Industry History | Rocket Lab — Sixty Thousand Dollars and a Sounding Rocket from Auckland

People treat Rocket Lab as the Long Beach campus that always lofted an Electron from Mahia and built a Neutron stage in Virginia.

The first book was a two-person New Zealand company with almost no cash.

On 29 June 2006 Peter Beck incorporated Rocket Lab Limited in Auckland after a trip to the United States convinced him a small orbital rocket could be a business.

He had apprenticed as a toolmaker at Fisher and Paykel and later worked composites at Industrial Research Limited.

Seed capital was under 100,000 New Zealand dollars, about 60,000 US dollars.

Mark Rocket, a Christchurch internet founder who had legally taken that surname, became the first outside investor and co-director from 2007 to 2011.

Stephen Tindall, Vinod Khosla, and a New Zealand government grant followed.

In November 2009 the sounding rocket Atea-1 left Great Mercury Island and made Rocket Lab the first private company in the Southern Hemisphere to reach space.

Registration moved to the United States around 2013, with a Huntington Beach then Long Beach headquarters.

The New Zealand company still lists 25 Levene Place in Mount Wellington.

The first fittings came off a junkyard bench because the budget bought ferrules and not whole valves.

Photo: industrial Auckland east of the isthmus, via Wikimedia Commons.