Rocket Lab has proven that it is much more than a startup company. A look at the company’s most recent earnings presentation proves it: Its space systems business, which designs, manufactures and sells components for satellites and spacecraft, generated more than 70% of the company’s revenue compared to launch. in 2022, with $150.3 million compared to $60.7 million. respectively.
The space systems business, whose products include star trackers, reaction wheels, solar power systems, separation systems and more, also saw massive revenue growth, rising 239% year-over-year. To meet this growing demand, the company further announced last year that it was developing new manufacturing capabilities for reaction wheels, in particular.
The investment is paying off: Rocket Lab appears to have landed a contract to provide reaction wheels to an unnamed mega-constellation customer. The company said as much in a February press release announcing a new 12Nms reaction wheel product, saying the wheel is “currently planned to fly with a large undisclosed mega-constellation customer.”
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.
“We struck a deal with a mega constellation where there are thousands of reaction wheels per year and much larger reaction wheels,” Spice said at the 44th Annual Cowen Aerospace/Defense & Industrial Conference in February. “What it allowed us to do was build a dedicated high-volume production facility in New Zealand and we reduced the cost by almost an order of magnitude on those wheels.”
At a Bank of America event on Tuesday, Spice reiterated the enormity of the deal: “We landed a contract with a mega-constellation customer where we’ll ship two to three thousand reaction wheels per year to one customer.”
While the company has not publicly disclosed the name of this client, and declined to comment on the matter with TechCrunch, citing business sensitivity, there are only a handful of known possibilities. Amazon’s Kuiper Project is one likely candidate, and OneWeb’s growing network could be another. However, SpaceX has shown that it wants to stay in-house as much as possible for its production stack, so Starlink isn’t likely.
In its data sheet on the 12 Nms reaction wheel, Rocket Lab lists the base price at $100,000. Of course, in contracts of this size, the price per unit is often discounted (which Spice acknowledged, saying at the Cowen conference that the ASP for mega-constellation reaction wheels “came down quite a bit”), but it suggests a big profit. for Rocket Lab’s revenue and a possible source for the company’s order book doubling last year: from $241 million at the end of 2021 to $503 million.
