Review: The Launch of Rocket Labby Jeff Foust
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| “And I think that process speaks for itself with respect to our hardware always looking beautiful and, more importantly, always working beautifully,” Beck recently said of Rocket Lab’s development approach. |
That attention to design detail is also evident in The Launch of Rocket Lab, a new book about Rocket Lab’s history published with the support of the company (Beck wrote the introduction.) The large-format book is lavishly illustrated with many color photos from Rocket Lab’s nearly 20-year history.
The book, written by journalist Peter Griffin, starts with a focus on Beck, charting his upbringing and the unconventional path that led him to starting Rocket Lab: no college degree but instead hand-on engineering experience and a fascination with space. When he realized that, as a New Zealander, he could not work for a US space company, he decided to start his own. Much of that was covered in Ashlee Vance’s When the Heavens Went on Sale that profiled Rocket Lab and a few other space startups.
The book then turns its attention to the development of Rocket Lab, with early launch projects that became Electron, followed by satellite work and, more recently, Neutron. The book brings in not just Beck but others who worked on those projects as Rocket Lab evolved from a scrappy startup to a Nasdaq-listed public company that now has more than 2,000 employees and a market cap of more than $20 billion, with plenty of images and illustrations.
That includes some interesting anecdotes. When meeting with prospective investors for Rocket Lab’s Series A funding round in 2014, Beck recalled in one meeting dumping a sack of “bouncy balls” on a boardroom table, which, predictably, went everywhere. “It was carnage,” he recalled, but allowed him to make a point: each ball was a satellite looking for a launch, and each was worth $5–7 million.
But in some cases the book embellishes the role of Rocket Lab. A section on CAPSTONE, a lunar cubesat launched by Rocket Lab to demonstrate operations in a lunar near-rectilinear halo orbit—the type to be used by the Gateway—highlights the challenges of launching the spacecraft and getting it to the Moon using its Lunar Photon upper stage. Reading the book would leave the reader thinking CAPSTONE was an entirely Rocket Lab-run mission. However, the cubesat itself was built by Terran Orbital (now part of Lockheed Martin) for Advanced Space, the company that owns and operates CAPSTONE; neither gets much of a mention in the book.
Rocket Lab has triumphed in a market for small launch that has seen dozens of other companies fail to get off the ground, figuratively or literally. Did the company’s focus on design, as illustrated in the book, help? Maybe.
“At Rocket Lab, we have a proven process for delivering and developing complex spaceflight hardware,” Beck said in an earnings call last week where he provided an update on Neutron, whose first launch has slipped into 2026. “And I think that process speaks for itself with respect to our hardware always looking beautiful and, more importantly, always working beautifully.” As the company pushed into larger vehicles, it is demonstrating its hardware is looking beautiful, but now needs to show it can be working beautifully as well.
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