Rocket Lab, an emerging competitor to Elon Musk's SpaceX, is doing a number of important things. The New Zealand- and Long Beach, Calif.-based company is one of the few in the commercial space with a reusable rocket and produces both launch vehicles and satellites—traditionally separate businesses. But what's most exciting for founder and CEO Peter Beck is the “totally unfunded,” “nights and weekends” project aimed at finding life on Venus, the entrepreneur revealed during an on-stage interview at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco yesterday (Oct. 28).
The New Zealand-born astronaut has long been fascinated by Venus, our closest neighbor 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 very good because you can put a trail on Mars, and that wins a lot of votes. You will never set foot on Venus [which can get as hot as nearly 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit]but I think that, as a planet, Venus is very interesting.”
His belief has some scientific support. In a study published in the journal Nature Astronomy in 2020, scientists found a large amount of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus, suggesting that there may 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 probe to hunt for life in the clouds of Venus. “There is an interesting, sweet place about 50 kilometers from Venus. “The conditions are good enough to be healthy there,” Beck said. Because the destination is the atmosphere above the planet, the mission will be more difficult than placing the rover on a solid surface. Beck said, if the probe reaches Venus successfully, it will have only 250 seconds to disrupt the planet's atmosphere and place a nephelometer instrument there to look for life.
Rocket Lab's workhorse is a small, reusable rocket called the Electron, which has launched more than 50 missions for government and commercial customers since 2017. In June 2022, Electron launches a small spacecraft called CAPSTONE for NASA to study the 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 program as CAPSTONE, which was a challenging program in itself. He jokingly admitted that the Venus campaign currently generates “little money” for the company and takes up about 30 percent of his time.
Beck, who also serves as Rocket Lab's chief engineer, said he spends about half his time deeply involved in key engineering decisions within the company, while the other half is spent doing “rocket CEO nonsense,” he said.
If successful, the Venus mission could help shed light on what Beck believes is “one of the biggest questions we can ask ourselves and answer: Are we the only ones alive in the universe or not?”
Rocket Lab, which trades on the Nasdaq, is not yet profitable. But its share price has risen more than 110 percent this year so far, claiming a market cap of $5.7 billion.
