"I love the thrill of the chase": Sir Peter Beck on turning his love of rockets into a multibillion dollar space company

Author: Georgia Thorne,
Publish Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2026, 11:07am

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Rocket Lab founder and chief executive Sir Peter Beck. Photo / James Rattray

Sir Peter Beck is one of the country's greatest ongoing success stories.

The self-taught engineer turned his love of rockets into a multibillion dollar space company, and Rocket Lab is now the third largest launcher of payloads to orbit.

He's competing directly with the likes of Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Elon Musk's SpaceX, managing to hold his own against the billionaires, and can be credited as the reason New Zealand has a space industry in the first place.

Although the future of the industry may seem uncertain, Beck's confident in his ability to chart a path forward.

"The space industry right now is an amazing place," he told Mike Hosking.

"It's just growing rapidly. Like, it was $360 billion, they reckon it's going to be $1.7 trillion in the next five years."

"It is really, you know, a new bastion of ... industry and growth."

Going from being a small player starting his own company to a major corporation answerable to shareholders was a steep curve, Beck said, but one they were able to handle.

"We've always run the company, you know, incredibly frugally," he explained.

"We are never gonna outspend Jeff and Elon, so we have to be, you know, much more careful with how we build the company."

"We have to out-hustle them and out-innovate, and that's the only way we can survive."

And that ethos of hustling to survive has become a great advantage for the company, Beck's self-described 'workaholism' and drive flowing through into the very culture of Rocket Lab.

"If you look at the resources and what we try to chieve in the time frames – it's insane," he told Hosking

"We built two spacecraft that are currently on their way to mars right now, we did that in a couple years ... ten years ago that would be like, a half a decade NASA project, and we did it in two years."

"The Rocket Lab hustle is everybody's expected to get out their spades and just start digging under the barrier or, you know, climbing over the top of it, or whatever it takes."

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