Rocket Lab shares rose 2.24% to $71.26 in Wednesday premarket trading as investors assessed the company’s $8 billion acquisition of satellite communications company Iridium, its launch cadence and competition for government contracts. Rocket Lab said on Sept. 15 that the transaction was fully funded after completing a $1.94 billion at-the-market equity offering, allowing it to terminate a $3.6 billion senior secured bridge facility ahead of the targeted mid-2027 closing. About 99.6% of Iridium stockholders approved the buyout on Sept. 24. Separately, Rocket Lab protested NASA’s award of a $700 million Mars Telecommunications Network contract to Blue Origin. The filing with the Government Accountability Office triggered an automatic statutory stay, stopping Blue Origin from working on the contract until the GAO rules by mid-December 2026. Rocket Lab also completed four Electron missions from New Zealand during September 2026, including a Sept. 25 launch that became its 97th Electron mission overall and 18th launch of the year. The mission deployed Synspective’s 13th StriX synthetic aperture radar satellite into low Earth orbit. The company also released its IMM Apex space solar cell architecture, which uses a germanium-free design to avoid supply-chain bottlenecks involving critical raw minerals.