Rocket Lab is expanding its launch operations to the snowy north.
The California-based company, which already flies from New Zealand and Virginia, just inked a $266 million deal with the U.S. Space Force to fly up to 18 missile-defense missions, most of them from Alaska.
“The size and scale of this contract reflects the Space Force’s confidence in our ability to meet their urgent national security demands with speed, responsiveness and scale, and we’re proud to provide the high-frequency launch capacity required to keep the U.S. ahead of global threats,” Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck said in a statement today (July 27).
The contract covers 12 suborbital launches, with the possibility of up to six more. These missions “will primarily take place” from the Pacific Spaceport Complex, a picturesque site on Alaska’s Kodiak Island, which is most famous for its thriving population of brown bears.
The spaceport has hosted nearly three dozen missions since opening in 1998, most of them suborbital flights for the U.S. military. Recently, however, it has supported launches of private orbital rockets — specifically, those built by Astra and ABL Space Systems (now known as Long Wall).
The newly announced Rocket Lab missions will almost certainly be performed by HASTE, a suborbital variant of the company’s workhorse Electron small-satellite launcher that customers use to test hypersonic technologies in the flight environment.
They may also be part of the United States’ sprawling Golden Dome missile-defense initiative, though we don’t know that for sure; today’s release provides few details about the launches.
Rocket Lab’s primary launch site is on Māhia Peninsula, on the North Island of Peter Beck’s native New Zealand. The company also flies from two pads on Wallops Island, Virginia, one of which has been the jumping-off point for all HASTE suborbital launches to date.
HASTE debuted in June 2023 and now has nine missions under its belt. Electron lifted off for the first time in May 2017 and has flown 82 times to date.