The 2023 life-hunting mission will be just the beginning, if all goes according to plan.

The California-based company aims to launch a private Venus mission in 2023 to hunt for signs of life in the clouds where scientists just spotted the possible biosignature gas phosphine.

"We don't want to do one mission — we want to do many, many missions there," Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck told Space.com Monday (Sept. 14), hours after scientists unveiled the Venus phosphine discovery. .

"The probe is targeted at kind of an entry angle that maximizes the amount of time in that 50-kilometer[-high] region of interest," Beck said.

It will be more akin to the four small descent craft successfully deployed into the Venus atmosphere by NASA's Pioneer Venus Multiprobe mission in 1978, Beck said.

And Rocket Lab is already talking to scientists about the best ways to do this — including members of the team who spotted phosphine in the planet's clouds.

And they're amazing, to be so flexible," MIT planetary scientist Sara Seager, one of the world's leading experts on biosignature gases, said during the phosphine announcement press conference on Monday.

(37 kilograms), Beck said.

Rocket Lab's Venus plans were in the works long before the company started talking to Seager and her colleagues, Beck said.

"I thought the probability of finding something interesting was incredibly low, whereas now I think that the probability of finding something interesting is much improved, given the phosphine," he said.

Electron and Photon are pretty much set for the 2023 mission, Beck said, noting that Photon will prove its deep-space bona fides on the NASA moon mission next year.

And that will be a major milestone — a private life-hunting mission, developed and launched in just a few years at a total cost of $10 million to $20 million. .

(Two of the four Discovery mission candidates in the most recent selection round would explore Venus, by the way. Neither is a life-hunting effort, although one of them, called DAVINCI+, would send a probe through the Venusian atmosphere.).

Rocket Lab is planning to pay the full tab for the 2023 mission

But Beck said he'd "love to do a bunch more" Venus missions and would certainly be open to collaborating with a variety of partners — a prospect that may get a big boost from the phosphine find