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 2:01PM

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.”

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Luke Kawa11h

US job growth crushes estimates in March, with the unemployment rate unexpectedly dipping to 4.3%

US hiring surged in March, with job growth of 178,000 well ahead of estimates while the unemployment rate unexpectedly edged down to 4.3%.

Economists had anticipated non-farm payrolls growth of 65,000 for the month with the unemployment rate holding steady at 4.4%

Event contracts had presumed that job growth would come in between 70,000 and 80,000, a sunnier view than Wall Street.

Prediction markets had anticipated roughly 70% odds that the unemployment rate would hold steady at 4.4%, with a much higher implied likelihood of an increase versus a decrease.

(Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.)

S&P 500 equity futures, which were modestly negative ahead of the report in thin holiday trading, were little changed in the immediate aftermath of this release. Treasury yields jumped, with the 10-year yield rising to 4.35% from 4.31%.

The inflationary impact of the higher crude prices in the wake of US-Israeli attacks on Iran and the subsequent challenges shipping oil through the Strait of Hormuz has been the dominant macroeconomic development of the past month, rather than US labor market data.

Before the conflict began, roughly 60 basis points of easing by the Federal Reserve was priced in for 2026. Heading into this release, that’s slimmed to just 5 basis points as US gas prices jumped above $4 per gallon.

The Federal Reserve’s “dot plot” from the March meeting still suggests that officials think it will be appropriate to lower the policy rate this year if the economy unfolds in line with their expectations.

The February jobs report had been a big disappointment, with jobs unexpectedly contracting and the unemployment rate edging higher. With this release, the February figures were revised to show an even larger decline of 133,000.

Strikes which had weighed on employment in health care during February, a critical source of US employment growth in recent years, seemingly reversed. The industry accounted for more than half of net job growth for March.

Tasha Matsumoto

4/2/26

Stocks eke out gains on hopes for a path forward for reopening the Strait of Hormuz

Stocks rebounded on news that Iran is drafting a protocol with Oman to “monitor transit” through the crucial Strait of Hormuz.

Matt Phillips4/2/26

AI server cluster maker Penguin Solutions takes flight

Small-cap AI server cluster maker Penguin Solutions surged Thursday after posting better-than-expected Q2 revenue and profit numbers Wednesday after the close, along with an increase in full-year sales and profit guidance.

The company, which was known as Smart Global Holdings until July 2024, has positioned itself as a provider of “end-to-end AI infrastructure solutions.”

Its Advanced Computing division designs and sells computers, cabling, and cooling systems, the server racks and clusters of racks AI data centers need. Its other main division sells flash and DRAM memory products.

It’s a pretty small company, with a fully diluted market cap of just over $1 billion and roughly 2,900 employees, according to FactSet.

The stock is volatile. Penguin dove during last year’s tariff tantrum that followed “Liberation Day” in April. Then it turned tail and doubled through early October amid a surge of call options activity, which tends to reflect retail interest. From the October peak, it then plunged by about 50%, before Thursday’s renaissance.

For what it’s worth, call options activity in Penguin is pretty busy today, too — relatively speaking — with roughly 2,625 traded as of 1:15 p.m. ET. That’s the most since early January, when the company last reported quarterly numbers. The average volume over the previous 25 trading sessions is about 325 calls a day, FactSet data shows.

Penguin Solutions Stock Takes Off On AI Bolstered Outlook

The company, which was known as Smart Global Holdings until July 2024, has positioned itself as a provider of “end-to-end AI infrastructure solutions.”

It’s a pretty small company, with a fully diluted market cap of just over $1 billion and roughly 2,900 employees, according to FactSet.

Luke Kawa4/2/26

Momentum returns to optics stocks as the release valve for AI optimism

Potentially imminent end to the war? Buy optics stocks.

Maybe not? Buy optics stocks anyway.

Effectively all the juice left in the AI trade is coming from optics (and memory) stocks. And the latter group is taking a bit of a breather today while the former continues to surge.

Shares of Ciena Corp., Lumentum, and Coherent are building on recent big gains and among the biggest gainers in the S&P 500 near midday, while Applied Optoelectronics is also surging on Thursday.

These companies all provide solutions that help information move around in data centers, and thus are key beneficiaries of the aggressive capex plans of hyperscalers. Nvidia has invested $2 billion apiece in Coherent and Lumentum in deals that also include purchase commitments.

Matt Phillips4/2/26

Space stocks rip during a topsy-turvy day for the equity market

Satellite-services-from-space stocks surged Thursday after reports that Amazon is in talks to buy Globalstar, which provides voice and connectivity services from its satellite network. It also can’t hurt that the general mood around space is ebullient, following the successful launch of Artemis II on Thursday.

Planet Labs and ViaSat also soared on the news.

The gains for EchoStar — seen as a backdoor play at pre-IPO SpaceX exposure — and Rocket Lab were more muted, perhaps because a deep-pocketed competitor like Jeff Bezos getting serious about space services could complicate the plans of the two largest commercial space launch companies.

Rocket Lab and SpaceX see launch services as key to their aspirations of being major providers of voice and data services from low-Earth orbit satellites.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s SpaceX is the dominant provider of such services, and the early rumors on the company’s planned IPO — expected to be the largest ever — suggest the market is very excited about the prospects for the industry.

Elsewhere in the space stock world, Intuitive Machines — a maker of space infrastructure that provides services to NASA for lunar missions — also rose.

Globalstar surges after FT reports that Amazon is in talks to buy the satellite group

Rocket Lab and SpaceX see launch services as key to their aspirations of being major providers of voice and data services from low-Earth orbit satellites.

Elsewhere in the space stock world, Intuitive Machines — a maker of space infrastructure that provides services to NASA for lunar missions — also rose.

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