Rocket Lab Stock Is Up 230% — But the Real Story Starts in 2035

When Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket crosses the Kármán line somewhere over the Pacific, the telemetry briefly goes silent before the data resumes. During those moments, engineers in Mahia, New Zealand, hardly breathe. The company’s founder and CEO, Peter Beck, has spent the last 20 years transforming those gasping moments into a business and, more recently, into one of the more interesting and divisive stocks in the US market.

Over the past 12 months, Rocket Lab’s stock has increased by almost 230%. Most serious investors are stopped in their tracks by that figure alone. Since going public, the company has not reported a single profitable year. Hundreds of millions of dollars are lost.

Neutron, its next-generation rocket, continues to fall behind schedule. Despite this, the market capitalization is currently over $37 billion and continues to rise. What precisely are investors purchasing here? This is an important question to ask without resorting to the typical rhetoric.

It turns out that 2025 earnings are not the answer. Not even 2026 is here. Regardless of your opinion of the valuation, Beck has succeeded in completely changing the tone of the discussion, which is truly impressive. He has persuaded a significant portion of the investment community to focus on the orbital economy in 2035 and beyond rather than the revenue for the upcoming quarter. It’s not common to pull that off. The majority of CEOs find it difficult to persuade analysts to look past the upcoming earnings call.

With 64% of all non-SpaceX orbital U.S. launches, Electron, the company’s workhorse small-lift rocket, is already the second most launched U.S. rocket annually. That is an actual operational reality, not a statistic from a press release.

In a market dominated by one of the most powerful aerospace companies ever built, a small New Zealand company that operates launches from a remote peninsula has established a clear second place. It has an almost stubborn quality, but in a good way.

It gets really fascinating and a little dizzying in the larger math. The market for space launches is expected to grow from its estimated $21 billion in 2025 to nearly $70 billion by 2035. In the same time frame, the larger satellite market, which includes systems, components, and on-orbit management, may reach $780 billion. Satellite components and sensors currently account for 67% of Rocket Lab’s revenue through its Space Systems division.

Neutron is integrated into the supply chain of the very constellations it aspires to launch in the future, even before it has carried a single commercial payload. This type of strategic positioning doesn’t appear clearly in an income statement, which could be the reason why traditional valuation models continue to produce figures that irate bulls brush off as unimportant.

In both directions, neutrons are the rocket that keeps analysts awake at night. It is intended for the medium-lift market, which SpaceX currently serves almost exclusively. As a result, operators such as Amazon’s Project Kuiper, several governmental organizations, and commercial constellation builders are essentially structurally dependent on it.

Neutron will alter the competitive landscape in ways that are challenging to fully model if it functions and flies consistently. There is a real delay until late 2026, and it shouldn’t be ignored. There is literally no room for engineering error when building rockets, which makes the process extremely difficult. However, a delay does not equate to a cancellation, and it is important to keep in mind that for years, skeptics lined up to make fun of SpaceX’s timelines.

Even conviction investors have been alarmed by the recent volatility. Even though the company had recently secured a $190 million Pentagon contract covering 20 hypersonic test flights over four years using its HASTE vehicle, shares fell nearly 17% over the course of two trading sessions in late March 2026.

The stock fell to about $60.93—roughly 37% below its January peak of $96.30—after a new $1 billion at-the-market equity program added dilution concerns to geopolitical anxieties. Regardless of your time horizon, it is uncomfortable to watch that kind of drawdown happen, and anyone who claims otherwise is probably lying.

However, it’s difficult to ignore the backlog’s more consistent narrative. Demand is evident for about three years ahead, at $1.85 billion and growing 73% annually. Silently and without much fanfare, revenue per Electron launch increased from $7 million to over $10 million in a single year, indicating a pricing power that suggests the market for small-satellite launches isn’t softening.

In late March, the company also became a member of the FTSE All-World Index, which attracted passive fund inflows and expanded the shareholder base to include a new class of institutional holders.

Nothing is guaranteed by any of this. There is a long history of growth stocks in capital-intensive industries burning believers at the worst times. Rocket Lab’s $1 billion in liquidity is meant to get it through Neutron’s first flight, but that’s a small buffer in case delays worsen or the macroenvironment becomes unfavorable. It’s still unclear if the first serious competitor to SpaceX’s hegemony will be rewarded by the medium-lift market or if Falcon 9’s economics are just too solid to overcome swiftly.

Any serious discussion about RKLB gives the impression that investors are being asked to make a philosophical wager in addition to a financial one. Over the next 20 years, do you think orbital infrastructure will become truly fundamental to the global economy? Do you believe that a monopoly in medium-lift launch is a significant enough commercial and geopolitical issue to draw real capital to the person who breaks it?

If so, the current valuation of Rocket Lab begins to resemble early positioning rather than speculation. If not, then practically nothing about this company will satisfy you at this time, and that’s a perfectly reasonable position to take if you need profitability in the next eighteen months to justify a holding.

For years, Peter Beck has urged people to look farther than the majority of investors are taught to look. The question that RKLB shareholders ultimately have to deal with is whether the orbital economy he’s working toward arrives on time, runs late, or surprises everyone by arriving early. For the time being, the debate continues, the backlog continues to grow, and the rockets continue to fly.