Rocket Lab has confirmed that it’s way more than a launch firm. One look on the firm’s most up-to-date earnings presentation exhibits as a lot: its area methods enterprise, which designs, manufactures and sells satellite tv for pc parts and spacecraft, introduced in over 70% of firm income in comparison with launch in 2022, at $150.3 million versus $60.7 million, respectively.
The area methods enterprise — whose merchandise embrace star trackers, response wheels, solar energy methods, separation methods and extra — additionally noticed a large progress in income, rising by 239% year-over-year. To satisfy this rising demand, the corporate additional introduced final 12 months that it was constructing out new manufacturing capabilities for response wheels, particularly.
The funding is paying off: It seems that Rocket Lab has landed a contract to offer response wheels to an unnamed mega constellation buyer. The corporate mentioned as a lot in a February press launch asserting a brand new 12Nms response wheel product, saying that the wheel is “presently deliberate for flight with an undisclosed massive mega constellation buyer.”
Extra just lately, Rocket Lab CFO Adam Spice added extra shade to this assertion, revealing that the deal is value “1000’s” of response wheels per 12 months.
“We entered into an settlement with a mega constellation the place it’s 1000’s of response wheels per 12 months and far greater response wheels,” Spice mentioned at Cowen’s forty fourth Annual Aerospace/Protection and Industrials Convention in February. “What that allowed us to do is construct a devoted high-volume manufacturing facility in New Zealand and we introduced the price down by nearly an order of magnitude on these wheels.”
At a Financial institution of America occasion this Tuesday, Spice reiterated the enormity of the deal: “We secured a contract with a mega constellation buyer the place we’ll ship two or three thousand response wheels per 12 months to 1 buyer.”
Whereas the corporate has not publicly disclosed the identify of this buyer — and declined to touch upon the matter to TechCrunch, citing business sensitivity — there’s solely a handful of recognized potentialities. Amazon’s Challenge Kuiper is one probably candidate, and OneWeb’s rising community might plausibly be one other. SpaceX has demonstrated that it needs to remain in-house as a lot as potential for its manufacturing stack, nonetheless, so Starlink isn’t probably.
In its information sheet on the 12Nms response wheel, Rocket Lab lists the bottom value at $100,000. In fact, on contracts of this measurement, the value per unit is commonly discounted (which Spice acknowledged, saying on the Cowen convention that the ASP for the mega constellation response wheels “got here down fairly a bit”), but it surely suggests an enormous win for Rocket Lab’s revenues and a potential supply for the doubling of the corporate’s backlog final 12 months: from $241 million on the finish of 2021 to $503 million.