Rocket Lab reports second-quarter results after Monday's close, with Wall Street penciling in about $232 million of revenue and growth of about 60% year over year. The stock already jumped 9% on Friday ahead of the print, and two Space Force contracts worth a combined $663 million won't even show up in the numbers yet.
Rocket Lab reports second-quarter results after the market closes on Monday, Aug. 10, and traders didn't wait for the numbers. Shares jumped 9% on Friday, pushing the space company's value to about $50 billion before it reported anything at all.
Wall Street expects about $232 million of revenue, up about 60% year over year. That matches the range management guided to in May — $225 million to $240 million, a midpoint up about 61% from the $144 million Rocket Lab reported a year earlier.
A fifth straight record is the floor
The first quarter showed why expectations climbed so high. Revenue grew 63.5% year over year, and Rocket Lab beat every metric it had guided to, including margins and adjusted EBITDA. Backlog — the value of signed but unfulfilled contracts — ended the quarter at a record $2.2 billion.
Bookings ran even hotter than revenue: Rocket Lab signed 31 new Electron and HASTE launch contracts plus five dedicated Neutron missions in the quarter, more launch business than in all of 2025, taking the manifest past 70 contracted missions.
For Q2, management guided for GAAP gross margins of 33% to 35% and an adjusted EBITDA loss of $20 million to $26 million. Rocket Lab still isn't profitable — it lost about $183 million over the past 12 months — but it holds more than $2 billion in total liquidity to keep funding growth.
$663 million in contracts the results won't include
Some of Rocket Lab's biggest recent wins won't appear in Monday's numbers at all. On July 27, the company announced a $266 million missile-defense deal with the Space Force covering 12 suborbital launches, with up to six more as options — the largest launch contract it has ever signed. A $397 million Space Force award followed on Aug. 4, this one to build, launch and operate satellites tracking airborne threats.
Together the deals add up to $663 million of contract value announced in eight days, all landing after the quarter closed on June 30. Backlog excludes unexercised options, so neither award shows up in Monday's figure — but how fast they convert into revenue is what investors watch next.
Neutron's timeline and a 70-times-revenue valuation
The other line to watch is Neutron, the larger rocket Rocket Lab has never flown. Management said in the first-quarter update that the vehicle remained on track for a debut launch later this year, though that timeline has slipped before.
Rocket Lab now trades at more than 70 times the roughly $680 million of revenue it has booked over the past 12 months, and the stock is up almost 90% over the past year. At that valuation, the gap between a good quarter and a disappointing one is thin.
Source: Motley Fool
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