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

In truth, his apology signaled an ambitious new era for Rocket Lab. This company will soon fly Neutron for the first time and deploy interplanetary spacecraft, including a mission to search for alien life on Venus.

By launching Neutron, Rocket Lab aims to challenge SpaceX’s monopoly of medium-lift space. Simply put, “no monopoly survives the test of time,” Beck told Interesting Engineering in an interview.

Neutron: The road to reusability

Rocket Lab’s medium-lift Neutron rocket will perform vertical landings like the ones pioneered by SpaceX’s Falcon 9 program. However, Neutron will also perform a few tricks of its own. It will feature a 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. “What that enables us to do is basically open the fairing, or the nose, of the rocket, and spin out the second stage and the payload that goes on top of it. And that 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 that Rocket Lab has designed Neutron from the ground up as a reusable launch vehicle. What’s more, the company drew from its experience with Electron. The small sat launcher, Electron, has flown more than 50 times, and Rocket Lab has recovered 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 that’s been 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’s going to 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 quite 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. 

However, 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. One of those is to restore balance to the medium launch category,” Beck said. 

“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 the 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.” 

According to Beck, Neutron is on track to fly by mid-2025, though “we always caveat that, it’s a rocket program.”

Flying to Mars and beyond

Ironically, Rocket Lab’s ambitions represent an upcoming mission in which the company won’t fly on one of its rockets. The mission, ESCAPADE, will launch 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. 

Rocket Lab also 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. The mission highlights the company’s goal of developing a whole host of space-bound technology in-house.

“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, you know, 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.

While Electron isn’t large enough to launch the ESCAPADE spacecraft, Rocket Lab hopes Neutron will soon give it the capability to launch similar missions.

Searching for alien life

Could Rocket Lab’s interplanetary ambitions overtake SpaceX in a few key areas? It’s not completely out of the question. SpaceX may currently dominate with Falcon 9 and the promise of Starship, but things change quickly in the space industry. 

This month, for example, 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 need help to keep up with Boeing’s crew capsule program.

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

“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.

Once again, 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 mission is representative of the controlled chaos – engineered by some of the world’s brightest engineers – 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. It’s worth the effort, though, as you never know exactly how the lessons learned might contribute to a successful mission the next time.