Originally published by Space Intel Report on February 5, 2025. Read the original article here.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Rocket Lab Chief Executive Sir Peter Beck appeared to question whether the company’s goal of mimicking SpaceX and Amazon in becoming a fully verticalized company with a core applications business is the right strategy.

In a curious speech here Feb. 4 at the SmallSat Symposium, organized by Satnews Events, Sir Peter showed more excitement about Mars exploration as governments cede more control to commercial companies than in conventional applications including Earth observation and data delivery.

On Earth observation, he said “it feel like the race is won” and that the sector been unable to find its long-promised mass market.

“You don’t see a bunch of new Earth observation companies starting up and being funded, certainly not in the numbers we used to see five or 10 years ago,” Beck said. “Why is that when demand is increasing? We are yet to see the scale.”

Beck said that may be a sign that there is more opportunity in the market, but he did not sound like someone ready to invest heavily to find it.

Beck said Rocket Lab does 50% of its business with government defense and security customers.

“And when we peel the layer of our commercial customers and look at them, they are 50% defense in their own right, so it represents a tremendous proportion of the industry and having more focus on that is going to be good for us all,” he said.

Beck’s vision is that Rocket Lab would develop its medium-/heavy-lift Neutron rocket, expected to begin flying this year, and with its already broad in-house satellite component manufacturing capacity turn its attention to an application that has not been decided.

The most logical candidate, at least until Starlink became established, was broadband delivery. Direct-to-device applications are viewed as a huge opportunity by some. Both require the construction, launch and maintainance of large infrastructures.

“There are other applications of bent pipes and IoT and the rest. But internet and direct-to-device drown out everything else,” Beck said. “It’s an application that requires tremendous scale. That’s pretty hard to go and do, to build hundreds if not thousands of satellites and provide a scaled solution.”

‘A new player that can deploy infrastructure at a scale and cost hard to match’

“The more traditional players are really struggling with the disruptors. All of a sudden there is a new player in town that can just deploy infrastructure at a scale and a cost that is just very very hard to match.”\

Amazon’s Project Kuiper is, for now, the only other company besides SpaceX to have the means and the ambition to compete with Starlink.

Is there room for a third that will arrive on the market after 2030? That’s unclear.

“If you think about the future end-to-end space companies, which ultimately are going to be the really large behemoths of the industry, it’s going to be blurry about whether they are a space company are not a space company. You need both to be competitive in this industry right now.

“To be competitive and successful you really have to have your own rocket, have the ability to build your own satellites at scale, which generally means a lot of vertical integration to do that at the right price point, and be able to launch relentlessly on demand to deploy the infrastructure and then maintain it.”

The appeal of Mars exploration 

On Mars exploration he seemed much more enthusiastic.

“Mars is going to get a lot of attention and we are particularly excited about that. This is certainly going to be the year for Mars and there will be a lot of formative plans put into place with the real teeth.”

Originally published by Space Intel Report on February 5, 2025. Read the original article here.