Rocket Lab, an emerging rival of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is doing a lot of important things. The New Zealand- and Long Beach, Calif.-based company is one of the few in commercial space that have an operating reusable rocket and manufacture both launch vehicles and satellites—traditionally separate businesses. But what excites its founder and CEO Peter Beck the most is a “completely unfunded,” “nights and weekends” project aimed at finding life on Venus, the entrepreneur revealed during an onstage interview at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco yesterday (Oct. 28)
The New Zealand-born space founder has long been fascinated by Venus, our nearest neighbor planet in the solar system, because of how similar it is to Earth. “I think Venus is a much more interesting planet than Mars,” he said. “Mars politically is excellent because you can put a footprint on the surface of Mars, and that wins heaps of votes. You’re never putting a footprint on the surface of Venus [which can get as hot as nearly 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit], but I think, as a planet, Venus is much more interesting.”
His belief has some scientific backing. In a study published in the journal Nature Astronomy in 2020, scientists discovered a large amount of phosphine in Venus’ atmosphere, suggesting there might be life there. Phosphine is a chemical that could have been produced by a biological source like those on Earth.
Rocket Lab is working to send a life-hunting probe into the clouds of Venus. “There’s a very interesting, sweet zone about 50 kilometers off the surface of Venus. The conditions are just good enough that there could be life there,” Beck said. Because the destination is essentially air above a planet, the mission will be a lot trickier than landing a rover on a hard surface. Beck said, if the probe gets to Venus successfully, it will have only about 250 seconds to interfere with the planet’s atmosphere and deploy a nephelometer instrument there to look for life.
Rocket Lab’s workhorse vehicle is a small, reusable rocket called Electron, which has launched more than 50 missions for government and commercial clients since 2017. In June 2022, Electron launched a small lunar spacecraft called CAPSTONE for NASA to study a unique orbit around the Moon where the space agency intends to build a space station in the future.
Beck said his company plans to launch the Venus mission using the same system as CAPSTONE, which was a challenging process in itself. He jokingly admitted that Venus mission is currently causing a “small financial drain” on the company and taking up about 30 percent of his time.
Beck, who also serves as the chief engineer of Rocket Lab, said he spends about half his time getting deeply involved in the main engineering decisions within the company, and the other half is just spent doing “useless rocket CEO stuff,” he said.
If successful, the Venus mission could help shed light on what Beck believes is “one of the biggest questions that we can ask and answer: Are we the only life in the universe or not?”
Rocket Lab, traded on Nasdaq, is not profitable yet. But its share price is up more than 110 percent this year so far, claiming a market cap of $5.7 billion.
