Rocket Lab shares have climbed about 88% over the past year, a move that now looks less like a sudden discovery by the market than a delayed response to contract demand the company had already been signaling for months. The stock opened the period at $44.1, touched $150.23 over the trailing 52 weeks and sits at $82.83 now.
That rally is easier to understand when set beside the broader market. The S&P 500 rose 23% over the same stretch, while LMT gained 39%. Rocket Lab’s gain was larger because investors were not just buying a stock; they were buying a growing backlog of defense and launch work that had already started to show up in company announcements.
The earliest marker came in February 2025, when Rocket Lab was selected by Kratos to support the next phase of the Department of Defense’s MACH-TB program. That effort is a $1.45 billion, five-year push to expand hypersonic technology testing, and Rocket Lab’s HASTE vehicle, the suborbital variant of Electron, was soon embedded in it. By May 2025, both the U.S. and the United Kingdom had picked HASTE for their hypersonic programs, seven HASTE missions were booked under MACH-TB, and Rocket Lab was also on a multi-awardee U.S. Air Force contracting vehicle with a shared $46 billion ceiling.
The commercial side was moving too. The earth-imaging operator iQPS had doubled its Electron order from four launches to eight by May 2025, and Rocket Lab flew the fifth iQPS Electron launch just before the stock run began. Even the options market suggested the shares were not trading as a panic story: implied volatility sat in the 34th percentile of its trailing one-year range in June 2025, then in the 31st percentile five weeks later.
That is the part that makes the stock move look different from a typical rerating. The demand was not hidden; it was announced in pieces, then absorbed over time. By the time Rocket Lab signed a record $266 million multi-launch missile defense contract with the U.S. Space Force in July 2026, the company’s largest launch contract had only put a much bigger number on a trend that had already been building in plain sight.
The latest figures back that up. Rocket Lab reported $200.3 million in fiscal Q1 2026 revenue and a backlog of roughly $2.2 billion, while iQPS placed a third multi-launch Electron booking in under a year by late July 2026. For investors, the question is no longer whether Rocket Lab has real demand behind the move. It is how much of that demand is still waiting to be reflected in the price.
