Rocket Lab USA (RKLB +3.37%) stock, maker of America's second-most frequently launched rocket of 2024, had an eventful introduction to 2025 last week.
In a flurry of press releases, the maker of small space rockets, satellites, satellite parts, and space tugs announced:
- Powerful sales and earnings growth for Q4 2024 and for the year as a whole.
- The purchase of a drone barge that it will use for remote-controlled landings of its new Neutron rocket ship.
- The development of a new satellite designed for mass manufacture and easy packing inside.
- Another multi-mission launch contract with one of its biggest customers, Japan's Institute for Q-shu Pioneers of Space, or iQPS.
Let's take those one at a time.
NASDAQ: RKLB
Key Data Points
Rocket Lab Q4 earnings
"2024 was a record-setting year for Rocket Lab, with our highest annual revenue ever posted of $436.2 million and a record Q4 2024 revenue of $132.4 million." That's how Rocket Lab CEO Sir Peter Beck described the company's most recent quarter and year. Rocket Lab set a new record for rocket launches in a single year: 16 launch.
Sales surged 78% for the year, and were still accelerating as the year concluded, with Q4 sales specifically rising 121%. Even better, operating costs didn't rise as fast as sales -- up 39% for the year and 34% for the quarter -- which is a good trend as Rocket Lab continues to try to find a path to profitability.
In that regard, though, investors will probably have to wait for Rocket Lab's Neutron to arrive, boosting revenue at the same time as it reduces margin pressure from research and development spending. For now, Rocket Lab's basically treading water on profitability, with both quarterly and annual losses unchanged from 2023, at $0.10 lost for the quarter, and $0.38 lost for the year.
Rocket Lab buys a boat
Speaking of Neutron, Rocket Lab continues to make progress getting its newest rocket ship design ready for first launch. In a post-earnings conference call with analysts, CFO Adam Spice confirmed that Neutron's more or less on track to hit its previously promised target on a mid-2025 launch -- maybe a few months behind schedule at worst, with a target launch date "in the back half of 2025," versus a previous projection of "mid-2025."
As work on the rocket per se continues, though, Rocket Lab is already looking ahead to a day when it has Neutron operating regularly. It has acquired a 400-foot barge that it intends to customize to transform it into an at-sea landing platform for the rocket's reusable first stage. The company expects modification work to continue through the end of 2025, aiming to have the landing barge ready to receive rockets in 2026.
Image source: Rocket Lab.
Rocket Lab invents a flatter satellite
Neutron is designed as a 141-foot-tall reusable first stage rocket, which will launch and land either on the barge or on land, and which encloses a second stage that carries the rocket's payload and is expendable. And Rocket Lab had news last week on the payloads the second stage will carry as well.
As it name implies, the new "Flatellite" design is a "low-profile, stackable" satellite designed to cram as many units as possible inside Neutron's Hungry Hippo fairing and on top of the second stage. Rocket Lab says Flatellite "can be produced in high volumes" and incorporates all sorts of proven satellite components that Rocket Lab is already producing for other customers -- "propulsion, flight software, avionics, reaction wheels, star trackers, separation system, solar arrays, radios, composite structures, fuel tanks, and more."
Rocket Lab intends to market Flatellite to customers seeking satellite capability in orbit, but also to build its own constellation of satellites providing services from orbit -- what kind of services, specifically, remains to be seen.
Rocket Lab is big in Japan
Wrapping up its PR tornado last week, Rocket Lab announced its second multi-launch deal with Japanese earth imaging satellite company Institute for Q-shu Pioneers of Space (iQPS). Rocket Lab launched its first satellite for iQPS back in December 2023 and signed its first multi-launch deal last year -- and announced it just last month -- to put four more iQPS satellites in orbit over the course of four flights.
Image source: Rocket Lab.
The contract announced last week also covers four satellites and four launches, for a total of eight, with six taking off in 2025, and two in 2026. At an average cost of $8.4 million per Electron launch, this means iQPS will probably add upwards of $67 million to Rocket Lab's revenue over the next two years. According to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence, that would amount to about half the revenue Rocket Lab's launch services division collected over the course of 2024.
iQPS aims to put a total of 36 satellites in orbit, though, and will presumably need to replace satellites from time to time as older units fall out of orbit. So the way things are going, it looks like iQPS could be patronizing Rocket Lab's services for years to come.
When will the rockets start flying? We actually found out the answer to that question just last week, when Rocket Lab announced its first launch in this series of eight iQPS launches will take place on March 10, weather and wayward boats and aircraft permitting.
Let the revenue generation begin!
