Lockheed Martin invests in Auckland's Rocket Labs

US military and aerospace giant Lockheed Martin has invested in Auckland-based Rocket Labs.

A series B funding round also saw Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) and shareholders Sir Stephen Tindall and Silicon Valley investor Khosla Ventures kick in more capital.

How much? Rocket Labs founder and CEO Peter Beck (36) won't say – and because his company has been incorporated in California since its series A funding, shareholdings are no longer publicly listed, let alone how much each party has put in. The only morsel of detail Mr Beck is willing to divulge is that he still owns a majority of the company.

What Mr Beck will say is that the new funding will be enough to see Rocket Labs through to 2016, when it hopes to have the first commercial launches for its $US5 million Electron – an 18m tall 10-tonne rocket that can take a payload of 110kg into low Earth orbit. The average launch cost today is near $US133 million, Mr Beck says (albeit with the capability to carry heavier payloads).

Rocket Labs has about 35 commercial launches in the pipeline, Mr Beck says. The company is aiming to stage the Electron's first test flight by the end of this year.

The Lockheed investment is partly about money, and partly about a strategic partnership, he says. "We're interested in their technology and they're interested in ours."

Beyond its low-cost launch vehicles, Rocket Lab is known for its breakthroughs in liquid fuel technology. 

Says Lockheed Martin chief scientist Ned Allen: “Rocket Lab’s work could have application in a number of aerospace domains, and we look forward to working with them to complement our overall efforts in small lift capabilities and hypersonic [Mach 5 and above] flight technologies.”

The rocket man is willing to talk staff numbers. He says his company had 15 staff last year. Now it has 40 and is taking on one or two a week (most are still based in Auckland, where Rocket Labs maintains a facility close to the airport).

He says he would take on another 30 today, if he could, but the recruitment process is tricky when "quite literally" looking for rocket scientists.

"We're attracting talent from all over the world: Germany, the US; people who have worked on [NASA's] Mars Re-Entry Vehicle; people who have worked in the European Space Agency."

Lift-off
Rocket Labs was formed in 2007 and first came on to NBR's radar in 2009 when it launched New Zealand's first rocket, Atea 1, from Sir Michael Fay's property on Mercury Island. 

That launch didn't go so smoothly as data was captured but the rocket was lost (read Coromandel, we have a problem), but it did attract the attention of Lockheed, US defence agency DARPA and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khlosa.

According to CrunchBase, Khosla has raised $US2.8 billion and made 329 investments.

Khosla and Tindall are also co-investors in Auckland-founded clean energy company LanzaTech, incidentally.

But while LanzaTech moved most employees to the US last year, most Rocket Lab staff are still in Auckland, Mr Beck says.

These days, the CEO divides his time between Auckland, Silicon Valley and Washington DC.

His next big moment will come in April, when Rocket Lab is expected to reveal more details about the Electron at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs.

Mr Beck's company aims to launch satellites into low earth orbit, not people into a sub-orbit, but he says he and many Rocket Lab staff knew people involved in the fatal Virgin Galactic crash. "We really feel for those guys," he says. The incident reminds how fraught, and complex, the industry is. 

"There's a good reason only a few nations have ever gone to space," he says. 

ckeall@nbr.co.nz

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