Leidos has booked four new HASTE missions with Rocket Lab:

The missions, scheduled across 2024 and 2025, will lift off from Rocket Lab Launch Complex 2 at Virginia’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport within NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility. Rocket Lab was selected by Leidos to provide hypersonic test launch capabilities with HASTE under the MACH-TB project. The project was awarded by Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) Crane through the Strategic and Spectrum Missions Advanced Resilient Trusted Systems (S2MARTS) Other Transaction Authority (OTA) vehicle on behalf of the U.S. Department of Defense Test Resource Management Center (TRMC).

While that’s a pretty big deal, I still think it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what’s about to come as hypersonic research heats up.

At the Morgan Stanley 11th Annual Laguna Conference last week Rocket Lab’s Manager of Investor Relations, Colin Canfield, said they eventually see HASTE also being used as a target for counter-hypersonic weapons. That will be a really profitable way to “decommission” flight hardware that has already seen multiple uses.