Life is pretty good right now for Rocket Lab and its founder, Peter Beck.

With a total of nine launches last year and as many as 15 planned for 2023, Rocket Lab now flies more boosters than any other company in the world not named SpaceX. In recent years, Rocket Lab's cadence has surpassed United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and other major players.

This year, Rocket Lab may even launch as many boosters as Russia does, something that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago.

Clearly, Rocket Lab's Electron vehicle is much smaller than others in the established launch industry. Electron's capacity maxes out at 300 kg to low-Earth orbit. But that has not stopped Beck from being inventive about use cases for the small rocket. Last year, his company launched a small satellite to the Moon, and Beck is working on a Venus mission.

And there is something to be said for providing a product that a lot of customers want to fly on—and then delivering that product.

Hypersonics

To that end, Rocket Lab recently announced a new venture—using Electron to serve as a testbed for hypersonic technologies. The rocket will use essentially the same first and second stages, but it has a modified kick stage that will allow Electron to deploy payloads with a mass of up to 600 kg into hypersonic trajectories five times greater than the speed of sound.

"We can do lots of interesting things with throttles and shutdowns and really tailor starting points of trajectories super accurately," Beck said in an interview with Ars. "The whole purpose of this is a high-cadence flight capability. We all know that China and Russia and others have been doing lots of flights and generating lots of data and really advancing the field in hypersonics. The key to advancing the field here in the United States is to do lots of flights."

Beck would not say how many hypersonic missions the company will fly per year out of its launch pad at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. However, he believes the opportunity is significant once Electron demonstrates its capability.

According to the US Congressional Budget Office, the Army, Navy, and Air Force are all developing hypersonic missiles to provide a fast-moving, maneuverable capability for striking targets quickly from thousands of kilometers away. Among the research problems the military likely wants to test is managing the extreme heat that hypersonic missiles are exposed to by traveling at high speeds in the atmosphere for most of their flight. This is less of an issue for ballistic missiles, which mainly fly above the atmosphere.

Rocket Lab can offer this service because, with nearly three dozen launches now completed, it has demonstrated the ability to build and launch Electrons at a relatively high cadence. Beck said that has only been achievable through significant investments in Electron's New Zealand-based factory, quality control, and software that manages the manufacturing processes known as ERP (enterprise resource planning) and MRP (material requirements planning).

Cadence matters

"The 20th rocket was 20 times harder than the first rocket because by the time you're building the 20th rocket, you're completely reliant on your ERP and MRP and quality control systems," Beck said. "You're completely reliant on the system to deliver a reliable vehicle."

Since Rocket Lab put its first Electron into orbit in 2018, Beck has seen several competitors come and go. In the purely small-launch arena, Vector and Virgin Orbit have both entered bankruptcy, and Astra has abandoned its first attempt to build a small rocket due to more failed launches than successful ones. Beck said he anticipates further consolidation in the small launch industry.

"I think there's more to come," he said. "We went through a period where there was launch frothiness, and tremendous amounts of capital were raised for all kinds of concepts and ideas, some with more merit than others. But I think at some point you actually have to do what you said you were going to do and execute. And I think you're starting to see the shakeout of that."

Beck's next challenge is taking the lessons learned from Electron and developing the larger Neutron vehicle. With a planned capacity of 15 metric tons to low-Earth orbit and a reusable first stage, Neutron is moving into territory presently occupied by SpaceX. However, there is a great demand in the Western world for additional medium-lift capacity, and Neutron is one of several vehicles under development—including the Ariane 6, Vulcan, New Glenn, and Terran R rockets—coming along to meet it.

There will probably be room for only one or two ultimate winners alongside SpaceX, with its Falcon 9 rocket. So it will come down to delivering a quality rocket with a high cadence. Can Peter Beck repeat that feat?

"I think the great thing about the space industry is it is the ultimate leveler, and there's no hiding from execution," he said.

We'll see.