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 techniques 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 techniques enterprise — whose merchandise embrace star trackers, response wheels, solar energy techniques, separation techniques and extra — additionally noticed an enormous progress in income, growing by 239% year-over-year. To meet this rising demand, the corporate additional introduced final yr 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 firm mentioned as a lot in a February press launch asserting a brand new 12Nms response wheel product, saying that the wheel is “currently planned for flight with an undisclosed large mega constellation customer.”
More just lately, Rocket Lab CFO Adam Spice added extra shade to this assertion, revealing that the deal is value “thousands” of response wheels per yr.
“We entered into an agreement with a mega constellation where it’s thousands of reaction wheels per year and much bigger reaction wheels,” Spice mentioned at Cowen’s forty fourth Annual Aerospace/Defense and Industrials Conference in February. “What that allowed us to do is build a dedicated high-volume production facility in New Zealand and we brought the cost down by almost an order of magnitude on those wheels.”
At a Bank of America occasion this Tuesday, Spice reiterated the enormity of the deal: “We secured a contract with a mega constellation customer where we’ll ship two or three thousand reaction wheels per year to one customer.”
While the corporate has not publicly disclosed the title 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 Project Kuiper is one doubtless candidate, and OneWeb’s rising community may plausibly be one other. SpaceX has demonstrated that it desires to remain in-house as a lot as attainable for its manufacturing stack, nonetheless, so Starlink isn’t doubtless.
In its information sheet on the 12Nms response wheel, Rocket Lab lists the bottom value at $100,000. Of course, on contracts of this dimension, the value per unit is usually discounted (which Spice acknowledged, saying on the Cowen convention that the ASP for the mega constellation response wheels “came down quite a bit”), nevertheless it suggests an enormous win for Rocket Lab’s revenues and a attainable supply for the doubling of the corporate’s backlog final yr: from $241 million on the finish of 2021 to $503 million.