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Rocket Lab USA, Inc. RKLB

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You are paying about $39.5B for a rocket company that will do roughly $955M of revenue this year and lose money on every dollar of it, which is 41 times sales for a business that has never earned a profit.

Everything else in this memo is downstream of one binary: whether Neutron, the medium-lift rocket, flies when they say it will.

RKLB · price with moving averages

Daily · 6MWeekly · 3Y
$-8$33$74$114$155 Sep '23Apr '24Nov '24Jun '25Jan '26Aug '26 BID
EMAs82140

Source: market data.

The business

Rocket Lab does two things. It launches small satellites on Electron, a carbon-composite rocket about the height of a five-story building that has flown enough times to be routine, which in this industry is the whole achievement. And it sells space systems: satellite buses, solar arrays, star trackers, separation rings, the unglamorous hardware that goes inside other people's spacecraft. Space systems is now the larger line and it is the reason the revenue chart looks like a company rather than a science project.

Neutron is the third thing and the only one that matters to the price. It is a reusable medium-lift vehicle aimed squarely at the payload class SpaceX's Falcon 9 currently owns alone in the West. If it works, Rocket Lab is the second credible provider in a market with one seller. If it slips, this is a $955M revenue company valued like a $10B one.

Inside the complete Back of Napkin

  1. 01The business
  2. 02The numbers
  3. 03Management
  4. 04How it fails or surprises you
  5. 05The shape of the payoff
  6. 06Closing thoughts
  7. 07Methodology

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