The CEO of a key SpaceX rival says customers are drawn to his company because it's 'even-keeled'
"It's fair to say that folks, both government and commercial, come to us and they know that they have a very even-keeled public company that just builds rockets and satellites, and executes against that and nothing else," Peter Beck told Business Insider in June when asked whether the feud between the world's richest man and the president benefited his company. "That becomes valuable to people."
Beck added that he hasn't seen any "obvious" data point about the impact of the ongoing disagreement about Trump's spending bill. And, as of mid-June, Beck told BI that Musk hadn't come up more frequently in conversations, either. Representatives for Musk and SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment from BI.
Rocket Lab is headquartered in California, though Beck is based in New Zealand. It's an end-to-end space company, meaning it offers launch services, spacecrafts, satellite parts, and on-orbit management. Despite being much smaller than SpaceX — Rocket Lab has about 2,600 employees, Beck said, compared to around 13,000 at SpaceX, according to Forbes — it has emerged as a key rival. Musk himself once called Beck "impressive."
Rocket Lab's partially reusable two-stage rocket vehicle, Electron, has completed 67 launches and deployed more than 230 satellites as of the end of June, according to the company. Beck told BI that Neutron, its reusable medium-lift rocket, is scheduled to launch later this year. SpaceX's Falcon 9 currently rules the medium-lift space, having completed almost 500 missions by the end of June.
"Right now, there is essentially a pseudo-monopoly on medium lift. I don't think anybody went out intentionally to create that. But nevertheless, that's a status," Beck said. "So we have both government and commercial customers cheering us on very loudly to get Neutron to the pad, because there needs to be some launch site diversification."
At the time of writing, Rocket Lab's stock was rising, and the company's market cap was more than $16.8 billion. While SpaceX is a private company, BI reported it was valued at $350 billion at the end of 2024. It's suffered some recent setbacks with its Starship rockets, a successor to the Falcon model — four consecutive launches have blown up, most recently in June. Musk downplayed the latest explosion as "just a scratch," and said the company learns from data collected during failed launches.
Some of Musk's companies have suffered due to his public, sometimes ugly, on-again-off-again relationship with Trump, especially Tesla. Polling indicates that Musk's favorability is still underwater, even after he left his government role.
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