Rocket Lab

Founding

Rocket Lab was founded in June 2006 by Peter Beck from New Zealand, after a trip to the United States. While contacting potential investors, he met Mark Rocket, who would become a key seed investor to Rocket Lab and was co-Director from 2007 to 2011. Other investors to the company includes Stephen Tindall, Vinod Khosla, and the New Zealand Government.Rocket Lab became the first private company in the Southern Hemisphere to reach space after launching its ?tea-1 sounding rocket in November 2009. The payload was not recovered, as it was deemed to be unnecessary. The payload was a ballistic instrumentation dart and its trajectory depended only on the boost phase of flight. The launch took place off the coast of New Zealand, from the private island of Michael Fay, a New Zealand banker and Rocket Lab investor. A second early investor was Stephen Tindall, a New Zealand entrepreneur.In December 2010, Rocket Lab was awarded a U.S. government contract from the Operationally Responsive Space Office to study a low cost space launcher to place CubeSats into orbit. The agreement with NASA enabled the company to contract for limited NASA resources such as personnel, facilities, and equipment for commercial launch efforts.

Moving to United States

Around 2013, the company moved its registration from New Zealand to the United States, and opened headquarters in Huntington Beach, California. The move coincided with the company receiving funding from American sources, and was in part due to increased U.S. government involvement in the company. In 2020, Rocket Lab moved its headquarters to Long Beach, California.In 2013, additional funding was obtained from Khosla Ventures, and Callaghan Innovation . Bessemer Venture Partners invested in 2014 and Lockheed Martin became a strategic investor in 2015. Rocket Lab announced in March 2017 that it had raised an additional US$75 million in a Series D equity round led by Data Collective with participation by Matthew Brown Companies and Promus Ventures as well as several previous investors. In May 2017, the investments of Callaghan Innovation was reported to total NZ$15 million. In November 2018, the company reported raising a US$150 million Series E round led by Future Fund. The first NASA mission, launched in 2018, was valued by the space agency at US$6.9 million .In 2018, Rocket Lab began to develop reusable first-stage technology, after previously stating publicly that they had no intention of attempting to recover and then reuse their small low-cost launch vehicles. They disclosed the effort to study the potential recovery of an Electron first stage in August 2019, aiming to use a parachute and mid-air retrieval, with a goal of a stage recovery attempt before mid-2020. In December 2019, they flight tested the reentry technology — a Rocket Lab proprietary aerothermal decelerator — on Electron flight number 10, and were able to decelerate the rocket and successfully bring it through the space-to-dense-atmosphere transition. They did not attempt to recover the rocket on this first test; but they planned to add guided parachutes to future test flights, to recover the booster by snagging the rocket with a helicopter in the lower atmosphere.In March 2020, the company announced that it had acquired Sinclair Interplanetary, a Canadian manufacturer of components for small satellites. Rocket Lab said that it will use Sinclair technology on its Photon line of small satellite buses, and that it would help Sinclair increase production of small satellite components for sale to other firms. Since then, Rocket Lab has launched a variety of missions with some or all of the payload being made by Sinclair Interplanetary.

Trading as a public company

In March 2021, the company announced that it was planning to go public through an initial public offering of stock in the second quarter of 2021. The company planned to accomplish the IPO through a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company called Vector Acquisition Corporation . The deal had been rumored and some details of the impending deal had leaked out the previous day in New Zealand news outlets. The merger was planned to value Rocket Lab at US$4.1 billion and provide the company with US$790 million in working capital in order to begin development of a new medium-lift two-stage-to-orbit launch vehicle called Neutron, aiming for the mega-constellation satellite deployment market. Neutron was planned to be partially reusable with the booster stage returning to land on an ocean platform, to be refurbished and launched again.Rocket Lab began trading on the Nasdaq on 25 August 2021 after it merged with SPAC Vector Acquisition, which valued Rocket Lab at $4.8 billion in equity, and the transaction added $777 million in gross cash proceeds. At the time of going public, Rocket Lab had over 500 employees and it had launched 105 satellites into orbit up to that point in time. Rocket Lab's launch business booked revenues of $13.5 million in 2018, $48 million in 2019 and an estimated $33 million in 2020. Rocket Lab expects to spend about $200 million of the cash gained from going public to develop its next-generation rocket Neutron. Rocket Lab aims to launch Neutron for the first time by 2024.As of August 2021, Rocket Lab intended to build a new factory in the U.S. to build the rockets as well as new launch infrastructure for Neutron at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Virginia. In October 2021, the company acquired Advanced Solutions, Inc , a Colorado-based spacecraft flight software company. In November 2021, the company acquired Planetary Systems Corporation , a manufacturer of satellite separation systems for $81.4 million. In January 2022, the company acquired SolAero, a supplier of space solar power products.On May 3, 2022, the company launched its Electron rocket from New Zealand, hoping to recover it for the first time. It was able to capture the falling rocket booster in mid air, a historic first. Beck later said that the booster was hanging improperly, so it was allowed to parachute into the water where it was pulled out by a ship.In August 2022, Rocket Lab revealed plans to become the first private company to reach Venus. The company is building a small probe, called the Venus Life Finder , with the ability to fly through Venus's upper atmosphere for roughly five minutes between 29 and 37 miles above the planets' surface. The target launch date aboard the Electron rocket is May 2023 with the goal of reaching Venus in October.