Space Force taps Rocket Lab for its biggest contract yet: 12 hypersonic test flights from Alaska

Rocket Lab has won its largest contract ever: a $266 million deal with the US Space Force for 12 suborbital launches from a new Alaska spaceport, with up to six more on option. The work is hypersonic weapons testing, flight trials of weapons and systems that travel at roughly five times the speed of sound or faster, and the first launch is expected no earlier than the end of 2026.

The award comes from Space Force Space Systems Command, the service's acquisition arm, under a multi-launch task order that runs out the company's existing national-security book. The Space Systems Command release ties the buy to "urgent national security demands" and the need for high-frequency launch capacity to stay ahead of peer-competitor test campaigns. The framing matters: hypersonic weapons testing is one of the few launch lanes where the US and its rivals publicly compete on cadence, and the Space Force is buying flight rate, not just flights.

Most of the missions will lift off from Pacific Spaceport Complex–Alaska, the public spaceport at Kodiak Island's Narrow Cape that has spent the better part of a decade waiting for an anchor tenant. Until now, the site has been built around an FAA launch license and a few demonstration flights. A 12-mission base load, with six more on option, gives the spaceport its first real multi-year campaign and a credible reason to keep the range staffed year-round.

Rocket Lab's founder and chief executive, Sir Peter Beck, framed the deal in the company's announcement as a recasting of the company into a new category of national-security work, with a cadence and mission profile that put Electron in a role it has not held before. The vehicle is the same small rocket that has been flying commercial and government payloads from New Zealand and Virginia, but the workload now includes hypersonic test profiles that have to integrate with military range schedules.

The cadence is the second-order story. Twelve confirmed missions and up to six more translates, on the Space Force's stated timeline, to roughly one launch a quarter through 2028 and into 2029, a tempo closer to a small dedicated test squadron than a commercial rideshare line. The contract is also structured as multi-launch rather than per-mission, which is how the Space Force typically signals it expects a single provider to keep a range warm and a payload integration pipeline flowing.

For the Alaska site, the deal doubles as a referendum. The operator that has run Pacific Spaceport Complex–Alaska since 2019 has been pitching the site to defense and small-launch customers for years. An anchor tenant on a multi-year cadence gives the corporation a budget line it can defend, a workforce it can grow, and a justification for the next round of range-safety and telemetry upgrades. The flip side is concentration risk: if Rocket Lab's Electron slips, the spaceport's first major tenant slips with it.

Two other threads in this week's Rocket Report roundup at Ars Technica sit alongside the contract but are not the lead. A proposed rule in the Federal Register would exempt commercial launch licensing from some environmental review, a deregulation lane that SpaceNews has tracked as a parallel policy track to a separate White House executive order on commercial space. And a modeling paper on arXiv updates the predicted ejecta from the upcoming Falcon 9 upper-stage impact on the Moon, a story Ars Technica first reported in April and that is now days away from the strike itself.

The contract makes the picture easier to read: a smaller launch firm is being recast as a hypersonic-test prime, a new public spaceport is being pulled into a national-security cadence, and the Space Force is buying the kind of flight rate that hypersonic test campaigns actually need to stay relevant.