Oct 8 – Rocket Lab USA (NASDAQ:RKLB) shares advanced about 6% in premarket trading Wednesday after the space company secured a new multi-launch agreement with Japan’s Institute for Q-shu Pioneers of Space, according to a Wednesday press release.
The deal designates Rocket Lab as the main launch provider for iQPS’s commercial Earth-imaging satellite network. It includes three dedicated Electron missions scheduled to begin no earlier than 2026 from Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand.
The latest contract expands Rocket Lab’s planned launches for iQPS to seven in total. Each mission will deliver a single synthetic aperture radar satellite using Rocket Lab’s Motorized Lightband separation system, a component that highlights the company’s integrated launch and space hardware capabilities.
CEO Sir Peter Beck said iQPS’s choice of both the Electron rocket and Rocket Lab’s deployment hardware reflects the benefits of an integrated service that supports faster and more reliable access to orbit.
Rocket Lab said it is scaling up manufacturing and flight frequency to handle more than 20 launches in 2025. The company’s next launch for iQPS is slated for November. RKLB shares recently traded at all-time highs, with short interest above 10% of float.
It’s no secret that there are plenty of big egos in the spaceflight industry. While the key players typically refrain from roasting their rivals in public, that wasn’t the case at this year’s Berkeley Space Symposium. At least, not for Astra CEO Chris Kemp.
During a talk he gave at the event on September 5, Kemp threw some serious shade at SpaceX, Blue Origin, Firefly, and Rocket Lab, Ars Technica reports. While some of his remarks spoke to legitimate shortcomings amongst his competitors, they came off harsh, especially given Astra’s history of financial troubles and its rocky launch record.
Kemp co-founded Astra in 2016 alongside CTO Adam London. Five of the company’s seven operational rocket launches between September 2020 and June 2022 resulted in failure. Astra retired its “Rocket 3” in August 2022, and by March 2024, the company’s valuation had fallen from $2.6 billion to about $11.25 million, Reuters reported. Kemp and London took the company private at 50 cents per share to avoid bankruptcy.
Now, Astra is focused on developing Rocket 4, targeting summer 2026 for its inaugural launch. It’s possible that this new chapter could help Astra rejuvenate its reputation and capital, but Kemp’s recent remarks may create more problems for the struggling company. Here’s what he had to say about four of his biggest competitors.
Gizmodo reached out to each of them for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication. You can watch Kemp’s full talk here.
SpaceX
In his closing remarks, Kemp attempted to appeal to prospective interns in the audience by arguing that Astra provides a better work environment than SpaceX’s Starbase in south Texas.
“It’s more fun than SpaceX, because we’re not on the border of Mexico where they’ll chop your head off if you accidentally take a left turn,” he said. “And you don’t have to live in a trailer. And we don’t make you work six and a half days a week, 12 hours a day. It’s appreciated if you do, but not required.”
Yikes. Up until this moment, Kemp generally spoke respectfully about SpaceX, drawing fair comparisons between Elon Musk’s approach and his own. To end on this sour note felt like an unnecessary jab. Needless to say, no SpaceX interns have ever been beheaded.
Blue Origin
At the start of his talk, Kemp described two approaches to innovation in today’s space industry: the fail-fast iterative design method and the more traditional long-term development of a single rocket.
“I call it the Blue Origin and NASA approach, where you spend tens of billions of dollars, and in 20 or 30 years you build a rocket and it works the first time,” he said. “This is super important if what you’re trying to optimize is [that] it works the first time. And for a program run by a nation-state or a billionaire that doesn’t want to have a rocket blow up, this is prudent. But it does take decades and cost tens of billions of dollars for you to do the analysis and testing.”
Astra, like SpaceX, uses iterative design. While Kemp is correct in saying that Jeff Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin, has taken the more traditional approach, neither New Shepherd nor New Glenn costs “tens of billions” of dollars. What’s more, Astra’s Rocket 3 launch record pales in comparison to New Shepherd’s.
Firefly Aerospace
In 2021, Astra signed a deal with rival Firefly to purchase its Reaver engines. Neither company ever acknowledged the agreement publicly, but during Kemp’s talk, he was eager to discuss it.
“We have a new rocket engine. There is a company called Firefly. They went public,” he said with a mocking giggle. “We bought the engine from them, and it was garbage. We literally could not get the same engine twice from them. And none of them matched the CAD. And if you’re in engineering, you know that just doesn’t work. So we basically had to start from scratch with this engine.”
In response to Kemp’s comments, a Firefly spokesperson told Ars, “Reaver engines built by Firefly have powered our Alpha launch vehicle to orbit multiple times and have performed flawlessly. In addition, our patented tap-off engine technology used across our family of engines has been hot-fired more than a thousand times and counting. Firefly has full confidence in our engineering and the design of our flight-proven Alpha systems.”
Firefly did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
Rocket Lab
In the late 2010s, while Astra was developing Rocket 3, Rocket Lab was racing to build Electron, a rival small-lift rocket. This set the stage for fierce competition that still persists today, but comparatively, Kemp’s remarks toward Rocket Lab were mild at the Berkeley event.
Kemp admitted that both Rocket 3 and Electron were not large enough to serve the booming market for satellites. “That little rocket is too small,” he said of Rocket 3. “And so is Electron.”
This may be true, but Electron’s launch record far surpasses that of Rocket 3, and it continues to generate significant revenue for Rocket Lab.
Between his snide remarks, Kemp’s talk offered valuable insight into Astra’s past, present, and future. Whether his bark will stand up to his bite remains to be seen with the upcoming debut of Rocket 4.
America’s space industry was supposed to undergo a big change in 2023. As multiple news outlets reported at the time, the United Launch Alliance (ULA) joint venture between Boeing(NYSE: BA) and Lockheed Martin(NYSE: LMT) was up for sale, with a deal likely to happen before the end of the year.
It didn’t happen.
No matter, said the pundits. As 2023 flipped over to 2024, ULA was still for sale. Up until the arrival of SpaceX, after all, ULA was the nation’s biggest launcher of rockets carrying NASA and national security satellites. Even after SpaceX’s arrival, it was still No. 2. (Well, until Rocket Lab, it was.) Surely someone would happily pay the $2 billion or $3 billion it would take to buy ULA in 2024?
Except, 2024 is now three-quarters over, and so far at least, no one has done so.
Image source: Getty Images.
ULA looks incredibly cheap, so why is no one buying it?
And yet, as Reuters reported last month, ULA is still up for sale. And the sales price is still reported to be in the neighborhood of $2 billion to $3 billion.
That’s probably a bargain price. As I explained back in 2023, ULA generated $1.3 billion in sales in 2022, before a transition in launch vehicles caused a slump in launch rate in 2023. As 2024 rolls along, though, launch cadence is already increasing again. With four launches in the bag so far, ULA has already put more rockets in orbit in 2024 than it did in all of 2023. Plus, a big order book populated by launches for Amazon‘s Project Kuiper mean ULA’s launch rate (and revenue) are only going up.
It shouldn’t be too long before ULA is raking in revenue at its usual rate, or better. At the usual valuation for space stocks of 3 or 4 times annual sales, that implies ULA should be worth $4 billion to $5 billion.
In any logical world, that should mean that someone will step up to the plate and buy ULA eventually.
Wanted: A buyer for ULA
And here’s the thing: Reuters thinks someone might be looking to buy ULA. Curiously, though, the company Reuters believes is now in talks to bid for ULA is a company no one even thought was in the running back when this sales process began: Sierra Space.
You remember Sierra Space. It’s the subsidiary of private defense company Sierra Nevada Corporation. It’s the company I described as “a $5 billion space unicorn” back in 2023, and a potential IPO candidate. And according to Reuters, it’s the leading contender to acquire ULA from Boeing and Lockheed, as other bidders such as Blue Origin and Rocket Lab step to the sidelines. As the news agency notes, both Blue Origin and Rocket Lab (and several others) had expressed interest in buying ULA in the past, but none of those negotiations led to a deal.
As for whether this new negotiation will succeed where others failed, though, that remains very much unclear. Asked to comment on the report, Sierra Space, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin all declined, or failed to respond.
Will Sierra Space buy United Launch Alliance?
Ordinarily, that wouldn’t mean much. Refusing to comment on a pending acquisition before ultimately going ahead and making that acquisition is standard operating procedure for big corporations. (See the recent sale of Dish to DirecTV for one very recent example.) But in this particular instance, it’s not the only reason to be skeptical that any talks will actually result in a deal.
Unless and until it conducts an IPO, Sierra Space is probably going to be strapped for cash, and unable to make a big bid to acquire ULA — certainly not as big a bid as billionaire-backed Blue Origin could manage. Indeed, as recently as late 2023, Sierra Space was reported to be laying off workers to conserve cash. Meanwhile, its available cash is probably needed for the multiple space projects it’s already involved in, which include developing modules for a proposed private space station, building missile warning satellites for the Pentagon, and getting its Dream Chaser spaceplane ready for a (much delayed) first flight in 2025.
Granted, I could be wrong about this. Indeed, I hope I am wrong, because if Sierra Space were to first buy ULA and then IPO the combined company, for example, then this would give space investors like me exactly what we’re looking for: an opportunity to invest in a company the size and capability of SpaceX, that’s also publicly traded.
Such a scenario could still happen eventually. I just don’t think Sierra Space is the company that will make it happen.
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Blue Origin’s New Glenn heavy-lift rocket and its Mars-bound NASA payload now have a tentative launch date. The company on Friday that the inaugural flight will take place no earlier than October 13, carrying to help NASA study the effects of solar wind on Mars’ atmosphere. This will be the first time New Glenn flies in its development, and the date cuts well into the window of opportunity for travel to Mars, which occurs roughly every two years based on the planetary alignments. That launch period opens on September 29 and extends to mid-October, per .
The mission will lift off from Space Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The twin spacecraft of NASA’s Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers mission (Escapade) on August 19 to begin preparations and integration with the launch vehicle.
Now, the pressure is really on for Jeff Bezos-founded Blue Origin to get New Glenn ready in time. reported on Wednesday that the company recently suffered two failures at its factory that resulted in damage to hardware for its second and third New Glenn flights. But, a spokesperson told the publication that it’s still on track for this year’s inaugural launch.
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft will bring NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore (L) and Suni Williams back from the ISS on July 1. AFP via Getty Images
Last month, Boeing made history when it successfully launched its Starliner spacecraft into space after three delays, sending a crew of NASA astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). July will kick off with the space crew returning to Earth. But that won’t be the only space event to watch that week. As the return vessel heads for Earth, Firefly Aerospace will be preparing to send a rocket, appropriately named “Noise of Summer,” in the other direction as part of a Nanosatellite mission.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s SpaceX has multiple launches scheduled. After successfully sending up its Starship megarocket for the 4th time in June, the space exploration company has earmarked July for its next launch. But it isn’t stopping there. SpaceX is also preparing for the launch of Polaris Dawn, which Space.com describes as the company’s “most ambitious crewed mission to date.” In other news, Rocket Lab is gearing up for its next mission, which centers around a new-generation satellite.
Here are six space missions to watch in July 2024:
July 1: Firefly’s “Noise of Summer” (FLTA005) satellite mission: Texas-based Firefly Aerospace will kick off July with the launch of the FLTA005, or “Noise of Summer” mission using a two-stage, expendable Firefly Alpha rocket designed for commercial small satellite launches. The mission, scheduled to blast off at 4 :03 a.m. UTC from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara, Calif., will mark the small satellite launcher’s fourth test flight. It will carry eight cubesats as part of NASA’s ELaNa 43 (Educational Launch of a Nanosatellite) mission.
July 2: Boeing’s Starliner brings astronauts back to Earth. Last month, Boeing’s thrice-delayed Starliner Crewed Flight Test (CFT) launch finally sent astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Suni Williamsto the ISS.These NASA crew members are scheduled to return from the ISS on July 2, pending no further technical complications, after helium leakage and thruster problems pushed back the return from June 26.
July 2: SpaceX launches Starlink Group 8-9 satellites. SpaceX has a busy month planned with several missions scheduled. On the same day as Starliner’s return mission, SpaceX will launch a batch of Starlink satellites from Cape Canaveral Florida. This omega-constellation collection is part of the company’s satellite-based internet service.
July 9: ESA’s Ariane 62 maiden flight. The European Space Agency (ESA) is preparing for the first test flight of its newest heavy-lift rocketafter multiple delays. Designed by the French firm ArianeGroup, the Ariane 62 has two solid boosters and is intended for both government and commercial missions. The mission is scheduled to launch from the Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana. Although no specific time has been set, the mission has a three-hour launch window between 2 p.m and 5 p.m local time.
TBD: SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn launch. The start of SpaceX’s new series is scheduled for July, although the company hasn’t released a set date yet. The billionaire entrepreneur and pilot Jared Isaacman is funding the first of three missions that will comprise the Polaris Program. The first mission will include an attempt at history’s first “all-civilian spacewalk.” It follows the Inspiration4 launch of 2021, a SpaceX mission that took Isaacman and several other patrons into space.
TBD: Rocket Lab’s Capella Acadia 3 Electron mission. Leading small rocket maker Rocket Lab is preparing for the launch of Capella Acadia 3 Electron rocket. This expendable two-stage orbital launch vehicle has an optional third stage. Its payload includes a single Earth-imaging Acadia (SAR) satellite, designed and operated by Capella Space. Though no date has been set, the mission is expected to blast off from the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand into low earth orbit.
Rocket Lab is exploring possible applications for a satellite constellation that they would build, launch and operate in-house, similar to SpaceX’s Starlink business, as a way of generating recurring revenue, an executive said this week.
“If you look to where we ultimately want to go, in a lot of ways we want to emulate what [SpaceX] has successfully done, which is work their way towards the applications market,” Rocket Lab CFO Adam Spice said. “SpaceX has chosen the consumer broadband and other applications on Starlink for their anchor application in space. We’re evaluating a lot of different constellation application opportunities.”
“Ultimately, we view end-to-end as not just build and launch, but it’s build, launch, operate and generate a recurring revenue stream off of the end customer relationship,” he said.
Rocket Lab has already taken great strides to become a full service space company: the company flies its small Electron rocket for commercial and defense customers; it is developing a larger Neutron rocket, similar in size and payload capacity to SpaceX’s Falcon 9, which is on track to fly for the first time at the end of this year; and it operates a booming space systems business, which includes products from full satellite buses to spacecraft components, like solar panels and reaction wheels.
Spice’s comments, made at the TD Cowen 45th Annual Aerospace & Defense Conference on February 14, show that the company is looking to vertically expand even further.
In recent months, Rocket Lab has also expanded its work with U.S. government agencies, most notably in its win of a $515 million contract to build 18 satellites for the Space Development Agency. The company leveraged its vertical integration to score that contract, and will be building all of the critical portions of the satellite bus as part of that deal. Where Rocket Lab has the greatest reliance on third-party suppliers is with the payload portion of the spacecraft, Spice said.
But the company wants to close that gap, too. Earlier this month, Rocket Lab announced it had closed a $355 million convertible note offering, and Spice said that the new funding will enable the company to “inorganically work our way into more payload capabilities.”
That means more acquisitions. Rocket Lab has already executed four acquisitions to build its end-to-end capability, but Spice said unequivocally that the company is looking for more.
“Right now is a great time to be shopping because the ability to raise capital for most companies is very, very, very challenging,” he explained. “So we’re seeing some real opportunities […] We see other distressed assets that are quality technology that we can add to our portfolio.”
