Latest news with #DaveMcFarland
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Why Rocket Lab (RKLB) Stock Is Soaring Today
Rocket Lab USA (NASDAQ:RKLB) shares climbed about 8% on Wednesday after the company supported the third successful return of Varda Space Industries' W?3 capsule. Warning! GuruFocus has detected 7 Warning Signs with INTC. This marks Rocket Lab's second Earth?return mission in two months using its Pioneer spacecraft. The W?3 capsule touched down at Southern Launch's Koonibba Test Range in South Australia after 60 days in orbit. Since February 2024, Rocket Lab has managed three of four contracted W?series missions. The inaugural W?1 effort was the first private space?manufacturing return outside the International Space Station, landing at Utah's Test and Training Range. Each Pioneer spacecraft provides power, communications, propulsion, and attitude control for Varda's 120 kg capsules. Built and tested at Rocket Lab's Long Beach facility, the modular design uses in?house star trackers, reaction wheels, and composite structures to enable rapid re?entry. Delivering three missions in just over a year highlights our rapid?response capability, said CEO Sir Peter Beck. Varda's vice president of reentry testing, Dave McFarland, added that the pace demonstrates a reliable low?Earth?orbit manufacturing solution. Rocket Lab is now preparing its fourth Pioneer for Varda's next mission while advancing its Electron launch vehicle and Neutron heavy?lift rocket for future orbital services. This article first appeared on GuruFocus. Error while retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Why Rocket Lab (RKLB) Stock Is Soaring Today
Rocket Lab USA (NASDAQ:RKLB) shares climbed about 8% on Wednesday after the company supported the third successful return of Varda Space Industries' W?3 capsule. Warning! GuruFocus has detected 7 Warning Signs with INTC. This marks Rocket Lab's second Earth?return mission in two months using its Pioneer spacecraft. The W?3 capsule touched down at Southern Launch's Koonibba Test Range in South Australia after 60 days in orbit. Since February 2024, Rocket Lab has managed three of four contracted W?series missions. The inaugural W?1 effort was the first private space?manufacturing return outside the International Space Station, landing at Utah's Test and Training Range. Each Pioneer spacecraft provides power, communications, propulsion, and attitude control for Varda's 120 kg capsules. Built and tested at Rocket Lab's Long Beach facility, the modular design uses in?house star trackers, reaction wheels, and composite structures to enable rapid re?entry. Delivering three missions in just over a year highlights our rapid?response capability, said CEO Sir Peter Beck. Varda's vice president of reentry testing, Dave McFarland, added that the pace demonstrates a reliable low?Earth?orbit manufacturing solution. Rocket Lab is now preparing its fourth Pioneer for Varda's next mission while advancing its Electron launch vehicle and Neutron heavy?lift rocket for future orbital services. This article first appeared on GuruFocus. Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Varda lands third space capsule, carrying key hypersonic flight data
Varda Space Industries, a California-based, in-orbit manufacturing company, recovered its third reentry capsule Wednesday, providing new data to support the Air Force Research Laboratory's hypersonic research efforts. Funded by AFRL, Varda's W-3 capsule launched March 14 on Rocket Lab's Pioneer satellite, which provided power, communications and propulsion for the system. It landed May 13 at Koonibba Test Range in South Australia. The Varda capsule carried an inertial measurement unit — built for the Air Force by Innovative Scientific Solutions Incorporated and designed to allow systems to navigate and maneuver without GPS. According to Varda, the W-3 capsule reentered Earth's atmosphere at speeds that exceeded Mach 25, considered an 'extreme' environment that can provide the military with new information about how systems perform in hypersonic conditions. 'The W-3 mission will provide unprecedented data to advance next-generation space and defense capabilities and continue to provide hypersonic environments to the reentry test community,' Dave McFarland, Varda's Vice President of Hypersonic and Reentry Test, said in a statement. Varda was founded in 2021 with a plan to send 'production facility' satellites to space and manufacture everything from pharmaceuticals to fiber-optic cables in a zero-gravity environment. Because the capsules it uses to return the objects to Earth travel through a hypersonic environment, AFRL and NASA have partnered with the firm to use those vehicles as high-speed, reusable testbeds. That application helped Varda secure a $60 million strategic funding increase in 2023 from AFRL, NASA and several private investors. Last November, AFRL awarded the company a four-year, $48 million contract to continue testing military payload reentry through a program called Prometheus. Varda recovered its first capsule in 2024 in Utah and its second in February, also at the Koonibba Test Range. Varda's fourth spacecraft is in the midst of integration and testing in California at Rocket Lab's Spacecraft Production Complex. The company has indicated that its first two successful missions proved the versatility of its W-series vehicle to fly a range of payloads and have given it the confidence to shift its focus to increasing the system's launch cadence. 'For our pharmaceutical customers, increased cadence means we are able to more closely match drug development timelines,' the company said in a May 8 press release. 'For defense customers, it allows for faster iteration between tests. And for microgravity researchers, we can offer a faster turnaround time between the design of an experiment and receiving data to iterate on.'
