Okay, I think we are officially counting down and are back on the stage. Is this the final presentation slot of the day? Okay, good. So we're batting clean up here. I have the pleasure of welcoming to the stage the team from Rocket Lab, CFO Adam Spice and , in the Investor Relations team. I think, Colin, why don't you open it up with the regulatory stuff to keep everybody in the loop?
Always fun. Sure. Today's discussion may contain forward-looking statements. All statements are based on Rocket Lab's current expectations and beliefs and may involve risks and uncertainties which are beyond Rocket Lab's control. Actual results may differ from those expressed by today's statements. Factors could cause actual future events to differ materially from the forward-looking statements in today's presentation.
Colin, I was just reminded of back when I was a kid. I don't know if this guy is still doing it, but there's this really deep baritone voice that comes over and does the voiceovers on movie trailers. You sounded exactly like that.
My teacher.
I don't think they do that anymore, right? They show you pretty much the entire movie now, right?
So.
Yeah, my wife and I always joke that we stop watching the trailer halfway through because we don't want to see the end of the movie by the time, right? Anyway, I digress. Adam, thanks for joining us.
Thanks for having us.
You know, look, right out of the gate, I want to congratulate you and the team for a couple of big milestones here for the company. In the last, I don't know, six, eight weeks, maybe, maybe we go back eight or nine weeks now, so you announced there at the end of the year a pretty large contract with the US government and offers up a really nice positive proof point for customer adoption of the things that you all are doing. I want to get into that in a little bit. As well, you did a financing that I think provides plenty of runway for the company. It's going to let you kind of accomplish what you all have set out to do here, which is, you know, pull together a couple of really interesting businesses inside, or underneath the hood of Rocket Lab.
So why don't we start with, maybe we start with the financing and, kind of what you think that that really enables the company. Well, you know what? Actually, let's step back. Why don't you talk to us a little bit about what, what are the problems you're trying to solve for the world, how you're approaching solving for those things, and then talk a little bit about how this recent financing is going to enable you to do that? How, how do we frame it that way?
Sure. Yeah. That's a good idea. So I would say that, you know, what we're really trying to solve for is providing an end-to-end one-stop solution for space services to the economy. And the way that we do that is we've taken, you know, an initial beachhead position in small dedicated launch. And, you know, as many people are probably going to appreciate, you know, launch is the hardest part of the ecosystem. Nothing is easy in space. Building satellites is not easy. Operating an orbit is not easy. Capturing images or transferring data is not easy. But launch is definitely, you know, we view as the hardest part of participating in the space ecosystem.
But now that we've done that, we've had 44 launches of our Electron launch vehicle, which is by far and away, the dominant, you know, small dedicated launch vehicle in the market. We then kind of took, took an eye towards, well, what are all the pieces that have to come together to enable a true end-to-end space play that really doesn't exist today? And we've gotten very consistent feedback from our customers, particularly government customers, that are saying, "Hey, look, we, we want to have a partner that can really service our needs from concept to orbit." And so that's resonated with us. And, you know, Pete's initial vision for the business was never to be just a launch company.
In fact, he designed Electron in such a way where it would be, you know, leveraged in a way where you can actually put a payload on orbit, after you've delivered a payload for a customer. So the size of the rocket, its architecture and everything around it was designed to kind of kill two birds with one stone. But now we're taking that further. And we've gone out and said, "Okay, well, when you step back and look, what are you going to need to be that full end-to-end provider?" Launch, we have solved at least on the small side. We're working on the medium launch with Neutron. But as we were developing our Photon family of spacecraft, you know, we realized that there were certain elements of the supply chain that were going to gate our ability to really create a scaled business.
And so we basically took a strategic review of a satellite and literally kind of looked, broke it apart, said, "Okay, well, what are the key subsystems that we really need to own?" And that included things like, you know, attitude direction control components like reaction wheels and star trackers and sun sensors that had a one-year or longer wait time to get your parts. And then the software that basically does all the coordination, so the command and control of those components that do the overall tasking of the satellites for pointing and stabilization and so forth. And then we realized, you know, you can build a great rocket and have a great satellite, but if it doesn't separate properly from your rocket, then all's lost. So we bought a company that does the separation systems.
And then after that, we looked and said, "Well, what's the next most expensive part of a satellite offering aside from payload?" And it's the solar. So we went, we bought a solar company called SolAero, which was one of three major space-grade solar providers in the world. And so all of that kind of goes together to provide, you know, the ability to build exquisite things in-house. So we then said, "Okay, well, not only do you have to build stuff, but you have to, there's a lot of IP that needs to be generated to be able to do really sophisticated things on orbit." And so we started choosing satellite design opportunities or contracts that would teach us something, and our customers would pay for us to learn. So that's essentially what we've done is we've gone out and we've acquired a bunch of key subsystems.
We've developed other key subsystems in-house. We've executed on some pretty big programs that allow us to prove that we can build things that can operate in really harsh environments under stringent, you know, conditions. Really all that's missing now from the grand scheme of things is kind of fleshing out some more of those key subsystems and on the bus, also put some payload kind of capabilities in play, but then also develop that end-market application. So I would say, you know, it feels like we're several innings into this game. What this capital raise really allowed us to do was to go exercise some of those gaps in our portfolio and capabilities.
You know, I think we're pretty aggressive in the fact that, you know, we've acquired four companies, which is a lot for a young company, three after just coming public. But there are some other tuck-ins that we need to go address. And so this raise really allows us to do that. This capital raise was never focused on supporting the existing business of scaling Electron and getting Neutron to the pad and executing on the Space Systems contracts we have. It was all about bringing new capabilities. And, you know, we had to make sure that we could execute on that commitment that we made in coming public to get Neutron to the pad.
And so we were reluctant to go out and kind of continue to exercise some of these inorganic things that would accelerate our ability to kind of flesh out the portfolio. So this really frees us up to be able to do that.
Mm-hmm. Okay. Great. The gaps that you're talking about and the tuck-ins that you'd like to do are going to be more on the spacecraft side of things?
Yeah. So I think it's really going to be more on, you know, there's a couple key subsystems in the bus that we still work with third parties on that we would like to have a little bit more control over. And then, of course, you know, we currently don't have any payload capabilities. So payload is going to be one of those. It's more of a greenfield opportunity for us to really start building some capabilities there to, you know, when we either are a sub for the bus, have as many pieces for that, or the prime, or we pull it all together, you know, again, we're just looking to extinguish or retire any risks to these pinch points where, you know, either time or cost are going to be, you know, very important to delivering the program.
Mm-hmm. Payload is a pretty, you know, vague word to use, I guess, right?
Yep.
Because that can mean a lot of different things. Are there any particular kind of mission sets that you think where you're seeing a lot of demand where, you want to make sure you're well positioned?
Well, you know, I think that it's true. In every space vertical, there's kind of multiple branches to those, right? So you think about the fact on with Earth observation, you've got optics.
Optical, yeah.
You've got SAR. You've got SIGINT. You've got lots of different ways to play that, to play those various markets. In the comm side, you've got, you know, probably even more, different flavors or paths you can go down, whether it's, you know, direct to mobile, broadband communications, you know, backhaul for government and enterprise customers. So it's a very broad area. So we haven't nailed that down yet as to exactly what subvertical that we're going to focus on. Right now, we've got our hands full, executing on the big programs that we have in-house today, which include, you know, the MDA Globalstar contract that's addressed at supporting, you know, direct to mobile.
And then this new SDA Beta program, which brings a different level of functionality in which we're dealing with other folks to provide the payload on that.
Mm-hmm. Okay. Great. So as we think about, you know, the next couple of years after this refinancing, what comes out or not refinancing, this financing exercise, what investors are likely to see and what they should expect then are, you know, a few M&A announcements over time to add some capabilities into that. Will they immediately follow those kinds of things? Will we see, you know, some more contracts following new awards, that kind of thing? Or is this kind of enabling you to go execute on what you currently have on your plate?
I think it just gives us more confidence and kind of self-determination when it comes to executing on contracts that we could probably get anyway. But it really allows us to get a bigger share of wallet as well, right? So you can one thing that we found is it's been very effective for us as we've acquired these capabilities where you eliminate margin stacking in the model, right? And so you can bring forward a much more cost-competitive solution. And also just as you're, you know, as you've spent time, you know, in the industry as well, it's like it's a there's a lot of things that have to line up, a lot of stars that have to align, you know, no, no pun intended, on, on a on a program. And they're all incredibly complex.
You know, if you have as much of, you know, the more that you have under one roof, the better chance you have of everything coming together at the right time and in the right way. So it's really all about control. And control is really a function of, again, getting your customer comfort that they're going to get what they contracted for on time and on cost and with the performance that you committed to. So, it's really all about risk elimination. And with that risk elimination, we think market share is going to accrue to us because there aren't that many people that I'm really aware of in the news arena that have the capabilities that we have today, never mind what we're going to have, you know, once we've exercised some of this war chest.
The biggest piece of that is really launch. Again, launch, we view as the hardest piece to get right. And, you know, I think that the days of funding kind of new launch startups is largely behind us. I mean, we still see some financings kind of, you know, that get disclosed. But, you know, it's we scratch our heads like, well, what do they really is they really think there's still a window for that? Because we think that the launch game is so competitive and it's so capital-intensive. And, you know, heritage, like everything in space, is super important. So, we think that that window for kind of new entrants into launch is for the most part, you know, probably closed, at least for now.
Maybe we'll put a finer point on my question, if you don't mind. Just do you need to go out to some acquisitions here to be able to execute on some of the contracts that you've already signed up?
No. Absolutely not.
Okay.
Yeah. We've got everything that we need to execute on the contracts that we have. Could we execute perhaps, again, better?
Yes.
Yes, we could. And then there are still opportunities given the long duration of these contracts that we sign up for where we can still intercept some of those opportunities with some of the acquisitions that we see out there as doable.
Right. And maybe to double-click on this contract that you just signed with the SDA, is it, you know, fair to characterize it as kind of a Firm-Fixed-Price program, right?
It's a Firm-Fixed-Price program.
Firm-Fixed-Price program. How much development work, kind of new, you know, new stuff you're doing on this program is there at this point? Because, as you're probably increasingly becoming aware, the investment community is, you know, they, they're becoming less constructive on Firm-Fixed-Price development programs. So just kind of walk us through what the risk profile looks like on this one.
Yeah. Fortunately for this, you know, if you look at the backlog of spacecraft that we have and the contracts that we've been executing on over the last several years, they're not trivial programs. I mean, there's pretty sophisticated ones, including there's a couple satellites that we're executing on for NASA that are going to map the magnetic poles of Mars, right? We've done some pretty sophisticated developments for the MDA constellation needs there. And so we're able to leverage a lot of the IP that we've developed for these other programs towards this SDA contract. There certainly is more R&D to come. But I would say it's not as heavy an R&D lift as pretty much anything that's come before it.
So we've now actually got our IP portfolio and kind of, you know, inventory of capabilities and subsystems to the point where a lot of that work has been done. Because some of the things that were really complicated to do, like, for example, when you look at the Globalstar MDA program, that required us to develop some IP that could survive in some pretty harsh radiation environments, have longer lives on orbit than a typical small satellite, you know, constellation. So those things have really kind of allowed us now to kind of take those technologies and leverage them across things like SDA. So I think we'll benefit a lot from the legacy R&D that we've done over the last two years.
But there will be still a not trivial amount of R&D for new capabilities because this is a you know a different platform for us than we've done before. And I think that you know what this program does and we try to be very strategic in only taking on work that ultimately leads us to a point where we can put it to work for our own benefit for our own infrastructure on orbit down the road where we want to own applications. And so this program is no different. But again it will carry forward a lot of kind of R&D value or leverage that we've done on prior programs.
Mm-hmm. And the, you mentioned that you will be hiring the payload from somebody else.
Yep.
Have you named the partner yet on that?
I don't believe we've named the payload provider.
Okay. That's fine. Do they have to go out and develop something new, or is this something that they've already done before?
I believe there is some R&D that's got to be brought across the line on that program as well. But it's one where, you know, from our engagement both with the end customer plus the subsystem vendor, you know, we're very comfortable that there's a you know high level of commitment from the government customer to get that technology across the line because it's very strategic.
Okay. And do you know off the top of your head PDR and CDR, what the dates are on that?
Well, we won't release all of that data. But essentially, you could think about 2024 as really kind of closing out the remaining R&D elements. And then we start to kind of go more into the actual kind of manufacturing side of things in kind of, I would say, the H1 of 2025 with payloads being launched in 2027. And that'll be bid out separately under the NSSL program. And of course, you know, we, you know, we'll put our hat in the ring on that with Neutron. So the timing actually might work out pretty well for that.
Right. Right. Yeah. I want to get to the timing on some of this in a moment. So talking about, if you're willing and able at this point to talk about kind of the rev rec, I think this program in particular is going to be, you know, percent complete basis, right?
Correct.
So we start out probably slow, and then we go up, and then we plateau for a while, and then we come down. Is that kind of the right way to think about it?
Yeah. No, that's exactly right. So, you know, Rocket Lab has a mix of different revenue recognition models. So we have some products that, you know, if you look at launch, it's point in time. So we don't recognize any revenue until we hit the intentional ignition, on the launch. For some of our spacecraft components that we sell into the merchant market, those are ship and bill. And then our larger programs, like, again, MDA Globalstar, now the, the SDA program, those are cost of completion, as you mentioned. And yeah, they typically start off pretty modest on the front end and then move much more kind of into, into, into sizable revenue recognition when you actually start receiving subsystems from your vendors and start assembling things together.
So you would expect, you know, some, I would say, some minor revenue contribution from, for example, the SDA beta contract in 2024, but not too, too interesting in 2024. But will, you know, much more in 2025 and 2026. And then, you know, we, not unlike the other programs that we've secured, we actually have the on-orbit management contract that'll go on for a period of time after that, but on a much smaller scale.
Yeah. Yeah. And not that there's a peak for one particular quarter, but I, I suspect the way that'll go, it'll go up and then plateaus for a little while. But do you have a sense of, you know, half-year when we get up to that higher level of revenue? So just trying to figure out how we model this particular program.
Yeah. I think we'll get more much more clarity on that as we progress through the design phase and get through a few of those CDR, PDR kind of phases. But I would, I would suspect that, you know, we'll have as we exit 2024, we'll have a pretty granular view of kind of what the quarterize kind of rev ramps look like in 2025, 2026, and 2027.
Okay.
Yeah.
Great. Yeah. Because we're, we're going to screw the modeling up unless you guys kind of help us out on that one. I took a stab at it, but I have no idea if I'm anywhere in the ballpark.
Well, what's helpful for us is the fact that we do have that diversity of rev rec in our model overall and the fact that, you know, we've built a fairly diversified business now between launch at roughly a third of our revenue, which in and of itself is a pretty lumpy business because it's very by the definition, it's event-driven business. And in that business, you know, we're very much at the mercy of our customers showing up with their payloads on time. Because you can have a whole, you know, raft of rockets lined up. And if the customer, you know, fails in TVAC, then things push out. And so we've experienced some of that over the years. But as you get a more fulsome backlog or manifest, that starts to kind of.
Hopefully, you don't see it as much.
As much, right? Yeah. And then on the 2/3 of the business that is space systems, you know, again, we've got a nice mix of component business into the merchant market. And then we have the, you know, these more programmatic things that you can really start to get confidence in. As long as you're confident in your execution and you've got a good control over what your, your, your subsystem vendors are doing, because under that cost to complete, you're also at the mercy of their ability to deliver to you on time. So, you know, this is one of those things where, you know, there's lots of reasons not to sleep so well at night as a CFO of a rocket company or space company. That just adds to the many, many reasons why.
Right. Okay. Yeah. But to be clear, I mean, this is a big contract for you all that essentially doubled your backlog in that business. So we're going to see it in the numbers.
Absolutely.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, Colin, you just have to keep us all honest on our models.
Sure.
So let's just step back for a second. So what we've accomplished here this afternoon is understanding, you know, what this financing is going to go toward. It's, you know, it sounds like it's largely going to be focused on, you know, M&A to fill out some capability gaps that you think you'd like to have. It allows you to have greater control over your own destiny. Don't need it to execute on current programs, but would be nice to have in maybe some cases to execute on your current programs. I suspect that you'll want to go buy things that you think are going to allow you to go win new business, right? So you probably have a nice pipeline there. So why don't we just okay. That all sounds great.
Let's maybe talk a little bit about then the launch business, kind of where we are with Electron. We had a failure last year. You were back up and running in a pretty short period of time. You got some learnings out of that. You know, maybe for those that are a little less familiar, maybe just kind of really quickly walk us through what happened, what did you learn on Electron. And then I think as you answer, you know, spend two seconds on that and then really just kind of go right into then what the manifest looks like here in 2024 and the visibility that you have out in 2025 and in 2026. I know you're kind of capacitizing to maybe do as many as 25, 30 launches a year.
You know, how long can we operate at 25-30 launches on that Electron product?
Sure. Yeah. So, you know, every anomaly is tough. I mean, you hope to never experience one. Unfortunately, I've been around for 43 launches now of Electron and experienced 3 anomalies. This one, you know, was just a really bad set of, you know, things that shouldn't happen but did happen, you know, together. We were able to mitigate, you know, well, first of all, we identified the root cause relatively quickly. The FAA gave us a return to flight authorization relatively quickly. And then we took a little bit of a little more time to, to make sure that we had the mitigations to the point where we had high confidence in those. And now we've been back to the pad successfully and feel comfortable with what we've done there.
So really, when you think about the Electron kind of roadmap over the next several years, it's all about just, you know, kind of increasing the cadence. Because cadence is Electron's best friend when it comes to margin expansion. There's really a few things that will drive margin expansion there and get us towards our, our longer-term target of, you know, roughly 50% non-GAAP gross margin. And cadence is the most important because it's all about fixed cost absorption. And when you operate things like, you know, launch sites that you control, you know, those are costs that, that continue whether you're launching, you know, one, two, five, six times in a quarter. So cadence is super important. Reusability is important as well. So we've returned, I believe, seven boosters now from space. Every time we do that, we've learned a tremendous amount.
I don't know if folks have seen some of the pictures and videos from the most recent recovery mission, but the booster looked incredibly good. So that actually represents the what we think and hope is the final block upgrade for reusability for Electron. And I think, again, what came back from space is pretty. It confirms that we think we've done what we needed to do to get the vehicle back in really great shape. So now it's just a matter of kind of, you know, testing the vehicle. You know, there's a lot of things. You test the engines. You do hydrostatic tests on the tanks to make sure everything is ready to fly again. So that's going to be probably over the course of the next few months. It's going to get a lot of focus.
But of course, once you have a reusable booster, it can bring pretty significant benefits to your margin expansion as well because no longer like this year, we have a manifest of 22 launches. So we're building 22 rockets, right? But I think if you flash forward to, you know, the next couple of years where you've got high confidence in reusability, then, you know, you're building a much smaller, you know, set of those. And you can either kind of redeploy or kind of reduce your resources accordingly. I think given the kind of resources that we have, you know, it just will happen to coincide with the ramp-up of Neutron, which is also a reusable vehicle, but we'll need a lot of resources to kind of get that production rate where we need to be over the next several years.
So we've actually sized the business and the infrastructure for Electron to be able to launch up to 50 times per year. So one vehicle per week. Since we control our own range in New Zealand, we've got plenty of capacity there. There's very little air traffic to clear. So, and then with our Wallops pad, you know, we've got now redundancy across continents. And we can support our government customers much more conveniently out of, out of Wallops, Virginia. So we think that business has a kind of significant headroom as far as growth is concerned. You know, we, we think that, you know, we've never designed our business plan to need to launch weekly. We've modeled out over the next several years where we think that can get into kind of the mid-30s type of launches per year.
And we think the market is plenty robust to support that kind, particularly as we've seen competition just pretty much evaporate, right? And we had, you know, competition like Astra and Virgin Orbit and, you know, the Relativity of the world and ABL and Firefly. And, you know, I think what it's shown is how difficult it is to do. I mean, people think that a small rocket might be easier than a large rocket. And in a lot of ways, what we found is actually small rockets are harder to do than large rockets because they're less forgiving. Particularly when you think about recovery and, you know, re-entering without using propulsive, you know, landing, it's we don't have that benefit, right? We have to do things very differently.
And also, when you're talking about a business where you have roughly an $8 million average selling price, it doesn't necessarily mean that you need fewer flight safety people just because the rocket's smaller, right? Or fewer GNC people because, you know, the modeling for flight doesn't really care if the rocket is a 15-ton rocket or a 300 kg rocket. So you've got to find clever ways to eke out margins on a much smaller ASP. So we think what we're doing that's really going to shine and come through is with Neutron because we're going to be able to take all of those learnings and all those clever efficiencies that we figured out how to do on Electron and apply those to a much higher average selling price for Neutron, much like a Falcon 9, and deliver much more attractive margins than people have seen in the past.
Right. So as we think about the next couple of years, 22 on the manifest this year, you're thinking mid-30s potentially.
Over the next several years.
Yeah. Because I'm not going to nail you down on a particular year. Yeah. But so Neutron starts to feather in. What does that, what does that do? We begin to cannibalize some of the demand for Electron, as Neutron feathers in? And do you care?
No. It's a good question. I think that, they're very different vehicles. So if you think of what Electron is really great at, it's doing kind of bespoke, really, you know, you need custom, you know, very precise insertion, for your, for your payloads. And really, if you think about, you know, yes, you can look at a Transporter or Bandwagon type of offering where they're putting hundreds, you know, of satellites on a, on a larger launch vehicle. That we've just heard back from our customers is really not it. I mean, they'll if it can be utilized, they'll utilize it. And, you know, what really if you, if you compare Neutron is really a constellation deployer at the end of the day, right? And Electron is not that. Yeah. So Electron will still be there for these small, exquisite kind of dedicated launch needs.
Neutron is going to come in and basically provide that constellation deployment capability, which is also important because right now we're building these constellations and then they're launching on SpaceX, right? So we don't like that, right? So we want to keep kind of it all in the family, if you will. So that's really what Neutron brings to the table. Of course, it also has other capabilities. It's, you know, longer term, the potential for doing, you know, things like ISS resupply and even human flight and so forth. So I think there's a lot of places that we can take that vehicle. And if you think about, you know, it's been a pretty audacious program.
I mean, when we came public, you know, two and a half years ago and told people we were going to build a, you know, a 13-ton reusable launch vehicle within three years for at or around $300 million, they're like, well, that's never been done before. You can't do that. And as it turns out, that's exactly what we're doing. And we're kind of knocking down the milestones along the way, to get there. And, you know, we still have the, you know, the target of getting, you know, Neutron to the pad by the end of this year, which again, if you know, if we can do that, it'll be an unbelievable accomplishment compared to what other vehicles have taken to get to that point.
Right. Right. First flight, Q4 this year. That'll be done out of New Zealand.
Goal? Get it to the pad? But nope, that's not.
Oh, get it to the pad.
At Wallops.
Okay. Yeah. So, get it to. You're emphasizing getting it to the pad. Tell me, what's that about?
Getting it to the pad could be getting you the pad and launching or getting you the pad and then launching shortly thereafter.
Okay. Got it.
So it's all ballparking.
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, with a rocket program, like you can have one day that can either confirm that you're absolutely on track and maybe even ahead of schedule or it could be disastrous and can set you back quite a ways. That's all, again, part of the excitement that allows you to, you know, not sleep well.
Right. Right. So we think about STA doing a lot of these, constellations, right? We've got Globalstar. We've got Telesat, OneWeb. Well, I guess OneWeb's done.
Kuiper.
Yeah. Kuiper, exactly. Lots got to get launched in the H1 of the year, H1 of the decade, excuse me. So it seems like this Neutron rocket is really well-timed, to meet potentially meet all of that demand.
We think so. And we've built relatively kind of, I would say, modest ramps into the, you know, to the cadence of Neutron. And part of that's because it's informed by our history, right? So we have the benefit of having done this a lot of times with the vehicle, developing a new program and doing the block upgrades to get increased performance. So if you look at like just an example of, you know, Kuiper, for example, they went their first batch of launch procurement was like, I think, 85 launches across three different providers. Yeah. And in our model, we assume we launch, you know, end of this year and then next year we launch, you know, maybe three times and then maybe the next year we launch eight times.
So it's not like we're planning some explosive, like we're going to be launching this thing, you know, 50 times within, you know, by year three or something like that. But we think there could be, you know, dramatic upside to the kind of opportunity set, which, you know, again, we'd have to evaluate kind of the incremental investment to support that much more significant cadence.
Right. Yeah. So, okay. So you're doing 30-some-odd Electrons. You are fully ramped on, you know, your STA contract roughly in this time period that we're talking about, right? Are we becoming self-financing so that you could, you know, if the demand is there, can you, you know, we have the cash flow available to go feed that CapEx to ramp up those Neutron launches?
I think for the most part, I think that, you know, it depends if you get a demand signal back from, for example, your government customer or a large commercial constellation, you know, I know you're planning on launching eight times in 2027. You know, we'd like to take 12 launches ourselves. Yeah. That might cause us to go put some more, you know, some more capital to another pad at Wallops, for example. Right, or to put a little bit more productive capacity in the ground around the manufacturing side of things.
But I will say, you know, much like Electron where we have the ability to build 50, you know, plus vehicles per year with our existing footprint and the existing, you know, equipment, we were very fortunate in the timing last year when we acquired the Virgin Orbit assets out of bankruptcy. And so we have a lot of capacity for engines and avionics out of Long Beach. So, one of our buildings in Long Beach builds avionics and propulsion for both Electron and for Neutron with a tremendous ability to scale. So we don't need any more space for propulsion or avionics. We just took a lease not that long ago on a large facility in Middle River, Maryland to make the large-scale composites. So the first couple of Neutrons are being hand-laid up in both the US and in New Zealand.
But going forward, we have the, you know, high, you know, capacity automated fiber replacement machine and all those capabilities at Middle River. So I think we've got good footprints pretty much everywhere. The only thing, again, that might need more capability would be more investment in final integration facilities at Wallops and perhaps a second pad at Wallops. But if you put a second pad there, hopefully we could leverage a lot of the infrastructure that we're building for the first pad, like the deluge and the tank farm, all that kind of stuff.
Yeah. Just a few cement trucks.
A few cement trucks. Yeah. But yeah. So I think that we always kind of think forward and say, okay, well, let's what if the demand signal is much stronger than we've kind of built into our base case? Will we be able to basically flex and go address that? And I think for the most part, yeah. I mean, with beta in full swing and so forth, we should be able to hopefully self-finance that. But if the opportunity was big enough, then we could go back to the investors and ask for more kind of expansion capital.
Yeah. Or if you're getting, you know, debt financing at that point would be back in the picture if you've got some cash flows going, right? Okay. So let's talk a little bit about, you know, sources of demand across both businesses, you know, for the next five years, right? I mean, to go out beyond that, I think, is exercising futility from a predictability perspective, right? But I think, look, the next five years we have a pretty good line of sight, particularly in this long cycle kind of that we're in. So, you know, you've got a mix of business today between, you know, government work and commercial work. What's the next five years look like? We changing much, in that mix?
I think it's going to look pretty similar but just scaled up. I mean, I think, you know, we always like to see a healthy mix of government business there because of the predictability of it. You know, and Colin can speak to some of the government budget dynamics. He's much more familiar with that than I am. But if you look at, you know, the predictability of that, matched with the hockey stick opportunity on the commercial side, that's really kind of what we want to keep. You know, you don't want to kind of put all your eggs in the commercial hockey stick, you know, basket. But at the same time, you kind of want to, again, have some balance so you have some predictability so you don't go through these boom-bust cycles.
But I think now that we've established ourselves as a, you know, a US government prime, we think the size of opportunities continues to get larger in front of us. So we have a pipeline of very attractive opportunities both commercially and on the government side. And with on the government side, you know, more and more high-value, important, classified strategic types of programs. So we think we're going to see more and more of that work coming our way over time. But those things typically take longer to germinate. And, you know, they're a little bit different in nature and the terms are quite different sometimes than a commercial contract. But, you know, right now we think we've struck the right balance. If you really kind of look at our business today, you know, we have quite a bit of "commercial" in the mix.
But if you kind of peel that onion back, those commercial customers are ultimately selling to the US government. So if you think about the Capella's and the BlackSky's and the HawkEye 360s, you know, a lot of that is really backed by government programs. So I think that, you know, it'll be a while before you get true commercial opportunities that become kind of a real significant piece of the mix.
Right. Yeah. That makes sense. Very good to hear because I think, you know, my, my thesis on investing in space is that you've got to go find people that are supplying to the government because those are the guys with the budgets and the enduring mission need, for these kinds of, of spacecraft and missions just generally speaking. Yeah. So that's good, good to hear. I want maybe just a quick follow-up on that then. So, I think there's a press release out today talking about an NRO mission that you're going to be doing here shortly.
Yep.
You talk a little bit about on the launch side in particular, you know, start there, kind of where you are in this journey in becoming kind of a national security launch provider.
Yeah. So, you know, from the very beginning with Neutron, we knew that it was going to be important for that to have, you know, a lot of government support, because, you know, we're, we don't, you know, we don't subscribe to the kind of the, the build it and they will come approach, right? So along those lines, we secured a $24 million development contract with US Space Force to help build the upper stage of Neutron. So we very much went into this with the customer helping define what their requirements are. And I think we're also kind of at a unique point in, in the supply on the launch side where you've got one company, you know, SpaceX is such a dominant, you know, kind of, you know, force in that market.
You're now, you know, it's encouraging that you see, you know, ULA's Vulcan vehicles flowing, which is great. So we think that, you know, that there's going to be room for multiple providers and, you know, actually by law, there has to be multiple providers. So we think we're poised to come in and really offer something different. If you look across, you know, SpaceX, ULA, Blue, their ownership structures and kind of their motivations and like that, they're very different than what we bring. None of them bring, what we think, is that end-to-end solution for that government customer. We've actually had the government customer say, "Look, we want somebody who can take our program from soup to nuts," right? So from concept, design the satellite, build the satellite, launch the satellite, operate the satellite, right? That's really what we want.
We're really now the first company that's really in a position to exploit that, right, in a meaningful way. I think that's really gives us confidence that we're building the right product at the right time. It's got the customer's requirements well kind of embedded in its design.
I do wonder, though, whether, you know, if SpaceX decided that they wanted to, I mean, they're making space today, right? I know that they're not making bespoke product for government customers. They're doing it for themselves. But I would think that they have got that capability set, maybe.
Oh, yeah. Never underestimate SpaceX. I think, and we don't. I mean, when that's your primary, you know, competitor, again, it makes for a few sleepless nights. But, right now it seems like their focus is Starlink, right? That's really their path. And I think if they were to decide or they get that well in hand and they've got the cycles to go kind of dedicate resource elsewhere, I suspect that if it's not after Starlink, it might be Mars or something else, right, rather than doing, you know, other.
That's the ultimate goal there, I think, right, with those guys.
Yeah. We all try to figure that out.
Yeah. So going back to the national security launch. So you're doing, is this NRO thing considered national security launch that you're about to do? What would you consider that?
Well, I think these smaller launches for the NRO, I don't think they're necessarily considered under the NSSL program. But yeah, obviously, you know, we're, we're very, very kind of dialed into kind of what it's going to be, what it's going to take to succeed in bidding for those NSSL programs. And we've got a lot of effort behind it. So, we've been fortunate that we've, this is our, I believe it's our fifth mission for NRO. Yeah. And we've flown for NASA and we've flown for Space Force. So all of those customers that we've done outside of NSSL really gives us that relationship kind of point with those customers. I think trust is super important with those customers, right? And so they've had nothing but incredibly positive experiences with us launching their, their solutions.
So, I mean, everything that we see is a very eager customer to get us into the fray. And they've been kind of, you know, helping us do that.
Yeah. I think you've done NRO from New Zealand as well.
We've done NRO from New Zealand as well. So yeah. So we were the, I believe, the first ones to launch national security payloads outside of or not on US soil. And so a lot of that was enabled by the, the treaty that was put in place between New Zealand and the US and that whole Five Eyes Alliance. So, actually we're seeing now that, that our New Zealand launch, even though, you know, we have no plans to launch Neutron out of New Zealand, all the launches right now are planned out of, out of the US and particularly Wallops. Having that strategic launch capacity in, like, the South Pacific, you know, is, is actually a very, very kind of interesting and strategic asset for the US government customer. Yep.
So, you know, I think it's kind of a happy coincidence that Pete is a Kiwi and decided to try to, you know, do this from that. But, you know, for the ability to be able to launch, you know, from these two different regions of the world, it's incredibly important, very differentiated.
Yeah. So let me ask you a little bit about, and how we do it on time. Oh my God, we're already at the end of time. I had so many things I wanted to do with you all. But we'll do it, we'll do it a different day. I mean, maybe last question because I think this is, you know, help people kind of dream about the potential here with the company because I think very clear that you guys are, you know, garnering some success here with the most important customer, in the world, which is, the US government. Those are the ones that have got the biggest budgets. You know, you're launching successfully here with Electron. Hopefully we get some Neutron launches for US government, missions as well. But it begs the question about, you've attached yourself to the most important customer.
But does that limit your range of mobility to go to other places? Like, I don't think we've got a European launch provider today that I'm aware of that's, you know, launching much, right? And we've got an organization called NATO over there that seems like they're going to be ratcheting up their spending. If for no other reason, then they're worried about how reliable we are going to be as a in that relationship. So, talk to us a little bit about the potential to penetrate that market and, you know, begin doing some launches for some European customers.
Well, we have launched for quite a few European customers. So we think there is an opportunity there. I think, you know, the hopes are for them for their domestic needs are you know that Ariane 6 comes up to speed and works and everything else. But we, yeah, we think that Neutron's got great opportunity for Europe. When they have an option to launch on a European launcher, they're going to do it. But as we've seen, there's a lot of plans that go by the wayside and people just, you know, execution is incredibly rare in this industry, right? And so I think there's a lot of paper tigers out there who say they're going to be launching at certain dates and have certain capabilities and they just don't show up.
So as the, you know, as we've done in this domestic market, we're going to take advantage of other people's lack of execution. So we think there'll be plenty of those opportunities in Europe as well.
Yeah. Okay. Well, we're going to leave it with that. I want to thank you both for your time today. It was really helpful.
Appreciate the invite.
And I thank everybody here in the room, those on the webcast as well. And look forward to doing it again soon.
Absolutely.
Thanks so much, Jason.