged, you don't want do that, you know, wait until Monday, just wait until Monday because you'll feel much better trust me this jet lag to New Zealand really hits you so... [00:17:12] S1: Don't want you to be sleep deprived when you come
00:17:12 · Ty Morse, Peter Beck
[00:17:12] S1: Don't want you to be sleep deprived when you come [00:17:14] S0: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, no, exactly right So, we just, you know, everybody, it was just nobody slept at all, and we just worked and worked and worked. And, you know, we were rebuilding this engine and we knew there was a couple of things in the engine that were like, you know, we would have liked to fix at some point in time, but they were risky, like if we, you know, we made some changes to an injector and, you know, it might not have worked, but we're like, oh, well, at this point, like, let's just go for it. So, we made a whole bunch of changes to the engine and we changed, you know, what we thought, you know, some of the injectors and some of the parts of the engine we thought would improve its performance. And then, you know, we got this whole engine back together and got it on the test cell at Monday morning and our very important friends turned up and they were like 'hey guys, how you going?' We got 'good, good, right, ready for an engine test, yep' and you know we hot fired that engine and that was the first time that engine had been hot fired since a rebuilt engine, you know, test cell and a brand new engine with all these modifications And I think most companies would have played it safe and just said, Let's rebuild it exactly as it was. But, you know, we built this new engine, and that new engine performed 13% better than the previous one, which in rocket engines' perspective is a huge number. [00:18:26] S1: Over the course of a weekend?
00:18:26 · Ty Morse, Peter Beck
[00:18:26] S1: Over the course of a weekend? [00:18:27] S0: Yeah. And completely rebuilt the engine, and that engine ran for the next nearly a month, just day after day doing hot fire after hot fire and tweaking things and doing different experiments that everybody wanted to do and all the rest of it. So, you know, that's a Rocket Lab hustle. I mean, it's, you know, I think a lot of people would go, well, you know... Yeah. Pretty much. [00:18:52] S1: What happens after that sort of event, like internally? How do people kind of react to being able to overcome something that feels insurmountable or impossible? [00:19:01] S0: That's a great question. Generally, there's the next big thing, so you're just on to the next big thing. And, you know, there's been a couple of couple of these kind of really big things, like the capstone mission was a really big one. That a totally impossible project. I still, to this day, don't know how we pulled it off, but that was a totally impossible project. [00:19:20] S1: Do you want to just walk through what that was? [00:19:22] S0: Why it was so That was a much mission to the moon. Yeah. So, you know, we had signed the Capstone mission, and we had to deliver the spacecraft to the moon, and, you know, it's off an Electron rocket, so, you know, going to the moon off a tiny little rocket [00:19:36] S1: is 7 to $9,000,000?