Rocket Lab CEO Interview on Neutron Rocket

A test of the Archimedes rocket engine intended to power Rocket Lab’s next-generation Neutron craft (Rocket Lab)

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.”

8/13/25 1:01PM

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.”

Tasha Matsumoto

The S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 notch new closing highs as investors shake off the government shutdown

The S&P 500 closed 0.3% higher, the Nasdaq 100 was up 0.5%, and the Russell 2000 gained 0.2%.

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Intel jumps on report of customer talks with AMD for foundry division

Intel shares popped in afternoon trading Wednesday after Semafor reported that it’s in preliminary talks for AMD to come aboard as a customer for Intel’s troubled contract chip manufacturing division, known as a foundry.

Shares were recently up 5.7%.

Semafor stressed that sources said, “It’s unclear how much of their manufacturing would shift to Intel if the two companies reach a deal, or whether it would come with a direct investment by AMD, similar to the deals cut by other companies. It is possible that no agreement will be reached, the people said.”

The addition of AMD — which competes with Intel in the CPU space — as a customer would be another big win for the US chipmaker following its partnership with Nvidia announced in mid-September.

TSMC, the primary manufacturer of AMD chips, was only briefly rattled by the news, and remains well in the green on the day.

Intel in early talks to add AMD as foundry customer

The addition of AMD — which competes with Intel in the CPU space — as a customer would be another big win for the US chipmaker following its partnership with Nvidia announced in mid-September.

TSMC, the primary manufacturer of AMD chips, was only briefly rattled by the news, and remains well in the green on the day.

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ChargePoint jumps as EV sales soar

Riding along with some other EV stocks, shares of ChargePoint jumped 4.1% in recent trading. The last rush to take advantage of Biden-era federal EV incentives has put a bunch of new electric vehicles on the road, sending ChargePoint up along with Tesla, Rivian, and Lucid.

Ford said earlier Wednesday that its EV sales hit a quarterly record, and it and other EV makers have been exploring unorthodox ways to replicate the EV tax credits for consumers through year-end.

Still, ChargePoint is down over 47% for the year and narrowly escaped NYSE delisting with a 20-for-1 reverse stock split back in July. And it’s not hard to see why: the company has never had a profitable quarter.

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Trump admin reportedly backs off on pharma tariffs

The Trump administration will not be imposing tariffs on pharmaceutical companies by the deadline it had initially given them, a White House official told STAT.

Last week, President Trump announced on Truth Social that starting on October 1, there would be a 100% tariff on patented, branded pharmaceuticals “unless a Company IS BUILDING their Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Plant in America.” As of October 1, those tariffs have not gone into effect and it’s unclear when they will, according to STAT.

Trump administration backs off 100% pharma tariffs threatened to start today

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GE Vernova declines after analyst downgrade of top AI energy trade

Power turbine maker GE Vernova is down midday after RBC analysts cut their rating on the stock from “outperform” (essentially a “buy”) to “sector perform” (essentially a “hold”), suggesting that long-term earnings expectations for the company might have gotten too optimistic.

RBC’s Christopher Dendrinos wrote:

“Our longer-term expectations are more conservative than consensus expectations which we think could be over appreciating the cadence of revenue growth in the power segment in 2029-2030. We believe investors are already fully valuing the company on the longer-term 2030 outlook and there could be more limited opportunity for positive rate of change in current expectations.”

Dendrinos argues that the Street’s expectations for when the river of payments will materialize from the service contracts GE sells to maintain the newly installed turbines is too soon. He wrote that it will take a much longer cycle:

“Mgmt sees an opportunity to double the installed base of baseload power over the next 10 years which should support significant rev growth and stronger margins (we estimate gas service margins over 30%).

However, the first major service cycle typically occurs ~3-4 years after installation so the benefit of service price increases and new LTSAs are unlikely to begin to benefit the income statement until later in the decade and will be a gradual increase.”

Earlier in the year, GE Vernova was a top performer as the AI data center trade boomed. It was up roughly 100% for the year in late July, making it the third-best gainer in the S&P 500 for the year.

It has stalled since then, though it remains up more than 80% in 2025.