“When we put a vehicle on the pad, we do not expect it to fail.” This interview with $RKLB CEO Peter Beck is well worth the $1 paywall fee. “If you look at our launch vehicle, our spacecraft history, generally the stuff that we build works the first time. The threshold for Electron was 92%: I said to everybody that unless you are 92% sure that your system is going to be perfectly functional, don’t put it on the pad.” After being asked when Neutron will fly for the first time, Beck says, “at the end of the day, if it’s not at the end of the year, it won’t be that far away. A few months here or there in the grand context of a 20-year lifecycle of a product is just totally irrelevant.” This is what I was hoping to hear. Delays aren’t great but when you get confirmation that the timeline will likely shift by just a few months (instead of 6-12), that’s great news. Another point worth drawing attention to is how fast and cheap Neutron was developed: “One of the things that I don’t think we’ve done a good job of is putting into context that this will be a four-year-plus, $350 million rocket development program. If you look at the last two rocket development programs: The one that just launched [ULA’s Vulcan launch], that was a decade and $7 billion. And another one that just launched [SpaceX’s Starship] was, like, 20 years and nobody knows how many billions of dollars.” I also really like what he says about space companies of the future: “I think it’s going to become very clear, if it’s not already, that the really large space companies of the future are going to be a little bit blurry about how much of a space company they are and how much of a something-else company they are. I mean, if we look at our friends over at SpaceX, are they a telecommunications company, or are they a space company?  It has always been our ethos and our belief that if you have the ability to build the spacecraft and launch it and deploy it in orbit at a rate that’s faster than anybody else, then you have a distinct advantage. That’s been proven out with Starlink. The only way to be competitive with Starlink is to have your own ability to launch at will, at mass, at cadence, your own satellites. I think that will become true in a lot of domains in space. And so there’ll be a relatively small number of companies that have launch and manufacturing capabilities who will be the large players.” Big things to come! 👀🚀 fastcompany.com/91400102/roc…