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?
00:19:36 · Ty Morse, Peter Beck
[00:19:36] S1: is 7 to $9,000,000? [00:19:38] S0: Yeah. Yeah, it was $10,000,000 Yeah. But it, like, on paper it closed, but in practice it was the most ridiculously hard thing to, you know, we were measuring grams in that rocket. And, you know, there was like a three hour debate whether or not we could afford the mass of the NASA stickers down the side of the rocket because the mass of those stickers would, you know, put us over the edge. So, it was the most ridiculously difficult engineering project. And, you know, we delivered that spacecraft to the moon with such perfect accuracy. It incredible, but there were so many firsts there. There was a, you know, the rocket engine that was on the little spacecraft that took it to the moon was the highest performing engine that we have ever built. And, you know, we had a separate tank of 11 herbs of spices that we would inject into the engine to just make it run super hot. So, you know, it was the craziest, craziest project. And, you know, even today, you can ask people around company what their best moment was at Rocket Lab, and anybody working on Capstone, or just about anybody, will say Capstone even though it was the most punishing and cruelest mission that we ever did. [00:20:55] S1: What's your kind of philosophy on chewing glass and enjoying taking on extremely difficult challenges with uncertainty on whether or not they can't even be successful?
00:20:55 · Ty Morse, Peter Beck
[00:20:55] S1: What's your kind of philosophy on chewing glass and enjoying taking on extremely difficult challenges with uncertainty on whether or not they can't even be successful? [00:21:05] S0: Yeah, well, I mean, I think that is the definition of a good start up. But I would temper that with, yeah, okay, you're chewing glass, but also you can't just do that and not know the outcome or, you know, sometimes you have to force the outcome to be good. That's a fact. But also, I would say everything that we take on, we honestly believe we can do. Now, sometimes our belief is unfounded, but generally, you know, we won't take on something that we just will not have a clue about how we're going to achieve. So, yep, I think that's a fair statement, but I think I'd temper that with like, don't be reckless with that because [00:21:50] S1: It's like you build trust with the people that you're working with, and so if you fuck up, then that trust is broken.