Rocket Lab shares jumped in post-market trading after the company reported third-quarter results and announced its first customer for its coming Neutron vehicle.

The space infrastructure company reported third-quarter revenue increased to $104.8 million, up 55% from $67.6 million for the same period a year ago, and above Wall Street’s expectation of $102 million, according to analysts surveyed by LSEG.

Its net loss also increased year over year, to $51.9 million from $40.6 million, but its loss of 10 cents per share came in slightly below analyst expectations of a loss of 11 cents a share.

Rocket Lab forecast fourth-quarter revenue between $125 million and $135 million, which at the midpoint would see the company bring in about $430 million this year.

Additionally, the company announced its first launch deal for its Neutron rocket.

A “confidential commercial satellite constellation operator” signed for two missions in mid-2026, which Rocket Lab said were at a price “consistent with our target” for the vehicle. Previously, the company said it was targeting a price point of about $50 million per Neutron launch.

Shares of Rocket Lab jumped as much as 25% in after-hours trading, up from its close at $14.66 a share. The stock has been flying up the past three months, nearly tripling over that period.

The bulk of Rocket Lab’s Q3 revenue growth came from its Space Systems unit, which builds spacecraft and sells satellite parts. The business brought in $83.9 million of the quarter’s revenue, up from $46.3 million a year ago, while its Launch unit brought in $21 million, roughly in line wit- $21.3 million a year prior.

But the company’s small Electron vehicle, which sells for about $8.5 million per mission, has become the world’s third-most-frequently launched orbital rocket. It’s launched a company record 12 missions so far this year. And Rocket Lab added $55 million worth of new launch contracts to Electron’s backlog in Q3.

Development of Neutron — as well as the Archimedes engines that power it — remains a key watch item for investors, with heavy research and development spending driving most of Rocket Lab’s quarterly losses.

Neutron is seen as crucial for Rocket Lab to tap larger markets, including a broader swath of U.S. national security launches. The company continues to expect Neutron to debut in mid-2025 and has outlined a variety of milestones in the rocket’s path to launch — including assembly and testing of flight hardware, firing “multiple” Archimedes engines and continuing on work underway on the launchpad infrastructure in Virginia.

Apple committed about $1.5 billion to satellite communications company Globalstar to fund the expansion of iPhone services, the companies disclosed in a securities filing on Friday.

The tech giant’s deal with Globalstar includes $1.1 billion in cash, of which $232 million will go toward the satellite company’s current debt, and a 20% equity stake. The deal is expected to close on Tuesday.

Apple has already been spending hundreds of millions for Globlastar services, which enabled the 2022 rollout of iPhone emergency satellite texting.

It is one of several efforts in the direct-to-device, or D2D, satellite connectivity market — which provides service to unmodified devices such as smartphones directly from space — with other projects underway from SpaceX, AST SpaceMobile, Iridium, Lynk and EchoStar.

Globalstar stock jumped 31.4% in Friday trading to close at $1.38 a share.

In the filing, Globalstar noted that it will continue to allocate about 85% of its network capacity to Apple.

The new funds will allow Globalstar to purchase new satellites and expand its ground infrastructure. Globalstar currently operates 31 satellites and has already ordered as many as 26 satellites to replenish and upgrade its constellation in low Earth orbit.

The U.S. Air Force began deploying the Global Positioning System — more commonly known as GPS — nearly 50 years ago, satellites which have become critical infrastructure for both the military and the economy.

Since then, GPS is estimated to have generated more than $1.4 trillion in economic benefits, according to a Commerce Department study. But the agency warned that an “outage could potentially have an economic impact of $1 billion a day.” 

Pentagon leaders believe those losses are a conservative estimate, leading the U.S. Space Force to kick off a roughly $2 billion satellite program known as the Resilient Global Positioning System. Called R-GPS for short, the program is intended to provide an alternative, backup network for the current satellite system.

“[GPS is] vitally important to everything we do day-to-day, from the stock market, for timing of every transaction, to the crops we field,” Lt. Col. Justin Deifel, leader of R-GPS at the Space Force’s Space Systems Command, told CNBC.

“It’s like water and electricity. … It’s a utility of the economy and a utility of a warfighter that we need to make sure is available,” Deifel added.

The importance of the existing 31 GPS satellites in orbit, as well as the potential threat in space from U.S. adversaries like Russia and China, has led the Pentagon to prioritize building the alternative R-GPS network — and the Space Force has turned to the commercial space industry to do so.

Last month, the branch awarded four companies with contracts for R-GPS design concepts: Astranis, Axient, L3 Harris and Sierra Space.

SpaceX launched its fifth test flight of its Starship rocket on Sunday and made a dramatic first catch of the rocket’s more than 20-story tall booster.

The achievement marks a major milestone toward SpaceX’s goal of making Starship a fully reusable rocket system.

Elon Musk‘s company launched Starship at 8:25 a.m. ET from its Starbase facility near Brownsville, Texas. The rocket’s “Super Heavy” booster returned to land on the arms of the company’s launch tower nearly seven minutes after launch.

“Are you kidding me?” SpaceX communications manager Dan Huot said on the company’s webcast.

“What we just saw, that looked like magic,” Huot added.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson congratulated SpaceX in a post on social media.

“As we prepare to go back to the Moon under Artemis, continued testing will prepare us for the bold missions that lie ahead,” Nelson wrote.

Starship separated and continued on to space, traveling halfway around the Earth before reentering the atmosphere and splashing down in the Indian Ocean as intended to complete the test.

There were no people on board the fifth Starship flight. The company’s leadership has said SpaceX expects to fly hundreds of Starship missions before the rocket launches with any crew.

The full Starship system has flown four spaceflight tests previously, with launches in April and November of last year, as well as this March and June. Each of the test flights have achieved more milestones than the last.

SpaceX emphasizes that it tries to build “on what we’ve learned from previous flights” in its approach to developing the massive rocket.

The Starship system is designed to be fully reusable and aims to become a new method of flying cargo and people beyond Earth. The rocket is also critical to NASA’s plan to return astronauts to the moon. SpaceX won a multibillion-dollar contract from the agency to use Starship as a crewed lunar lander as part of NASA’s Artemis moon program.

The Federal Aviation Administration issued SpaceX with a license to launch Starship’s fifth flight on Saturday, sooner than the regulator previously estimated. But the company wanted to launch the fifth flight earlier than October, leading both SpaceX and Musk to be vocally critical of the FAA, saying that “superfluous environmental analysis” was holding up the process.

While the FAA and partner agencies at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service conducted assessments more quickly than anticipated, SpaceX has also had to pay fines to environmental regulators regarding unauthorized water discharges at its Texas launch site.

Northwood Space, the startup led by former television star and singer Bridgit Mendler, passed its first major development test last week by connecting with Planet Labs imagery satellites in orbit.

“We’re building this global network to send data for satellites, built off of phased array technology that we have now successfully validated, both in the lab and in the field,” Mendler, Northwood’s CEO, told CNBC.

El Segundo, California-based Northwood, unveiled earlier this year, is focused on the ground side of the space connectivity equation. Ground stations are the vital link for transmitting data to and from orbit and are especially crucial for operating and controlling satellites.

The startup is developing ground stations to be mass-produced and betting that its phased array-based system, called Portal, can outperform the parabolic dish antennas traditionally used by ground station companies. It’s projecting Portal will be able to connect to as many as 10 satellites at once versus the typical one to three for parabolic dish antennas.

“For Northwood, what we’re wanting to do is introduce a new standard for connectivity for companies,” Mendler said.

The ground station as a service, or GSaaS, market has companies going after the opportunity in managing the Earth-based side of space infrastructure. Along those lines, Amazon has launched its AWS Ground Station service, and satellite communications giant Eutelsat has proposed a nearly $1 billion deal in the sector.

Mendler’s Northwood wants to take GSaaS a step further, eliminating what she sees as “connectivity very much stuck in a different era” of blackouts and “super expensive networks.”

“Analogizing to the cellular industry — where we draw parallels to how cell towers and shared assets like that ultimately have super vertically integrated players — wound up offloading and selling their assets to the tower companies. We expected that the shared model is going to be an efficiency,” Mendler said.

In her view, ground stations are “the third leg of the stool” of space technology, with the other two being rockets, or the cargo vehicles, and satellites, or the orbital infrastructure.

“The industry is really at a point where there’s a lot of appetite for growth, and this is something that we can really interject into the industry and accelerate progress,” Mendler said.