Latest news with #spaceindustry
Reuters
3 days ago
- Science
- Reuters
Iran conducted suborbital test with Qased satellite launch vehicle, report says
DUBAI, July 21 (Reuters) - Iran conducted a suborbital test with the Qased satellite launch vehicle to evaluate new technologies developed by the country's space industry, semi-official Tasnim news agency reported on Monday. "The results of this test will be used to improve the performance of the country's satellites and space systems," the Tasnim report said.
Globe and Mail
3 days ago
- Business
- Globe and Mail
Why Rocket Lab Stock Skyrocketed Last Week
Key Points Rocket Lab stock surged nearly 32% with the help of bullish coverage from analysts. Citi and Bank of America both reiterated buy ratings on Rocket Lab and raised their respective price targets on the stock to $50 per share. Rocket Lab's growth-dependent valuation could create volatility for the stock, but the company has strong positioning in launch services. 10 stocks we like better than Rocket Lab › Rocket Lab (NASDAQ: RKLB) stock recorded another run of huge gains over the past week. The company's share price was gained 31.7% from the previous market's close. The S&P 500 index rose 0.6% over the same period of time. Bullish coverage from analysts helped power massive valuation expansion for Rocket Lab stock over the past week and pushed the company to a new valuation high. Continued excitement surrounding short-term and long-term opportunities in the space industry also supported strong bullish momentum for the stock. Rocket Lab surged as analysts moved price targets higher On July 14, Citi published new coverage on Rocket Lab that maintained a buy rating on the stock. The investment firm updated its coverage on the stock in conjunction with a broader review of its outlook on the defense and aerospace industries. In general, Citi's analysts continue to see very strong momentum in the categories -- and they raised their one-year price target on Rocket Lab from $33 to $50 per share. Bank of America followed up with its own coverage update on Rocket Lab on July 16 and also reiterated a buy rating on the stock. The firm's analysts raised their one-year price target on Rocket Lab stock from $30 to $50 per share and cited opportunities surrounding the company's reusable Neutron rockets and strong positioning in end-to-end satellite launch and development technologies as bullish catalysts. Following gains on the heels of the coverage, Rocket Lab stock actually closed out the week above Citi and Bank of America's price target of $50 per share. What's next for Rocket Lab? Space commercialization has emerged as a growth trend that's attracting a lot of excitement from investors, and Rocket Lab looks well positioned to capitalize on long-term growth opportunities in its corners of the space industry. After climbing 102% across this year's trading, the company now has a market capitalization of $23.7 billion and is valued at approximately 41 times this year's expected sales. Rocket Lab's stock run-up and growth-dependent valuation make its shares a risky play, but the company could still go on to deliver explosive returns for long-term investors if the business continues to rack up wins in launch services and other categories. Should you invest $1,000 in Rocket Lab right now? Before you buy stock in Rocket Lab, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Rocket Lab wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $652,133!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $1,056,790!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 1,048% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 180% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor. See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of July 15, 2025
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Why Rocket Lab Stock Skyrocketed Last Week
Key Points Rocket Lab stock surged nearly 32% with the help of bullish coverage from analysts. Citi and Bank of America both reiterated buy ratings on Rocket Lab and raised their respective price targets on the stock to $50 per share. Rocket Lab's growth-dependent valuation could create volatility for the stock, but the company has strong positioning in launch services. 10 stocks we like better than Rocket Lab › Rocket Lab (NASDAQ: RKLB) stock recorded another run of huge gains over the past week. The company's share price was gained 31.7% from the previous market's close. The S&P 500 index rose 0.6% over the same period of time. Bullish coverage from analysts helped power massive valuation expansion for Rocket Lab stock over the past week and pushed the company to a new valuation high. Continued excitement surrounding short-term and long-term opportunities in the space industry also supported strong bullish momentum for the stock. Rocket Lab surged as analysts moved price targets higher On July 14, Citi published new coverage on Rocket Lab that maintained a buy rating on the stock. The investment firm updated its coverage on the stock in conjunction with a broader review of its outlook on the defense and aerospace industries. In general, Citi's analysts continue to see very strong momentum in the categories -- and they raised their one-year price target on Rocket Lab from $33 to $50 per share. Bank of America followed up with its own coverage update on Rocket Lab on July 16 and also reiterated a buy rating on the stock. The firm's analysts raised their one-year price target on Rocket Lab stock from $30 to $50 per share and cited opportunities surrounding the company's reusable Neutron rockets and strong positioning in end-to-end satellite launch and development technologies as bullish catalysts. Following gains on the heels of the coverage, Rocket Lab stock actually closed out the week above Citi and Bank of America's price target of $50 per share. What's next for Rocket Lab? Space commercialization has emerged as a growth trend that's attracting a lot of excitement from investors, and Rocket Lab looks well positioned to capitalize on long-term growth opportunities in its corners of the space industry. After climbing 102% across this year's trading, the company now has a market capitalization of $23.7 billion and is valued at approximately 41 times this year's expected sales. Rocket Lab's stock run-up and growth-dependent valuation make its shares a risky play, but the company could still go on to deliver explosive returns for long-term investors if the business continues to rack up wins in launch services and other categories. Should you invest $1,000 in Rocket Lab right now? Before you buy stock in Rocket Lab, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and Rocket Lab wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $652,133!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $1,056,790!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 1,048% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 180% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor. See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of July 15, 2025 Citigroup is an advertising partner of Motley Fool Money. Bank of America is an advertising partner of Motley Fool Money. Keith Noonan has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Rocket Lab. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Why Rocket Lab Stock Skyrocketed Last Week was originally published by The Motley Fool
Forbes
17-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
West Coast Opportunities Await Space Industry Rocket Booster Builders
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base. America is struggling to keep up with a booming space industry. A particular space challenge is looming in the Pacific, where investments to bolster U.S. space launch infrastructure lag behind Florida's highly-integrated East Coast launch complexes. This East Coast overweighting is a mistake. Too much big-booster production and other key space manufacturing infrastructure is consolidating eastward. But America's Western launch sites are growing in importance, and the lack of space industry investment may strangle opportunities for future growth. The problem is an economic one. The space industry loves the short-term economic stimulus provided by the Southeastern states, but the operational consequences from the over-consolidation of this industry in the Southeast is, for certain space products, quite dire. Take boosters. The wide, tall and heavy rocket boosters of tomorrow are outgrowing America's old-school roads and rail systems. They don't travel well, and that forces America's next-generation orbital rockets into a crippling dependence upon America's fragile, underdeveloped and easily-disrupted maritime transportation network. This, coupled with America's unfortunate defenestration of the West Coast's limited supply of industrial waterfront, means that America's space launch industry is on the verge of trapping itself on the wrong side of the increasingly unreliable Panama Canal. For the U.S. space economy, overbuilding East Coast space launch support infrastructure provides short term gains in exchange for long-term risks. Cape Canaveral is a wonderful facility. But the Pacific offers America and the Space Industry massive and overlooked opportunities. Outside of SpaceX, America's big-booster community has been slow to invest in the West Coast. To grow—and to challenge SpaceX's virtual lock on the West Coast's big-rocket opportunities, California's Vandenberg Space Force Base, Alaska's Pacific Spaceport Complex and other remote-but-ideally-placed launch sites in America's Pacific territories need more West Coast-based booster production and associated support infrastructure. A 212-foot-tall SLS core stage for the Artemis II moon rocket squeezes out of a barge West Coast is the Space Industry's Future: For space flight, western momentum is undeniable. At California's Vandenberg Space Force Base, the Falcon 9-driven launch tempo has increased by a torrid 30% a year. After hosting just four launches in 2012, Vandenberg is challenging Cape Canaveral's blistering launch tempo. Between May 31 and June 28, Vandenberg hosted seven rocket launches to Cape Canaveral's 10. It would only take a strong hurricane for Vandenberg to sneak ahead. Farther north, the remote Pacific Spaceport Complex—becalmed by launch and testing failures—still predicts launch tempo at the Kodiak, Alaska-based facility will, by 2030, increase almost ten-fold. Farther west, additional development beckons the right innovators. Long-abandoned U.S. rocket-launch facilities on Johnston Island, leased facilities on Kwajalein, and other remote places in the deep Pacific offer American space launch programs invaluable launching points near the equator. With open sea to the east, America's island holdings may offer new frontiers for the big and heavy rockets—and the big, heavy payloads—of the future. Right now, the only big-rocket company poised to exploit America's Pacific space launch facilities is SpaceX. Elon Musk—a newly-minted presidential adversary—moved the SpaceX headquarters out of California in a highly-publicized political huff. Despite the well-orchestrated political showmanship, SpaceX has steadily expanded their West Coast footprint, growing a Long Beach port facility—just 30 minutes from a Falcon 9 first stage fabrication plant—so SpaceX employees can recover and refurbish Falcon 9 booster cores faster and, potentially, assemble and ship larger rockets for use elsewhere. Rivals may be hesitant to challenge SpaceX in the Pacific, but, even SpaceX's ideally-built-out 14-acre waterfront facility is no sure thing. Musk's new 'spaceport' is a former Navy base. In essence, SpaceX has effectively appropriated the Long Beach Naval Complex—and all the infrastructure investment the U.S. government made in the facility—for a bargain-basement cost. An irked White House could easily use the burgeoning national security threat in the Pacific as an excuse to recover the entire complex, dashing SpaceX's virtual monopoly on America's Pacific launch infrastructure—a step that would launch a healthy competition as booster manufacturers jostled for a West Coast toehold. Even without White House involvement, additional big booster-building outposts outside of the already-crowded Los Angeles/Long Beach waterfront makes sense. Private industry is paying a lot for launches, offering an opportunity to quickly pay off the capital costs. Space, however, is limited. Only a handful of California harbors can offer the Space industry the right combination of waterfront access and skilled labor within a few hundred miles of Vandenberg's launch pads. Wider geographical distribution of America's booster production and refurbishment sites is a good thing for America's space industry. It is the only way to accelerate an already blistering Pacific launch tempo at Vandenberg, and America's booster rockets, orbital payloads and geospatial stakes are just getting bigger.
Yahoo
11-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Spacecraft equipped with a solar sail could deliver earlier warnings of space weather threats to Earth's technologies
The burgeoning space industry and the technologies society increasingly relies on – electric grids, aviation and telecommunications – are all vulnerable to the same threat: space weather. Space weather encompasses any variations in the space environment between the Sun and Earth. One common type of space weather event is called an interplanetary coronal mass ejection. These ejections are bundles of magnetic fields and particles that originate from the Sun. They can travel at speeds up to 1,242 miles per second (2,000 kilometers per second) and may cause geomagnetic storms. They create beautiful aurora displays – like the northern lights you can sometimes see in the skies – but can also disrupt satellite operations, shut down the electric grid and expose astronauts aboard future crewed missions to the Moon and Mars to lethal doses of radiation. I'm a heliophysicist and space weather expert, and my team is leading the development of a next-generation satellite constellation called SWIFT, which is designed to predict potentially dangerous space weather events in advance. Our goal is to forecast extreme space weather more accurately and earlier. Commercial interests now make up a big part of space exploration, focusing on space tourism, building satellite networks, and working toward extracting resources from the Moon and nearby asteroids. Space is also a critical domain for military operations. Satellites provide essential capabilities for military communication, surveillance, navigation and intelligence. As countries such as the U.S. grow to depend on infrastructure in space, extreme space weather events pose a greater threat. Today, space weather threatens up to US$2.7 trillion in assets globally. In September 1859, the most powerful recorded space weather event, known as the Carrington event, caused fires in North America and Europe by supercharging telegraph lines. In August 1972, another Carrington-like event nearly struck the astronauts orbiting the Moon. The radiation dose could have been fatal. More recently, in February 2022, SpaceX lost 39 of its 49 newly launched Starlink satellites because of a moderate space weather event. Space weather services heavily rely on satellites that monitor the solar wind, which is made up of magnetic field lines and particles coming from the Sun, and communicate their observations back to Earth. Scientists can then compare those observations with historical records to predict space weather and explore how the Earth may respond to the observed changes in the solar wind. Earth's magnetic field naturally protects living things and Earth-orbiting satellites from most adverse effects of space weather. However, extreme space weather events may compress – or in some cases, peel back – the Earth's magnetic shield. This process allows solar wind particles to make it into our protected environment – the magnetosphere – exposing satellites and astronauts onboard space stations to harsh conditions. Most satellites that continuously monitor Earth-bound space weather orbit relatively close to the planet. Some satellites are positioned in low Earth orbit, about 100 miles (161 kilometers) above Earth's surface, while others are in geosynchronous orbit, approximately 25,000 miles (40,000 km) away. At these distances, the satellites remain within Earth's protective magnetic shield and can reliably measure the planet's response to space weather conditions. However, to more directly study incoming solar wind, researchers use additional satellites located farther upstream – hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth. The U.S., the European Space Agency and India all operate space weather monitoring satellites positioned around the L1 Lagrange point – nearly 900,000 miles (1,450,000 km) from Earth – where the gravitational forces of the Sun and Earth balance. From this vantage point, space weather monitors can provide up to 40 minutes of advance warning for incoming solar events. Increasing the warning time beyond 40 minutes – the current warning time – would help satellite operators, electric grid planners, flight directors, astronauts and Space Force officers better prepare for extreme space weather events. For instance, during geomagnetic storms, the atmosphere heats up and expands, increasing drag on satellites in low Earth orbit. With enough advance warning, operators can update their drag calculations to prevent satellites from descending and burning up during these events. With the updated drag calculations, satellite operators could use the satellites' propulsion systems to maneuver them higher up in orbit. Airlines could change their routes to avoid exposing passengers and staff to high radiation doses during geomagnetic storms. And future astronauts on the way to or working on the Moon or Mars, which lack protection from these particles, could be alerted in advance to take cover. Aurora lovers would also appreciate having more time to get to their favorite viewing destinations. My team and I have been developing a new space weather satellite constellation, named the Space Weather Investigation Frontier. SWIFT will, for the first time, place a space weather monitor beyond the L1 point, at 1.3 million miles (2.1 million kilometers) from Earth. This distance would allow scientists to inform decision-makers of any Earth-bound space weather events up to nearly 60 minutes before arrival. Satellites with traditional chemical and electric propulsion systems cannot maintain an orbit at that location – farther from Earth and closer to the Sun – for long. This is because they would need to continuously burn fuel to counteract the Sun's gravitational pull. To address this issue, our team has spent decades designing and developing a new propulsion system. Our solution is designed to affordably reach a distance that is closer to the Sun than the traditional L1 point, and to operate there reliably for more than a decade by harnessing an abundant and reliable resource – sunlight. SWIFT would use a fuelless propulsion system called a solar sail to reach its orbit. A solar sail is a hair-thin reflective surface – simulating a very thin mirror – that spans about a third of a football field. It balances the force of light particles coming from the Sun, which pushes it away, with the Sun's gravity, which pulls it inward. While a sailboat harnesses the lift created by wind flowing over its curved sails to move across water, a solar sail uses the momentum of photons from sunlight, reflected off its large, shiny sail, to propel a spacecraft through space. Both the sailboat and solar sail exploit the transfer of energy from their respective environments to drive motion without relying on traditional propellants. A solar sail could enable SWIFT to enter an otherwise unstable sub-L1 orbit without the risk of running out of fuel. NASA successfully launched its first solar sail in 2010. This in-space demonstration, named NanoSail-D2, featured a 107-square-foot (10 m2 ) sail and was placed in low Earth orbit. That same year, the Japanese Space Agency launched a larger solar sail mission, IKAROS, which deployed a 2,110 ft2 (196 m2 ) sail in the solar wind and successfully orbited Venus. The Planetary Society and NASA followed up by launching two sails in low Earth orbit: LightSail, with an area of 344 ft2 (32 m2 ), and the advanced composite solar sail system, with an area of 860 ft2 (80 m2 ). The SWIFT team's solar sail demonstration mission, Solar Cruiser, will be equipped with a much larger sail – it will have area of 17,793 ft2 (1,653 m2 ) and launch as early as 2029. We successfully deployed a quadrant of the sail on Earth early last year. To transport it to space, the team will meticulously fold and tightly pack the sail inside a small canister. The biggest challenge to overcome will be deploying the sail once in space and using it to guide the satellite along its orbital path. If successful, Solar Cruiser will pave the way for SWIFT's constellation of four satellites. The constellation would include one satellite equipped with sail propulsion, set to be placed in an orbit beyond L1, and three smaller satellites with chemical propulsion in orbit at the L1 Lagrange point. The satellites will be indefinitely parked at and beyond L1, collecting data in the solar wind without interruption. Each of the four satellites can observe the solar wind from different locations, helping scientists better predict how it may evolve before reaching Earth. As modern life depends more on space infrastructure, continuing to invest in space weather prediction can protect both space- and ground-based technologies. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Mojtaba Akhavan-Tafti, University of Michigan Read more: Solar storms can destroy satellites with ease – a space weather expert explains the science Colliding plasma ejections from the Sun generate huge geomagnetic storms − studying them will help scientists monitor future space weather Lightning strikes link weather on Earth and weather in space Mojtaba Akhavan-Tafti receives funding from NASA. He is the Principal Investigator of Space Weather Investigation Frontier (SWIFT).
