Rocket Lab is an end-to-end space company delivering reliable launch services, complete spacecraft design and manufacturing, satellite components, flight software, and more.
Created: 2023-02-22
Updated: 2025-09-06
Company - Rocket Lab
Product/Service - Photon
- Classification
- In-Space Transportation
- Category
- Space Tug
Commercial Mars Lander
Commercial Sample Return
- Fields
- Transport Service (In-Space)
Venus
Mars
- Status
- Demonstrated
- First launch
- 2020
- Photon flies as the upper stage of Electron, eliminating the parasitic mass of deployed spacecraft and enabling full utilization of the fairing.
- Photon can also fly on other launch vehicles, in particular using ESPA ports as a secondary payload.
- Configurable for a range missions in LEO, MEO, GEO, and beyond, including lunar and planetary.
- The $32 million contract will see Rocket Lab design and manufacture a spacecraft to conduct rendezvous proximity operations, before launching it on Electron with 24 hours’ notice for Space Systems Command’s VICTUS HAZE mission.
- The mission is targeted for launch in 2025.
NASA Selects Six Companies to Provide Orbital Transfer Vehicle Studies, 2025-08-05.
- NASA has selected six companies to produce studies focused on lower-cost ways to launch and deliver spacecraft of various sizes and forms to multiple, difficult-to-reach orbits.
- The firm-fixed-price awards comprise nine studies with a maximum total value of approximately $1.4 million.
- Rocket Lab’s two studies will feature the upper stage of the company’s Neutron rocket, as well as a long-life orbital transfer vehicle based on its Explorer spacecraft. Both vehicles are equipped with their own propulsion systems and other subsystems for missions to medium Earth and geosynchronous orbit and deep space destinations like the Moon, Mars, and near-Earth asteroids.
Mars
Venus
Rocket Lab plans launch of Venus mission as soon as late 2024, 2023-10-30.
We’re embarking on the first private Venus mission and sending a probe into the Venusian atmosphere to search for signs of microbial life.
NASA Installs Heat Shield on First Private Spacecraft Bound for Venus, 2025-02-27.
- Led by Rocket Lab of Long Beach, California, and their partners at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Rocket Lab’s Venus mission will be the first private mission to the planet.
- NASA’s role is to help the commercial space endeavor succeed by providing expertise in thermal protection of small spacecraft.
- Invented at Ames, NASA’s Heatshield for Extreme Entry Environment Technology (HEEET) – the brown, textured material covering the bottom of the capsule in this photo – is a woven heat shield designed to protect spacecraft from temperatures up to 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit.
- The probe will deploy from Rocket Lab’s Photon spacecraft bus, taking measurements as it descends through the planet’s atmosphere.
Notes
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