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As Elon Musk basked in the public spectacle of SpaceX’s blockbuster initial public offering this month, another — altogether more restrained — rocket executive also hailing from the Southern Hemisphere was putting the final touches on his biggest strategic move.
Rocket Lab Corp. Chief Executive Officer Peter Beck was calculating the merits of what he revealed as his company’s largest takeover Monday — the $8 billion acquisition of Iridium Communications Inc. From his dimmed-out office in Auckland, Beck then proceeded to lay out the rationale of the deal to Wall Street in the middle of his night: to counter SpaceX and its omnipresent South African-born founder.
“We are not acquiring a field of dreams and starting from scratch,” Beck said in an interview in his soft New Zealand twang. “It’s a very typical, smart Rocket Lab deal. Our clear intention here is not stop at this acquisition and continue to grow.”
The purchase of the satellite pioneer vaults Rocket Lab into direct competition not only with SpaceX but also with Amazon.com Inc. in the space industry’s newest battleground of providing service to mobile phones and other devices via satellites. At its heart, the deal is a bold bet that a scrappy upstart can peck away at deeper-pocketed giants of the emerging new orbital economy.
Beck founded Rocket Lab in 2006 and relocated the headquarters to California in 2013. The company has grown to become the second-most prolific US launcher after SpaceX with its Electron rocket, and it also builds spacecraft and components for NASA, the US Space Force and companies.
His net worth tops $5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, thanks largely to his Rocket Lab shares. Still, that’s a far cry from the trillionaire sphere in which Musk resides, courtesy of his SpaceX IPO.
Through the acquisition announced Monday, Rocket Lab is now signaling its move into a burgeoning market that SpaceX, Amazon and Texas-based AST SpaceMobile Inc. are all racing to commercialize — direct-to-mobile services.
Beck’s company is doing so through two lucrative assets: Iridium’s low-Earth orbit network and its spectrum — radio frequencies that have turned out to be very valuable for companies looking to enter the direct-to-device market.
Sporting a mushroom of curly brown hair, Beck received one of the top civilian honors in New Zealand in 2024, an award that allows him to carry the title “sir.” Still, he’s levelheaded and almost clinical about his company’s ambitions, in stark contrast with Musk’s larger-than-life plans to journey to Mars, establish orbital data centers and even potentially pick up asteroid mining.
Beck’s subdued demeanor places him at odds with some of the other ultra-wealthy, flashy names who have founded or helm their own spaceflight companies, such as Musk, Blue Origin LLC founder Jeff Bezos and Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc. founder Richard Branson.
Growing up in Invercargill, New Zealand’s southernmost city, Beck spent his early years tinkering on rocket engines. In 1995, he landed an apprenticeship with Fisher & Paykel, a maker of dishwashers and washing machines, and later worked at a government research institute.
He founded Rocket Lab with the aim of creating cheaper rockets that would allow broader access to orbit. At the time, SpaceX was still in its early days, working on developing and testing the first version of its Falcon family.
Since then, Rocket Lab has become a reliable, swift manufacturer with a growing defense business and plans to debut a larger Neutron rocket. The company’s headquarters are in Long Beach, California, but it also operates in New Zealand and conducts US launches from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
In 2021, the company went public via a special purpose acquisition vehicle, becoming a rare success story from the risky method of entering the markets that drove a number of other, once-flashy stocks to irrelevance or bankruptcy.
The currency gained by going public has allowed the company to use deals to build out the platform, such as buying laser optics group Mynaric, satellite sensor firm Geost and robotics group Motiv. Yet none of those deals come close to the scale of the Iridium transaction, which Beck said “supercharges” Rocket Lab into the field of applications.
Similar to Beck’s own no-frills personality, Iridium has chugged along for decades largely out of the spotlight as a legacy satellite operator.
The company was first created by Motorola Corp. in the 1980s with the aim of launching a global network of satellites that could beam down cell reception to customized, brick-shaped phones. After a few bumps along the way, including a Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1999, Iridium has become a profitable bulwark of the commercial space economy by providing global satellite communications in remote locations.
Beck said he uses the system himself when he’s flying helicopters in his limited spare time, and with Iridium function on his dash, “if I have a super bad day and end up in the bushes, somebody will come and get me for sure.”
Putting the deal together took about six months, during which time Beck shuttled back and forth between Iridium’s headquarters in Virginia, Rocket Lab’s base in Long Beach, and the bankers advising on the deal in New York — and then back to New Zealand, according to the company.
The agreement was announced late in Beck’s evening. He hunkered down all night at his Auckland office in an industrial park in a suburb called Mount Wellington, from where he conducted interviews and calls. By the time he left again, it was daylight in New Zealand.
The tie-up stands to create a significant competitor to SpaceX, one that could mirror the business model Musk used to bring together launch and satellite communications and potentially even make a play into orbital data centers, according to Mandeep Singh, global head of technology at Bloomberg Intelligence.
Beck, however, would prefer not to get ahead of himself.
“I don’t think it’s appropriate to go into the kind of the new stuff that we will cook up together,” Beck said in an interview. “We want to support the current customer base, but, man, they’re going to get a whole bunch of better service here in the future.”
–With assistance from Ainsley Thomson, Dylan Sloan, Kiel Porter, Ed Ludlow and Loren Grush.
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