All right. Hi, everybody. My name is Anthony Valentini. I'm the defense tech analyst here at Goldman Sachs. Thank you for joining us. I'm really excited to, you know, welcome Adam Spice, the CFO of Rocket Lab. Adam, thank you so much for being here with us today.
Thanks for having me.
I think a great place to start is maybe on Neutron. I know that you guys, you know, recently, you know, announced when you're gonna be doing or the time frame of when you're gonna have the next launch or the first launch. Maybe something I think that would be helpful for people is if you could talk through the strategy of why or how it's a little bit different than some other competitors where you won't bring a rocket to the pad unless you think it's gonna be, you know, 100% successful.
Yeah. Well, look, I think it kinda goes back to one of the if you're gonna be, you know, in this market, you know, we think there's been way too many examples of companies that have, you know, kind of brought faulty products to market that weren't ready for prime time. And, you know, the appetite for mission failure is zero, right, with our customers. I mean, we know it happens. It's the nature of the launch business to a certain extent, but you don't ever willingly go in knowing you wanna take more risk than is prudent. And I think Pete is, you know, he's a hardcore engineer at his core.
He understands the product at a level that most other CEOs, I think, probably don't have that familiarity because he, you know, he designed, he built with his own hands Electron, which is now launched, I think, 77x . And with each one of those launches, you learn so much and you understand kinda where the risk is in the vehicle. And, you know, he just, you know, in his, process of developing a new rocket, he's leveraging everything we learned in Electron to make it as successful as it was. And he's just not willing to cut any corners to save schedule or, you know, to a certain extent cost. He's like, "Look, people won't remember a three-month push to a schedule, but they will remember a big smoking hole in the ground.
Yeah.
He's absolutely not willing to take that risk.
Makes a ton of sense. Can you just refresh everybody on the current timeline for Neutron, for the first launch and what needs to happen between now and then?
Yeah. So we talked in quite a lot of detail on our conference call about the timing. You know, right now, the goal is to get a vehicle to the pad in Q1 and then launch as quickly thereafter as we can. So if you think about, you know, what it takes to bring a program like a medium lift launch vehicle to market, there's a tremendous amount of coordination among the various disciplines, right? So you've got engines and avionics and tanks and pad infrastructure and everything else that has to come together. And the one thing that's created a little bit more of a challenge for us with Neutron than we experienced on Electron is just the scale.
If you look at some of the pictures, and maybe if some of you folks have been on some of the forums lately, I'm thinking the last couple days, there's pictures of the Hungry Hippo fairing making its way through New Zealand. Ultimately, that fairing is gonna be manufactured in the US in our facility, just outside of Baltimore. But the initial, you know, kind of prototyping was done in New Zealand 'cause that's where a lot of our carbon composite expertise resides. I mean, there's like these things are huge. I mean, there's like, you know, I was looking at another one of the pictures this morning, and you've got this massive, you know, Transport truck pulling this huge fairing that's, you know, five and a half meter in diameter fairing and quite long and everything else.
It's just moving parts like that and getting them through a qual is taking so much longer. When we were doing Electron, if you were gonna qual something or wanna do a tweak, you literally could pick up an engine with your hands, right, and carry it across the factory. Now an engine weighs more than a ton, right? You need the cranes and all the different things, and when you're moving these huge carbon structures, you wanna be careful that you're not, you know, putting stress on a joint that could take a long time to fix if you break something. So we're being very gingerly with all this stuff to make sure 'cause we understand how important schedule is.
You know, it's until you're faced with the reality of staring into this huge structure that you've gotta move and go, "Yeah, that fixture that we were thinking was gonna do the job probably needs to be augmented a bit here and there," and it's just taking a little bit longer. The plan is to get everything to the pad in Q1. What does that mean? That means you have the rocket that gets stacked and integrated on the pad, which is a little unique. Other times, it'll be done in integration facilities. We're actually stacking Electron—sorry, Neutron—on the pad. So having that ready to go. Now you're in a position where you're kind of running your final tests, and you're getting your final license from the FAA and NASA.
So I think we've got a pretty well-defined path to get where we need to go. But rocket to the pad in Q1, launch as quickly thereafter as kind of the final checkouts allow is really the goal.
Great. That's helpful. What's been the total cost of the project to date? And every quarter that you guys delay, how much incremental cost should people be expecting?
So the program, as we exit 2025, we will have spent about $360 million. And that's across CapEx and R&D. And so if you think of what that is accomplished, it's got a brand new pad at Wallops. It's gotten new integration facilities at Wallops. It's gotten a structures complex outside of Baltimore. It's got its static test that says it's actually been a very efficient project from that perspective. And so if you kinda target a first half of 2026 launch, I think there's probably about another $40 to 50 million of spend again across R&D and CapEx to get us to that first launch. So that'll put the program to a total of about $400 million, and it will have roughly taken about five years. The original estimate was $250 to 300 million over about four years.
So we experienced about a one-year total push to the program. And, you know, spending is, you know, call it at the high end, about $150, but really kind of $100 million above what we originally anticipated. But to put that into context, if you look at, you know, Blue Origin had a successful flight of New Glenn a couple weeks ago. Very impressive. Actually, you know, pretty encouraging for folks that are also looking to do the reusable, kind of ocean-landed, architecture. You know, this is anecdotal because, you know, Blue Origin is a private company, but kind of on the order of magnitude of, like, I think it was 14 years and probably north of $10 billion of investment.
Wow.
And then if you look at what it took to bring Vulcan to the pad, right, that was also measured in probably almost a decade and many billions of dollars, maybe not as much as New Glenn. But that's the kind of neighborhood that usually these programs occupy. And we're talking about doing things in half or less the amount of time and for orders of magnitude less in total spending. So we're trying to do some very aggressive things. And I think, you know, we're always trying to push the envelope, and Neutron is no different.
Yeah. It makes a ton of sense. It's incredibly helpful. Something that I hear from a lot of investors, and sometimes I even ask myself is, what exactly are we like, all the things that we need to send to space, right? And how should people be thinking through the demand for Neutron? Is it more commercial? Is it more government? How many launches can there be in the future? And let's just maybe keep the, you know, the part of your potential ambitions to have your own constellation in space aside.
Yeah.
We can get to that. But we'd just kinda love to get your thoughts on how people should be thinking about the market longer term.
You know, I think we're somewhat fortunate in the fact that, you know, this is a new and expanding market, but we've got a pretty clear comparable, and peer that we can point to with an established run rate in this very segment. So if you look at Falcon 9, that's really the only other medium lift launch vehicle. Last year, I believe they launched about 134 x.
Yeah.
This year, they were talking about launching a hundred over 190 x.
Yeah. Close to 200.
Close to 200. But about 60% of those volumes are estimated to be captive to Starlink. So if you kinda take that and you say, "Okay, roughly think of 90-ish launches of merchant volume for Falcon 9," it's been growing pretty dramatically year on year. So look, we think that there's a lot of market opportunity for Neutron. The easiest one to identify is the government side with NSSL launches, which we're now getting onboarded into that program. That program was funded to the tune for the lane that we're entering into to about, I think it was $5.4 billion of earmarked spend between now and the end of 2029. So that gives you one sense of kind of the customer kind of bucket of dollars. In order for us to start tapping that, we have to have a successful test launch of Neutron.
Once we have that, then they can start dropping task orders down to the lane for us to bid on. So I don't think so. Clearly there's a large volume of launch in that lane that's expected from the government customer. But again, we have to unlock that with a successful test launch. On the commercial side, there's also a lot of demand. Just to again provide a little bit of context, the first wave of deployments of Amazon Project Kuiper, which is now called Project LEO, which we're not contracted for, just to be very clear, but to look at it as an opportunity there, that's I think it was about 90 launches across three providers over the next several years.
And then once that constellation needs to be kinda reconstituted because low Earth orbit satellites don't stay up in orbit as long as, like, the prior generations of Leos and so forth, I mean, reconstituting a constellation like that will take many dozens of launches per year. So you've got a very tangible government opportunity, which is just starting to ramp because a lot of these higher volume proliferated architectures like SDA, they're just now starting to be launched. And that's gonna be a clear kinda present driver of launch demand for the foreseeable future. Then you've got the commercial side with things like Project LEO. You've got things like Telesat Lightspeed and IRIS². So I think the demand is clearly there. And what the market needs is more than one player. And that's all it really has to choose from today.
Yeah. So there's a lot of talk in the industry about supply constraints. Just to frame that for people, if I was a satellite manufacturer or operator and wanted to send a bird into orbit, today, and I called SpaceX and said, "Hey, I wanna do this," how long out would it be until I could get onto the launch pad and get to orbit?
So the feedback that we're getting from customers is it's about two years, right? Say when you want to basically, I'm ready to contract a launch on a Falcon 9. It takes about two years is our understanding. I wanna come back real quickly to the sizing of the number of launches available for Neutron.
Yeah.
Clearly there's an existing market today for Falcon 9 for merchant launches, which is approaching 100, probably gonna be very easily above that, you know, in 2026 and beyond. Our target to get to our target margin model for Neutron, given our pricing assumptions and cost for refurb and so forth, it only takes about 10 launches per year for us to actually get to our target margin model for this business. Obviously, we think that the opportunity is much, much, much larger than that, but it doesn't take, you know, a disproportionate amount of that existing volume today without assuming the growth potential to kinda hit our marks.
Yeah. So perfect segue there. I think that's something that's misunderstood from the investment community is actually how strong the margins can be in launch. So can you speak a little bit about what the margins are today on Electron, and how that improves as, you know, volumes ramp on that product? And then once you have Neutron, what does that look like with reusability?
I think most people understand that the launch business is a very high fixed cost business. So whether you're launching once or 20 times, you've got a certain amount of infrastructure that needs to be maintained. For us, for Electron, it's about $40 million a year for Electron. That maintains our launch facilities, it's all our production overheads and so forth. You know, it excludes the variable pieces of that, like the labor, you know, to build the rockets. But if you just think about your fixed nut to kinda stay in that market. So if you're launching once a year, you've got a horribly unprofitable business.
We've been pretty consistent in saying that, you know, if we get to 24 launches a year or two per month for Electron, that's where we hit the sweet spot of our margin, our overhead absorption, and margins on a non-GAAP basis in the 45-50 point range. You know, given the forecast.
Gross margins, right?
Gross margins.
Gross margins.
So given the guidance that we provided a few weeks ago, which embedded roughly seven launches in Q4, we're kinda there, right? So we don't need any material kind of, you know, growth to drive to get us to where we need to be. We're knocking on that door as we speak. So, and again, it kinda just reaffirmed for us, it's, you know, cadence is super important, right? You need to get that overhead absorption rolling. ASP, fortunately, in our case, has also been pretty helpful. It's all it's been up and to the right the last few years. And we see that continuing in that direction given just the lack of any real credible competition in certain segments of the market. So we think the demand is there. We now have dialed in the production and kinda scaling of Electron.
Right now, and even at that 24 launches per year, which gets us to your target margin, we can build twice that. We can basically build a rocket per week with our existing footprint for Electron. So you can only imagine there's more, there's kind of margin gravy to come at anything really kind of above that level.
Okay, so, is that the same framework that we should be thinking about on Neutron, or is it a little bit different given the reusability?
Yeah. I mentioned the fact that, you know, part of the challenge of Neutron is just the scale of the vehicle.
Yeah.
So, you know, the scale of production is greater. The launch pads are bigger. Everything is bigger. So instead of $40 million per year of kinda standing cost, it's really more like about $80 million of standing cost. So if you think about the margin path for Electron has been pretty predictable. It's always been about growing or maintaining your ASP and getting your cadence up to absorb the overheads. With Neutron being a reusable vehicle, it's less about that. It's much more about how quickly can we get to reusability on Neutron. And, you know, that really will have a much more accelerated path to margin expansion than we experienced on Electron, where it's you have to build one for every mission. The power of the fleet model for Neutron is or again, that's already been established.
We've seen what that can do to SpaceX, right, as far as being able to launch. You can launch a lot more if you build less. I mean, it's a lot easier to refurbish a rocket than to build a rocket, right? So that's really the whole kind of the premise underpinning the margin expansion because the first launch for Neutron, that we talked about earlier, that's just an R&D launch. There's no revenue associated with it. A lot of that R&D is already kind of in the rearview mirror, and that first rocket, the goal there is to get it to space, successfully re-enter the atmosphere, and do a propulsive soft landing in the ocean. We're not trying to catch that one or land it on a barge.
If everything goes really well, the goal would be then for the second tail or second rocket to basically land on a barge. And that rocket will probably not also be used. We'll use that for kind of, I would say, post-morteming and kind of really dialing in the block upgrades to the, the long-term architecture of the vehicle if there's any major changes or minor changes. And so it's really the third tail that we would have the opportunity to land it on the barge and then put that into reuse. So you can kinda think about kinda it's the third tail onward that represents the real margin expansion for that business. That's where you can start to see that trajectory. But the first couple, you know, launches are gonna be negative gross margin propositions for sure.
How do we think through the number of times that a rocket can be reused? And is there a way to think about how many rockets you'll wanna have, like, built in inventory ready to go at all times once you guys get to maturity, or is it might be too early to kinda think through that, but?
Yeah. That's ultimately gonna be kind of obviously demand-driven. But if you think about the rocket was designed to be reusable 20 x, and if you think about the time to turn a rocket from launch, get it through the refurb, back on the pad, right now we're being pretty, you know, pretty conservative about assuming roughly a quarter to take the vehicle back in, get it ready to be reused. If you look at SpaceX right now, I read online that the estimates are it's about 29 days to put a booster back into service after a launch. So that kinda gives you what the opportunity could look like. That's how quickly you could turn a vehicle. Now, I would say that hopefully we could do it even better than that.
Our design kinda criteria for Neutron originally was, can we get the rocket and put it back in a position where it could be relaunched within 24 hours, right? Not that necessarily we as we see demand driving you into that kind of a cadence, but it's really more about how do you constrain cost? Well, the less amount of time that you have to refurb, the less money you're gonna spend. So it's all about kinda ma optimizing your design around kind of easy reusability or efficient reusability. So we target 20 reuses per Neutron, roughly a quarter to put it back into service. So if you think about I mentioned earlier, like, 10 launches per year, that would say that you could do that with, say, three vehicles.
Yeah. That's amazing.
Right? So my current assumption is that we'll build out a fleet of, call it, four-ish vehicles over the course of the next couple of years, and that will be, I mean, again, at the relatively slow cadence of turning it every quarter, you know, that would say you could be, you know, in a position of launching up to, like, 16 launches per year off of that fleet and could do a lot more if you can get your turnaround time much quicker.
Right. Do you guys have any desire to introduce a new rocket that would be somewhere between Electron and Neutron?
No. No. We don't really see a market for that. You know, if you look at Electron, it's able to take most of the satellites that want dedicated launch on the small size small sat market. There are some payloads that we can't carry that look for alternative rides. But, you know, if we were to build, like, a one-ton, we just don't think the market's really big enough to justify the ROI for a one-ton rocket. So you've got Electron, super efficient, established, very reliable vehicle, priced incredibly well for that small dedicated launch market. You've got Neutron that's really gonna be the constellation deployer and also where you're taking more exquisite satellites into LEO or GEO or beyond.
Okay. That's helpful. Let's shift gears a little bit to Space Systems because I think that's an important part of the story here, and something that I think that people just maybe struggle to you know with on Space Systems is how to model it. Is there a way to think through the different business lines or the products or maybe the programs that are in Space Systems? How big are they today and, like, where can they go and how do they ramp?
Yeah. So Space Systems is roughly two-thirds of our revenue today. So people think of us as a launch company, and we are a launch company. But again, we get more of our revenue from Space Systems than from launch. Now, that will probably remix with Neutron coming onto the scene.
Right.
But that said, we do see a lot of growth opportunities on the Space Systems side. So if you take Space Systems and there's roughly two equally sized components of that. There's the subsystems business, excuse me, which think of that as things that we sell picks and shovels to other satellite manufacturers, whether those are solar systems from our SolAero acquisition, whether it's reaction wheels and star trackers and sun sensors from our Sinclair acquisition, whether it's ground software from ASI, that acquisition. So we've acquired a lot of businesses that brought these subsystem capabilities. And those businesses, again, are roughly a third of the total corporate revenue, and they're growing at around 20% CAGR.
Our gross, you know, non-GAAP gross margins are in the low 40s, with a pretty wide range where you've got solar at the low end of the gross margins at around 30 points, and you've got other products that are north of 70 points.
Okay.
So it's a pretty wide range there. But overall, a blended growth rate of around 20% is about right. We don't see that CAGR kinda changing that much from what we can see right now in the next, say, three to five years. That's more of a market where it's a rising tide because you're selling to a lot of different people. It's not program-specific. It's selling to a lot of diversified customers across a very diversified product range. And then the other half of Space Systems is where we sell full platform solutions, whether those are complete satellite buses or full satellites, including the payload. And that business is growing even faster. That was an organic one. So we didn't acquire a spacecraft platform business. We developed that organically using all the acquired technologies and then built out all the infrastructure to build these full system solutions.
We got our first real constellation build opportunity with Globalstar several years ago, and we're now wrapping up that program. And then we won a bigger program with SDA Tranche 2 Transport Layer. And now we've got our hat in the ring for subsequent SDA opportunities and other government and commercial opportunities. So we have a very robust pipeline of those platform sales. But it's all, it's kind of very important, I think, when you think about what we're doing and why we're doing things the way that we are because, you know, being a merchant supplier into the satellite market, it's a good, it's a really nice business. But for us, it's a means to an end.
For us, it's a way for us to pay or have other people pay for us to develop and scale capabilities that ultimately we're gonna use to build out our own constellation, our own assets on orbit because that's really what we're going after at the end of the day. That's really the last piece of the creating the end-to-end space division that, you know, that Pete's been driving for the almost last decade.
Yeah. So let's talk about that for a little bit, if you don't mind. Are you guys, you know, starting to think through how much that could potentially cost, the timeframe for that, and what the use case will eventually be on your own constellation?
So we spend a lot of time on the constellation opportunities. I think we sit in a pretty enviable position on the launch and also selling subsystems to other people. We're seeing what's working and what's not working, right? So I think we're a bit of a canary in the coal mine. So we're not, you know, having to just go completely blind into kind of a constellation opportunity. So again, we're getting to where we're building all the capabilities so that when we put our own assets in orbit, we're gonna do it in a very vertically integrated way across designing the spacecraft, building them with our own subsystems, launching them on our own rockets, communicating with them with our own ground stations, all of those capabilities.
The application is yet TBD, you know, but when you look at the market, there's, I kind of think of space applications in a few meaningful buckets. There's the national security side of the market, and we've seen that historically that's one where you, you know, you can sell hardware into that market. It's you can also sell services or data to that market. That's really more on the remote sensing EO side of the market where, you know, companies sell data to the US government in various forms, and they also do some analytics on that in some cases. But we've now also seen examples where the government customer has been turned into just basically a consumer of a service.
Like, think about, like, Starshield, right, where they're generating a lot of revenue from what we can tell selling into the US government, off of a secure communications platform. So there's and then, of course, you know, also with national security, there's all the where I consider, like, all the Golden Domes type of opportunities, missile warning, missile defense, and so forth. That's the first major bucket. And then I'd say the second major bucket would be call it commercial opportunities for Earth Observation, and that's kind of, again, a hybrid business where it sells into government plus commercial customers. And then you've got the communications market more broadly speaking, which is where there's some emerging business models like direct-to-device. You, of course, have Starlink that's doing consumer broadband, Project LEO from Amazon, same thing, plus a bunch of other capabilities.
So and even within communications, you've got again, you've got consumer broadband, D-to-D, you've got IoT opportunities. Undoubtedly, in the future, there'll be opportunities around, you know, fleet control for autonomous vehicles, drones, and so forth. So there's just a tremendous amount of vertical kinda diversification in the comms market. So what we're doing right now, rather than saying we've kinda staked a claim on which application we're going for, we're out there building the capabilities to basically be able to pick. Be, I'd say, agile in picking what we're gonna go exploit because we think it's really requires all the pieces to exploit something the way that we've seen SpaceX successfully exploit Starlink. Like, I think there's a few reasons why you could point to why they've been so successful with Starlink.
It's not the fact necessarily they that they've got, you know, the secret sauce on, on the satellite design capabilities. It's when you marry really good design with incredibly vertically integrated manufacturing with a captive launch vehicle where you can prioritize your payloads and deploy them at a cost and a cadence that nobody else can compete with. And so for us, that's where, again, our strategy's kinda dovetail with that. We're like, we need Neutron to really close that, that, that equation, right? And so that's why Neutron is so important. It's not everything, but it's, it's very important to our long-term kinda strategy.
Yeah. It seems like there's a lot more to come there, and it seems like a great and exciting opportunity. You mentioned the Transport Layer. Can we just talk a little bit about what is next to come there and what people should be looking for, on the next tranches? And then I think that we've talked in the past about how, you guys have had a strategy of, like, going after small pieces of these programs upfront, doing a really good job on that, and that's kind of, like, gotten you a seat at the table for the next big thing.
Mm-hmm.
And how that ties into taking on more risks, risks with fixed-price contracts. I know I just threw a lot at you there, but all within the Transport Layer is kind of what I would like to hear more on.
When we look at SDA, that SDA program, the proliferated warfighter architecture, it's, you know, our first opportunity was in that Transport Layer, right? So you think about Transport and Track where Transport is really the communications layer of that constellation architecture. Track is actually the tracking of the missile warning, missile detection aspect of it. So the Transport Layer is where there's been a little bit, a lot of chatter around whether or not that's something that the government customer will continue to procure hardware for or whether they're just gonna procure a service, right? Very different from Track, which is, there is no service provisioning of missile warning, missile detection. That's the government domain, right? And so our focus right now has been disproportionate on Track versus Transport. We're executing on Transport.
If there's future Transport Layers that do get awarded, we think we're in a really good position because we've got a position of incumbency now. And then on Tranche, we're you know, that's one where we've kinda thrown our hat in the ring, and where we acquired an asset, in the form of Geost, which is an IR sensor. And we closed that deal, I think it was in August of this year, to really give us a full platform. So now we go in with not only all of the vertically integrated bus capabilities, but now we've got the payload too. So we, we don't have to cobble together a solution using other people's, you know, kinda payload elements.
And that's very powerful because getting to your point on firm fixed-price contracts, the one thing that's really bitten everybody, you know, that's been in the business of providing space hardware to customers, government or commercial, is the flimsiness of the supply chain, right? The supply chain's always been very fragmented, very vulnerable, which puts people you know, that's why historically, I think it's been a cost-plus market because if you don't really have confidence in you're being able to deliver something on time and schedule, you're not gonna wanna get bound to that. But when you're very vertically integrated, like we are and like other people who we think are gonna succeed are, they're incredibly vertically integrated.
That puts you in a position to say, "Look, I can bet on myself, and so I'll take that firm fixed-price risk, but I'm not gonna bet on, you know, a dozen other people who've historically not been able to execute on time and schedule," because as the prime, you take on the exposure for liquidated damages and such.
Do you feel that the customer is looking for more of those fixed-price contracts from you guys in the industry?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that is that's all we're seeing. Like, we don't play in the cost-plus parts of the market. Not that we wouldn't, but that's just not where we're, you know, the margins are thin.
Right.
But we don't need to. We'd rather take the risk for the higher margin opportunities.
Makes sense. So this is a perfect segue into Golden Dome. Number one is Golden Dome, you know, the stuff that we're talking about on the tracking and Transport Layers, is that just gonna be repurposed into Golden Dome and rebranded, or is the $25 billion that people are talking about total incremental funding?
I think the $25 billion that people are talking about is incremental. I don't think that's part of. I don't think the SDA Transport and Track are part of that. Those initiatives were kind of taken into scope well before Golden Dome was even discussed as a term, right? So I think that's just more of the kind of existing kind of maintenance of business kind of part of the budget. I think the $25 billion that people are talking about, that's really for new innovative kinda things that really were not being discussed about before in a material way.
Those are things that, you know, we're now, you know, we've got quite a bit of, you know, points of entry into the government customer because now we've, of course, had, you know, the NASA things we've done for years. In fact, we just launched two satellites that are about 2 million kilometers away from Earth now. We launched those on Jeff Bezos' New Glenn vehicle a couple of weeks ago. And then, of course, SDA that we're executing on. But hypersonics is a big piece of our growing Electron product line. That's where we deploy, you know, get targets essentially for the government to develop hypersonic countermeasures and other capabilities. So we've got, we're having increasingly, I'd say audible voice at the table with the government customer because of the different things that we're now providing into that infrastructure.
So I think, and now Geost just basically puts that, you know, even more so. So I think we're in a good position to really at least now be heard and kind of be able to see what's coming through the pipeline and be aggressive on getting pieces where they fit for us.
There's an expectation that the public was gonna know more about the architecture of Golden Dome, I think, in November, which I think we're still kinda waiting on. When do you think that we'll have an understanding of what it looks like, and when do you think that awards will start happening and actually hitting backlogs?
I think that's very hard to predict. I think especially it's we're still pretty fresh out of the government shutdown, so we don't know whether, you know, some of these things were day-for-day pushes or.
Yeah.
Whether there's a much bigger delay because of other things being reprioritized. So I don't think we have the insight to really be that helpful on that one.
Makes sense. Maybe something that, you know, might be more strategic. You guys have been really successful with your M&A platform, and I think that's something that's really separated you from other, you know, some of your other space peers that have gone public recently. What should people be thinking about and expecting, out of you guys from an M&A perspective and, you know, the capital allocation, going forward?
Well, I, our pipeline has never been more full right now of opportunities, and it's a diverse set of opportunities. I think what I'm most confident that you'll see is a continued push towards vertical integration of key capabilities. So I mentioned before, look, having a comms platform and payload capability is gonna be foundational for us. So we're out there right now kind of looking at key pieces of that signal chain, right? So beam steerable antenna arrays, modems, PAs, encryption boxes, those kinds of things that allow you to build a full in-house comms payload. And whether that comms payload gets pointed at consumer broadband versus D- to- D versus encrypted government comms, I mean, you need those table stakes any way you look at it.
So that's kind of what you'll see from us, I believe, over the course of the next, say, 12 to 18 months. You'll see kind of hopefully a series of those things come into focus. We do look at, I would say, like, needle-moving or transformational types of deals where it gets us into new markets in a meaningful way quickly. But, you know, Pete and I are pretty conservative, you know, by nature. We're not gonna do bet-the-company things. And so we're also very careful that, like, for example, on the constellation side because we do get the question, like, are you guys gonna go out and buy Spectrum? Are you guys gonna do this, that, and the other thing?
Right.
Like, to preserve your spot for your future constellation opportunity? The answer is probably not because we really need to dovetail very carefully that we don't put the cart before the horse in investing in things that we ultimately need Neutron to ultimately deploy. So.
Right.
Having incremental lift capacity available to us to use captively is realistically probably a three-year away thing. Like, we think customer demand is gonna take the first three years as we scale that vehicle. And only once you get into this rapid cadence reusability model in a meaningful way can you get to those, you know, 10, 20, 30 types of launches per year where you gives you that SpaceX-like kind of internal capacity, so we gotta be careful that the timing and sequencing of these things, so I think those are more unlikely, although we continue to look at a lot of stuff. I think those kinda deals are. I don't think too likely.
Yeah. It seems like the pipeline is really strong. We're almost at the time here for maybe, like, the last question for you. Is there anything that you feel is misunderstood about the story or about the company, that you'd like to address with the investment community?
No, I think the knowledge base has gotten pretty good. I mean, if you looked at our cap table a year ago, it looked dramatically different than it looks like today, right? So we were a lot of retail. We still have a lot of retail, but the institutional investors that we had were largely, I would say, fast money. And if you look at our shareholder roster now, it's a pretty enviable list of quality, long-only kinda strategic-minded investors. So that, to me, is probably the most encouraging thing. So I think people are getting educated on it.
I think that probably if there's anything that's misunderstood, I think it's probably an underappreciation for the growth that companies like us are gonna see in the international markets as the geopolitics have created less of a kind of sharing of capabilities. And we're moving from decades of, you know, efficient concentrated spend by the US government to now you're gonna have a lot of sovereigns having to spend their own money, and it's gonna be a redundant spend model where people are gonna be buying a lot of the same things but in different parts of the world. And I think there's only a few. I mean, most of the industrial base for those kinda capabilities is in the United States.
So I think as much as a lot of these other regions want to buy within their region, it's gonna take time to develop the flight heritage for a lot of these capabilities. So I think there's gonna be disproportionate growth opportunities for well-positioned US assets to exploit that.
Makes sense. Well, I think we're up at time. Adam, thank you so much for being here with us today.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Great.