Rocket Lab

Rocket Lab started in Auckland in 2006, when Peter Beck set out to build rockets in a country with no space industry at all. The Electron rocket got there first. It is a small, two-stage orbital launcher that has now flown more than 75 missions and become the most frequently launched small orbital rocket in the world, with a 100 percent success rate across its most recent full year of flights. Electron flies from pads in New Zealand and from Wallops Island, Virginia, and it carries a mix of commercial satellites, national security payloads, and one-off science missions like the CAPSTONE lunar orbiter that scouted the orbit NASA later chose for its Gateway station. A suborbital variant called HASTE supports hypersonic systems testing for the Pentagon. Electron was never meant to be the whole company.

Rocket Lab builds Photon, a satellite bus derived from Electron's kick stage, and sells it to customers who want a spacecraft without building one from scratch. Underneath that sits a components business that grew mostly through acquisition: star trackers, reaction wheels, solar panels, separation systems, and radiation-tolerant flight computers that go into other companies' satellites as well as Rocket Lab's own. This is the part of the business that made Rocket Lab a supplier to constellations like Globalstar's and to the Space Development Agency's proliferated missile-warning and tracking layer, where Rocket Lab is building dozens of satellites rather than a handful. The company's next real step is Neutron, a medium-lift rocket with a reusable first stage, due to fly for the first time in 2026 from a new pad at Wallops. Neutron is sized to carry roughly 13,000 kilograms to orbit, more than 40 times what Electron can lift, and it is built with an eye toward the US Space Force's National Security Space Launch program, which recently added Neutron to the pool of vehicles eligible to compete for military launch contracts. That matters because national security launch has historically gone to a short list of established primes, and Rocket Lab is trying to become the first credible new entrant in years.

The company already holds an SDA contract worth up to $816 million, its largest award to date, to build 18 missile-warning satellites, and it has talked about point-to-point cargo delivery using rocket transport as a longer-range Air Force interest. Rocket Lab went public in 2021 through a SPAC merger and trades on Nasdaq. It is now headquartered in Long Beach, California, with roughly 2,600 employees split between the US and New Zealand, where a large share of Electron's manufacturing still happens. Revenue has grown steadily as the launch cadence and the components business both scaled, and the company's backlog has moved well past a billion dollars. Between a proven small launcher, spacecraft manufacturing, a components supply chain, and a reusable rocket aimed squarely at military launch, Rocket Lab has built something closer to a vertically integrated space company than a single-product launch provider.