The firm’s Nasdaq-listed shares, which have recently fallen sharply from their 12-month high, rose 5.75% today to US$74.48.
SpaceX confirms plans to go after telcos
During SpaceX’s quarterly earnings call earlier today, president Gwynne Shotwell stated that SpaceX intends to use its newly acquired EchoStar spectrum and next-generation architecture to directly challenge major telecom carriers like Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile in the US.
A key weakness of SpaceX’s mobile-to-satellite service today is that it needs line-of-sight to the sky. Partners like One NZ and recent signing One NZ (which got a new customer shout-out on the earnings call) are using the service to fill in mobile blackspots.
Newcomer AST SpaceMobile, launching later this year, says it has the capability to penetrate roofs by using low-frequency bands under its “cell tower in the sky” model.
But Shotwell surprised analysts by appearing to say that SpaceX would build its own cell towers on the ground in the US to complement its mobile-to-satellite service from above.
“Let me give a little hint, and that is you could put a base station, a cellular base station, on basically the gear that holds a Starlink broadband dish. So you can have kind of these little femtocells around the country,” Shotwell said.
A femtocell is a mini cell tower.
“The threat of satellite and leo [low Earth orbit] solutions disrupting telcos has been sitting on telco stocks year-to-date,” Harbour Asset Management’s Shane Solly recently told the Herald, in the context of discussing Spark’s depressed share price.
But there are political and logistical barriers to SpaceX launching a full-blooded mobile service in New Zealand.
Phone companies and satellite operators around the world can only lease spectrum from governments. The Trump Administration gave SpaceX the green light to buy spectrum rights from Echostar in a US$19.5b deal, first announced in 2025.
Our Government would have to give SpaceX the go-ahead to participate in a spectrum auction here.
And Gartner senior analyst Khurram Shahzad – a specialist in the satellite market – said that even if Musk hit his goal for SpaceX-owned Starlink to launch 100,000 mobile-to-satellite capable satellites, it still wouldn’t have enough bandwidth to beat congestion in urban areas (Starlink today has around 10,400 satellites in orbit, but only around 600 of those are its larger second-generation model capable of supporting mobile-to-satellite service).
Shahzad said the practical constraints of growing space junk would restrict Starlink to around 40,000 satellites, assuming it managed to gain regulatory permission.
The Gartner analyst also noted that Starlink faces competition from AST SpaceMobile and Amazon Leo (both due to launch commercial service by year’s end) plus three private Chinese operators.
Rocket Lab opening Alaska launchpad after US$266m missile defence win
Last week, Rocket Lab announced it was setting up shop in Alaska after winning a US$266mcontract to help the US Space Force to boost its missile defence capability.
The Kiwi-American firm will stage up to 18 suborbital launches under the $453m contract, with the first before the year’s end.
The company also revealed that the launches will take place from a new “Rocket Lab location” at the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Alaska, a facility owned by the Alaska state government.
“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 US ahead of global threats,” Rocket Lab chief executive Sir Peter Beck said.
The Alaska site complements Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex One on the Mahia Peninsula and its Launch Complex Two and Launch Complex Three in Virginia. The latter will host the larger Neutron rocket, due for its first test mission this year; the other sites host its smaller Electron.
A sub-orbital mission arcs just above the 100km Karmen line – the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space – then comes straight back to Earth. It provides Space Force with a way to quickly and cheaply test payloads, and the ability for rapid-reaction launches.
It’s the latest in a series of big US military contracts Rocket Lab has secured.
In March, it won a US$190m contract from the Pentagon to help test hypersonic flight conditions, using a modified version of its Electron rocket called Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Electron (Haste), which mimics the Mach 5+ speeds of hypersonic missiles.
The company is also working with defence contractor RTX on the US’s Golden Dome, a space-based missile-defence shield.
The US$266m Space Force contract is Rocket Lab’s third-largest in its US$2 billion backlog, behind its 2025 US$816m contract to supply 18 satellites equipped with advanced infrared missile warning and defence tracking sensors for the US military’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA) Tranche 3 programme and its $515m 2024 contract to manufacture satellites for Space Force under “Tranche 2″ of the PWSA programme.
In June, Rocket Lab said it was buying US satellite network operator Iridium in a US$8b half cash, half stock deal to create what Beck called a “fully integrated space superpower”.
The deal positions Beck’s company to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Amazon Leo, among others.
Locals’ slice of the action
Sharesies last month said Rocket Lab has become the most widely held company on its platform, displacing Air New Zealand, which had held the top company spot since the index began reporting in 2023.
Rocket Lab shares were held by close to 70,000 Sharesies investors across New Zealand and Australia at the end of June, while 23,000 had bought into SpaceX.
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.