Rocket Lab’s Neutron rocket is shown in this rendering delivering a stack of satellites into orbit.
Credit:
Rocket Lab
Rocket Lab’s Neutron rocket is shown in this rendering delivering a stack of satellites into orbit.
Credit:
Rocket Lab
Ars: You mentioned ESCAPADE. How’s your relationship with Jeff Bezos? I heard there was some tension last year because Rocket Lab was being asked to prepare the satellite for launch, even when it was clear New Glenn was not going to make the Mars window.
Beck: I know you want me to say yes, there is, but the honest truth is absolutely zero. I know David (Limp, Blue Origin’s CEO) super well. We’re great friends. Jeff and I were texting backwards and forwards during the launch. There’s just honestly none. And you know that they gave us a great ride. They were bang on the numbers. It was awesome. Yeah, sure, it would have been great to get there early. But it’s a rocket program, right? Nobody can show me a rocket program that turned up exactly on time. And yep, it may have been obvious that it might not have been able to launch on the first (window), but we knew there’s always other ways. Worst-case scenario, we have to go into storage for a little bit. These missions are years and years long. So what’s a little bit, little bit longer?
Ars: Speaking of low-cost science missions, I know Isaacman is interested in commercial planetary missions. Lots of $4 billion planetary missions just aren’t sustainable. If NASA commits to commercial development of satellite buses and spacecraft like it did to commercial cargo and crew, what could planetary exploration look like a decade from now?
Beck: I think that’d be tremendously exciting. One of the reasons why we did CAPSTONE was to prove that you can go to the Moon for $10 million. Now, we lost a lot of money on that mission, so that ultimately didn’t prove to be true. But it wasn’t crazy amounts, and we still got there miles cheaper than anybody else could have ever got there. And ESCAPADE, we have good margins on, and it’s just a true success, right? Touch wood to date, like we’ve got a long way to go, but success in the fact that the spacecraft were built, delivered, launched, and commissioned.
This is the thing. Take your billion-dollar mission. How many $50 million missions, or $100 million missions, could you do? Imagine the amount of science you can do. I think part of the reason why the public gets jaded with some of these science missions is because they happen once a decade, and they’ve got billions of dollars of price tags attached to them. It’s kind of transitorily exciting when they happen, but they’re so far apart. In the end of the day, NASA has to capture the public’s imagination, because the public are funding it. So it has to seem relevant, relevant to mum and dad at home. And you know, when mum and dad are home and it’s tough, and then they just hear billions of dollars and, you know, years of overrun and all the rest of it. How can they feel good about that? Whereas, if they can spend much less and deliver it on time, and have a constant stream of really interesting missions in science, I think that it’s great for public justification. I think it’s great for planetary science, because obviously you’re iterating on your results, and it’s great for the whole community to just have a string of missions. And also, I think it’s great for US space supremacy to be blasting around the Solar System all the time, rather than just now and again.