Rocket Lab CEO: Neutron still on track for 2025 launch
But Peter Beck warns, “There’s no fat in the schedule, so everything has to go according to plan.”
Rocket Lab is on track to launch its next-generation Neutron rocket later this year, CEO Peter Beck told Sherwood News in an interview Tuesday, but stressed that the timeline to launch remains incredibly tight.
“It’s a green light schedule and it’s a rocket program,” Beck said, using the engineering shorthand for a project that is currently on schedule. “We are pushing hard and, you know, we’ll do everything we can to get that vehicle away.”
A successful launch of Neutron — which has a larger payload that can deliver the constellations of low-orbit satellites increasingly used for commercial and government space applications — is the linchpin of Rocket Lab’s corporate strategy.
A successful Neutron launch would allow Rocket Lab to compete directly with Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which currently dominates the launch business.
The market seems to be betting that there’s a large, untapped demand for alternatives to Musk, whose erratic personal behavior, forays into global right-wing politics, and highly publicly rupture with President Trump might have put SpaceX’s lucrative space launch franchise at considerable risk.
Rocket Lab’s stock surged following the Musk-Trump breakup, adding to gains that have made the space company one of the stock market’s big winners over the last year.
Its rise of roughly 700% put it in the top 0.25% of all gainers in the Russell 3000 over that time period, though the shares have slipped a bit recently, after the company reported mixed earnings results last week.
We asked Beck whether there had been an uptick in interest from the US government since the Musk-Trump rupture.
“Both government and commercial partners and providers and customers are looking for launch diversity,” Beck said, adding, “I think there’s a general uneasiness that there’s really nobody that is competing with that class of launch vehicle, irrespective of whatever macro or minor political things are going on.”
But before Neutron can compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9, it has to get off the ground, a process that continues to burn cash and keep Rocket Lab in the red. (The company has never posted a quarterly profit.)
Rocket Lab is betting that once Neutron is up and running, that flow of red ink will quickly slow as R&D expenditures decline and the prices it can charge for Neutron launches with larger payloads will rise.
Beck said he was confident that the company has the financial resources to bridge the gap until that happens.
“Of all the things I worry about at night, customer demand and the financial health of the business are not the two things I’m worried about,” he said. “When we started off this program with Neutron, we said we’re going to spend somewhere between $300 million and $350 million, and we are bang on budget.”
