Rocket Lab’s $35 Billion Valuation Makes Little Sense – Until You Look at 2035

March 30th, 2026 by Trefis Team
RKLB: Rocket Lab logo
RKLB
Rocket Lab

Building the 2040 Economy

The message is simple. How short-sighted can you be – look way far out and imagine the civilization you’ll leave for your children. Will it be a civilization stuck on a single planet, dependent on a single launch provider, with no affordable access to orbit. Why would you focus on this quarter’s earnings when thousands of satellites need to be launched, when the entire global communications infrastructure of the next century is being built right now, up in space?

Think about what the world looks like post-2040: fully connected and reliant entirely on the orbital infrastructure being laid today.

So what does that have to do with Rocket Lab stock? Everything.

Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket is already the second most frequently launched U.S. rocket annually, accounting for 64% of all non-SpaceX orbital U.S. launches. And yet, this is a global launch market where SpaceX dominates, where Arianespace, ULA, CASC, and ISRO launch billions of dollars of payloads annually, where the addressable market is vast and barely tapped.

Yes, most of these incumbents are either government-backed or divisions of defense giants, and yet Rocket Lab, a small company out of New Zealand, is already a clear #2 in the U.S. Let that sink in. See how Rocket Lab’s stock performance and risk profile stacks up against some of the players in aerospace industry.

Building a rocket takes time. Even if the market is screaming for it, you can’t cut corners on the engineering unless you’re okay with the entire mission ending in a total disaster. So the only way Rocket Lab can look like it is worth $10 billion, $40 billion, and eventually $150 billion or more, is if investors can look way, way out. Think 2035.

The Math Behind a Potential $400 Billion Valuation

The global space launch services market was $21.2 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $70.6 billion by 2035 (Precedence Research). And that is just the launch. The broader satellite market was $362 billion in 2025 and could surge to $780 billion by 2035 (Precedence Research). Rocket Lab, through its Space Systems division, wants a slice of all of it – not just the rockets, but the satellites, the components, the sensors, the on-orbit management. The whole stack.

Now settle on a timeframe where Rocket Lab capturing 10% of the launch market and 5% of the satellite systems market makes sense. Ten percent of a $70 billion launch market is $7 billion. Five percent of a $780 billion satellite market is $39 billion. That is over $46 billion in combined annual revenues against a current run rate of just over $600 million. At margins of 25-30% as reusability matures, you are looking at $11–14 billion in annual profits. What is that worth to you? A lot more than $35 billion, which is the current market cap of RKLB. Stocks like MSFT, AAPL, and NFLX trade at 35 times profits. This would imply a $400 billion company, 10x from here.

Why Neutron is the Monopoly Breaker

And don’t forget Neutron. The medium-lift market is currently almost entirely served by SpaceX -a strategic bottleneck for Amazon’s (AMZN) Project Kuiper, the U.S. government, and dozens of commercial constellation operators. Neutron is designed to break that monopoly. And here is what most people miss: Rocket Lab already generates 67% of its revenue from satellite components and sensors, and this business accounts for 74% of the company’s current backlog. This means even before Neutron flies a single commercial mission, the company is profiting from the very constellations that will one day fly on its rockets. Vertical integration as a moat. Competitors cannot easily replicate that.

But wait, Neutron is delayed, so it must be risky. No?

Again, risk is a matter of perspective. Real risk is leaving humanity dependent on a single launch provider. Real risk is obsessing over a quarterly miss while the architecture of the next century’s global infrastructure is being assembled above the clouds.

Real risk is ceding the medium-lift market entirely to SpaceX and letting the geopolitical and commercial leverage that comes with it concentrate in one pair of hands. Fear that. Look way out, and you will see Rocket Lab’s real value.

The Bottom Line

Rocket Lab’s backlog hit $1.85 billion, growing 73% year-over-year. Revenue per Electron launch climbed from $7 million to over $10 million in a single year. The trajectory is unmistakable.

What about discounting those future profits back to today? Don’t lose too much sleep over it. Interest rates will not stay elevated forever, and 2035 will be here before you know it.

If you understand this perspective, you will recognize that Rocket Lab’s most important metric is its long-term time horizon. Many investors already sense this value even if they haven’t explicitly defined it, which is why the company’s current $35 billion valuation still appears low to them.

However, even with a strong long-term thesis, the path for any single growth stock is rarely a straight line. Navigating the volatility of the space sector requires balancing high-conviction bets with a broader strategy designed to protect against the unpredictability of the market.

A smart portfolio helps you stay invested by limiting the impact of sudden downside shocks while maintaining exposure to significant upside. While consistently beating the market is a challenge, the Trefis High Quality (HQ) Portfolio is designed to make it an achievable goal. By selecting 30 high-conviction stocks, the HQ strategy has historically outperformed benchmarks like the S&P 500, S&P Mid-cap, and Russell 2000. You can see how this curated selection delivers superior risk-adjusted returns in our HQ performance factsheet.