Described by company leadership as a “nights-and-weekends” project, Rocket Lab has since partnered with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to deliver the first private mission to Venus. It would be the first such commercial endeavor, though not the first ever visit to Earth’s closest neighboring planet.

Armed with a device called a nephelometer, which helps study particles by analyzing how light interacts with them, the Rocket Lab-MIT probe is expected to collect data for approximately five minutes as it pierces the Venusian cloud layer. It then will “have a crack,” Beck said, at uncovering those floating signs of life.

“It is a privately-funded philanthropic mission, and so that’s where the nights-and-weekends come from,” he explained on the Space Minds podcast. But it is how the leader of a $13 billion company wants to spend his time and where he thinks there’s value.

“We’ve all got real jobs to do. But if you can go there and you don’t find life, I think that’s super interesting,” he added. “If you go there, and you did find life, that answers one of the biggest questions in our history … and you can pretty conclusively draw that life is going to be prolific throughout the universe.”