$9.5M Per Flight: The Unit Economics of Rocket Lab's Pentagon Deal

Rocket Lab just signed its biggest launch contract ever — $190 million for 20 hypersonic test flights over four years — and the number almost obscures the real story. This isn't a trophy deal. It's evidence that a company known for dropping small satellites into orbit is building something more durable: a hypersonics test infrastructure business.

The contract, awarded by the Pentagon's Test Resource Management Center under the MACH-TB 2.0 program, calls for Rocket Lab to fly its HASTE vehicle 20 times, delivering payloads along controlled trajectories that reproduce hypersonic flight conditions before releasing them for experimentation. First mission is expected within months of the March 18 signing, according to Rocket Lab's corporate announcement. Each flight runs roughly $9.5 million.

HASTE — Hypersonic Accelerator Space Testing vehicle — is a suborbital variant of Rocket Lab's Electron rocket. It retains Electron's two-stage, liquid-fueled architecture but is configured for experimental payloads: reentry vehicles, glide bodies, air-breathing systems. The payload rides the vehicle through Mach 5+ speeds and the associated thermal and aerodynamic stress, then separates for its own testing regime. What HASTE provides is access to flight conditions that are extremely difficult to replicate on the ground.

That's the core value proposition, and it's one the Defense Department has decided it needs badly. MACH-TB was created because the existing hypersonic test infrastructure — historically built around one-off missile launches — couldn't keep up with the pace that modern development cycles demand. The program brings in commercial launch providers specifically to increase flexibility and repeatability. Kratos leads Task Area 1, with Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane Division as the technical partner. Rocket Lab is the launch provider, as SpaceNews reported.

The track record matters here. Rocket Lab has already conducted multiple HASTE flights for the MACH-TB program since 2023, all at Mach 5 or above, with a 100% mission success rate. This isn't a capability they're proposing to develop — it's one they've been operating. The new contract is a block buy that locks in capacity for four years.

Peter Beck, Rocket Lab's founder and CEO, framed it as a leadership statement: "Our advanced technology, responsive launch schedules, and mass production of our HASTE hypersonic rockets are enabling faster progress across a range of hypersonic experiments by our government and industry partners." That's a deliberate choice of words. He's not selling launches — he's selling the idea that Rocket Lab is becoming the commercial backbone of a hypersonics testing ecosystem.

The numbers back up the ambition. With this contract, Rocket Lab's launch backlog exceeds 70 missions and its total backlog — across launch and space systems — tops $2 billion. In Q1 2026 alone, Rocket Lab sold 28 new launches, nearly matching its full-year 2025 total. The HASTE line is a growing share of that mix.

The defense market signal is real. Hypersonic weapons programs have been constrained for years not by design maturity but by access to testing — range availability, scheduling friction, and cost per flight have all limited how quickly programs could iterate. If a commercial provider can offer repeatable, relatively affordable access to hypersonic flight conditions, it changes the development economics for a whole class of systems.

Rocket Lab is not alone in this space, but it has moved faster than most. The question now is whether block-buy contracts like this one become the model — or whether MACH-TB remains a niche program serving a handful of high-priority efforts. The next twelve months of HASTE flights will answer that.