Rocket Lab has proven to be more than a launch company. A quick glance at the company’s latest earnings presentation shows that its space systems business, which designs, manufactures and sells satellite components and spacecraft, will account for more than 70% of the company’s earnings compared to its 2022 launch. brought. Each.
The space systems business, which includes products such as star trackers, reaction wheels, photovoltaic systems and separation systems, also saw a significant increase in revenue with a 239% year-over-year increase. To meet this growing demand, the company announced last year that it was building new manufacturing capacity, specifically for reaction wheels.
The investment has paid off. Rocket Lab appears to have struck a deal to supply reaction wheels to an unnamed Mega Constellation customer. The company announced its new 12Nms Reaction wheel line in his February press release, which said the wheel is “currently planning to fly with an undisclosed large mega-constellation customer.” increase.
More recently, Rocket Lab CFO Adam Spice added more color to this statement, revealing that the deal is worth “thousands” of reaction wheels per year.
Speaking at Cowen’s 44th Annual Aerospace/Defense Industry Conference in February, Spice said: “This has allowed us to build a dedicated mass production facility in New Zealand, which has allowed us to bring the cost of these wheels down by almost an order of magnitude.”
At this Tuesday’s Bank of America event, Spice reiterated the enormity of the deal.
The company has not released the name of this customer and declined to comment on the matter to TechCrunch, citing commercial confidentiality reasons, but there are only a handful of possibilities known. . Amazon’s Project Kuiper is one of the leading contenders. However, Starlink seems unlikely, as SpaceX has indicated it wants to keep its production stack in-house as much as possible.
Rocket Lab lists a base price of $100,000 in the datasheet for their 12Nms reaction wheels. Of course, deals of this size often come with a discount on the price per unit (Spice acknowledged this, saying at the Cowen conference that the ASP of Mega Constellation Reaction Wheels has “dropped a lot”), It suggests a big win. Rocket Lab’s revenue and sources that may have doubled the company’s backlog last year: from $241 million to $503 million at the end of 2021.
