Rocket Lab stock jumps 8%, building on strong two-month rally
Shares of the space infrastructure company have nearly doubled over the last two months following a slew of successful launches and a deal with the European Union.
The stock is up 63% year to date after surging nearly sixfold in 2024.
Last month, Rocket Lab announced a partnership with the European Space Agency to launch satellites for constellation navigation before December.
Rocket Lab also announced the successful launch of its 66th, 67th and 68th Electron rockets in June. The company successfully deployed two rockets from the same site in 48 hours.
Rocket Lab competes with a growing list of companies in a maturing and increasingly competitive space industry with growing demand. Some of the main competitors in the sector include Elon Musk's SpaceX and Firefly Aerospace, which filed its prospectus to go public on Friday.
"For Electron, our little rocket, we've seen increased demand over the last couple of years and we're not just launching single spacecraft — these are generally entire constellations for customers," CEO Peter Beck told CNBC last month.
He said the company is producing a rocket every 15 days.
Beck, a New Zealand-native, founded the company in 2006. Since its debut on the Nasdaq in August 2021 through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, the Long Beach, California-based company's market value has swelled to more than $19 billion.
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New York Post
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CNET
an hour ago
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What Is Grok? Everything to Know About Elon Musk's AI Tool
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"'PhD-level' is being thrown around as a marketing term with no real rigorous benchmarks behind it. It also completely misunderstands what PhDs actually do," Licato told CNET. xAI didn't immediately respond to a request for clarification or comment. Grok offers three tiers. The Basic plan is free and includes limited access to Grok 3, basic features like projects and tasks and limited tokens (building blocks of text that AI models use to process language). The SuperGrok plan costs $30 per month and unlocks increased access to both Grok 3 and Grok 4. It includes 128,000 tokens, context memory and additional features like voice with vision. For example, if you show Grok a photo or point a camera at something and ask about it out loud, it will analyze the image and generate a response. Then there's SuperGrok Heavy, priced at $300 per month, with access to Grok 4 Heavy (currently in exclusive preview), early access to new features and dedicated support. 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When I asked Licato if he found that concerning, he agreed and added that he's not convinced Grok or the leadership behind it is doing anything to ensure responsible use of its technology. "Grok is marketed as more of a truth-teller than its competitors, and this is leading to a lot of people believing that it is somehow more reliable," Licato told CNET. "But I do not see any good evidence that this is actually true, and I worry that, since so much of the public does not know how easy it is to get LLMs to spout false information, they may just be aiding in the spreading of mis- and disinformation." Michael Berthold, CEO and co-founder of AI analytics company KNIME, told me he's concerned about the broader implications of AI chatbots rewriting or summarizing knowledge. "The worry I have, and I see it with my own kids, is how the next generation will be learning things," Berthold told CNET. 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With rapid advancements in the AI sphere, skepticism over this technology is rising, too.
Wall Street Journal
an hour ago
- Wall Street Journal
AI Is Growing Up, and So Are Users
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