Sir Peter Beck: Rocket Lab’s Neutron to smash Falcon 9 monopoly

Sir Peter Beck, founder and CEO of New Zealand and California-based private space firm Rocket Lab, recently ate his hat – literally.

When he founded Rocket Lab in 2006, the Invercargill, New Zealand-born entrepreneur promised his company would stick to small satellite launches with its Electron rocket.

Fast-forward to March 2021, and Rocket Lab announced its medium-lift Neutron rocket. In a clever promotional ploy, Beck shredded his hat and ate a small portion to “apologize” for breaking that promise.

In truth, his apology signaled an ambitious new era for a company that aims to take on SpaceX’s monopoly of the medium-lift space. It has also designed interplanetary spacecraft that will soon set off for Mars, and may even find alien life on Venus.

“No monopoly survives the test of time,” Beck told Interesting Engineering in an interview. And Neutron is here to “restore balance to the medium launch category.”

Neutron: The road to reusability

Rocket Lab’s medium-lift Neutron rocket will perform vertical landings like those pioneered by SpaceX’s Falcon 9 program. The new rocket will also perform a few tricks of its own, though. One example is an innovative reusable captive ‘ Hungry Hippo ’ fairing that doesn’t separate from the next-generation rocket’s first stage.

“The second stage of the rocket, which is normally stacked in line with the first stage, is shrouded inside [Neutron],” Beck explained over a video call. “That enables us to open the fairing, or the nose, of the rocket, and spin out the second stage with the payload. It lets us keep the fairings attached and land the rocket back down on Earth with all of its pieces attached.”

According to Beck, design choices like these are born from the fact Rocket Lab baked reusability into the design from the beginning. The company also drew from its experience with Electron. The small sat launcher, Electron, has flown more than 50 times. Rocket Lab recovers the rocket for reuse via parachute-assisted ocean splashdowns.

“We have the added advantage of having a successful reusability program with our smaller rocket, Electron,” Beck continued. “So we were able to roll straight into all the lessons learned in developing Neutron. It’s one of the only launch vehicles designed from day one to be reusable, as opposed to taking an expendable launch vehicle and appending reusability to it. For that reason, we think it will be a very competitive product in the launch industry.”

Taking on SpaceX’s medium-lift monopoly

Rocket Lab’s medium-lift Neutron rocket will be 43 meters (141 ft) tall, meaning it won’t stand as tall as the 70-meter Falcon 9. The rocket will also have a lower payload of 13,000 kg to low Earth orbit (LEO) when compared with Falcon 9’s 22,800 kg.

Crucially, though, Rocket Lab has pledged to match Falcon 9 on a cost-per-kilogram basis. While SpaceX charges roughly $67 million per Falcon 9 launch, Rocket Lab will target around $50 million for a Neutron launch.

“Neutron is designed for two reasons,” Beck said. “One of those is to restore balance to the medium launch category.”

“SpaceX has built an incredibly successful rocket [with Falcon 9] and it’s lifting 80 percent of the mass to orbit in the world right now,” he continued. “That’s a great thing, but there are a number of folks, both commercial and government who want to see alternatives there for various reasons. No monopoly survives the test of time.”

“We think we can bring some balance to that market,” Beck told IE. “And the other 50 percent of Neutron’s purpose of existence is to launch our own stuff. It’s our view that large space companies in the future are not just launch companies or satellite manufacturers. They actually deploy infrastructure. And that’s our intent as well.”

Flying to Mars and beyond

Ironically, Rocket Lab’s ambitions may be best represented by a mission launched by another firm. The mission, ESCAPADE, will fly aboard Blue Origin’s first New Glenn rocket no earlier than October.

Two Rocket Lab-built spacecraft—based on the company’s Explorer platform—will fly aboard New Glenn. Once deployed, they will travel to Mars to investigate the Red Planet’s arid climate.

NASA funded ESCAPADE under its Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) program. SIMPLEx aims to fund interplanetary missions at a fraction of the cost.

As a point of reference, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission and the MAVEN orbiter mission in 2005 and 2013 each cost NASA over half a billion dollars. NASA funded ESCAPADE with $55 million.

As such, the ESCAPADE mission highlights Rocket Lab’s goal of developing a whole host of space-bound technology in-house. By doing this, it can drive down costs and cater to a host of different mission parameters.

Building spacecraft for Mars is “incredibly difficult”

Rocket Lab took just three and a half years to prepare the ESCAPADE spacecraft—a fraction of the time it typically takes to prepare an interplanetary mission.

“To non-space people, [three and a half years] might seem like a reasonable timeframe,” Beck said. “Typically, though, these interplanetary missions are measured in decades. And that’s to build one spacecraft, let alone two.”

The reason this is possible, Beck continued, is because “we are an incredibly vertically integrated company. So if you look at ESCAPADE, it has our reaction wheels, our starter trackers, our solar panels, our radios, etc. What makes Rocket Lab unique is that we have all of those components at scale on the shelf.”

For ESCAPADE, Rocket Lab will also draw from its experience developing a deep-space vehicle for NASA’s lunar CAPSTONE mission. “Designing for an environment like Mars is incredibly difficult,” Beck said, adding that ESCAPADE will face a barrage of solar radiation as it flies to the Red Planet.

Archimedes: Fast-tracking development

While Electron isn’t large enough to launch the twin ESCAPADE spacecraft, Rocket Lab hopes Neutron will soon give it the capability to launch similar missions. Similarly to ESCAPADE, the company aims to fast-track the development of Neutron.

One key milestone in this development process was the recent hot-fire test of a flight version of the Archimedes engine. On August 8, Rocket Lab announced the early tests a success. Archimedes will be used on Neutron and a single engine will produce 165,000 lbs of thrust at launch.

Rocket Lab skipped the prototype test for Archimedes, opting instead to build a flight version to speed up the development. They also chose to build Archimedes as a staged combustion cycle engine to lower temperatures and reduce stress factors, making reusability possible.

“What’s unique about Archimedes is that it’s a staged combustion cycle engine, which is very challenging to build when compared with what’s typical in the industry,” Beck said.

Typically, “you start to build up over many years of testing each individual element,” he continued. “We were confident enough to build a flight-ready engine and put it on the test stand. And within a few weeks, we were then able to take it to over 100 percent power. So that literally shaves years off the development time cycle for that kind of propulsion system.”

According to Beck, this means Neutron is on track to fly by mid-2025. Though “we always caveat that, it’s a rocket program and schedules are historically challenging.”

Searching for alien life

One of Rocket Lab’s most ambitious upcoming projects is the company’s self-funded Venus Life Finder mission. If all goes to plan, Rocket Lab could prove alien life exists within our solar system.

“We have a wide interest in interplanetary work, it is super important,” Beck told IE. “As a species, a deep part of our history is exploration. So if you have an opportunity to play a part in that, I think you have to.”

Rocket Lab’s Venus mission will search for microbial life in the upper clouds of Venus. According to Beck, the mission will be somewhat of a shot in the dark, though it will be well worth the effort. It will be immensely difficult, due to “the sheer challenge” of flying a probe into the clouds of Venus.

Much like ESCAPADE, the Venus spacecraft will be based on Rocket Lab’s Explorer platform. However, it will be adapted to deploy a probe once it arrives at our planetary neighbor.

“Once we get to Venus, we’ll have to capture its gravity, and then descend a probe through its atmosphere, which is known to be pretty horrendous,” Beck explained. “Then we will have to find a region of the atmosphere that that may have signs of life. And we get 120 seconds of time to transit through the cloud, as we’re re-entering the planet’s atmosphere, to take a measurement and then send that measurement all the way back to Earth.”

“So, Venus could be abundant with life, but from an engineering perspective, it is immensely challenging to go and actually execute the mission,” he continued. “There are a lot of things that have to go flawlessly, even if there is life, to be able to get a positive response.”

The private space race

Could Rocket Lab overtake SpaceX with Neutron? It’s a tall order. With its interplanetary ambitions, however, it forges its own path. And things change fast in the space industry. Today, SpaceX dominates with Falcon 9 and Starship, but that wasn’t always the case.

This month, NASA officially announced SpaceX will fly Boeing’s Starliner crew back to Earth, due to issues with Starliner. Just 10 years ago, SpaceX was seen as an upstart that would struggle to keep up with Boeing’s crew capsule program. Then it brought human spaceflight back to US soil.

If Rocket Lab proves alien life exists, it’s hard to imagine a more historic mission. The eye-watering logistics of Venus Life Finder, as described by Beck, represent the controlled chaos of the rocket industry as a whole. Much like Rocket Lab’s attempts at capturing rockets out of the sky using helicopters, it might not always go off without a hitch. Still, it’s worth the effort. You never know how the lessons learned might contribute to a successful mission the next time around.