Rocket Lab held an eagerly anticipated conference call to confirm additional details about its massive $515 million satellite constellation deal today:

The company joins Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, who received awards in August to develop 36 satellites each. The spacecraft are part of the third generation — dubbed Tranche 2 — of SDA’s Proliferated Warfigher Space Architecture, a fleet of hundreds of small satellites operating in low Earth orbit, about 1,200 miles above the planet’s surface.

That is very exclusive company and it highlights the most important takeaway from today’s call:

Rocket Lab will act as a prime contractor for SDA, leading the design, development, production, test, and operations of the satellites, including procurement and integration of the payload subsystems. The contract has a base value of $489 million plus $26 million in incentives and options.

“This contract marks the beginning of Rocket Lab’s new era as a leading satellite prime,” Rocket Lab’s founder and CEO Peter Beck said Jan. 8.

The company also confirmed that it is pursuing similar and even larger contracts across the defense and commercial domains. You can really see the strategy coming together (as they note in the related presentation) and positioning Rocket Lab to be a powerhouse even before all of the pieces are firmly in place.

This, at least in my opinion, signals Rocket Lab’s transition into a much more impactful and stable phase in it’s evolution. It de-risks the business and positions it for growth in ways that simply expanding launch cadence cannot. If that isn’t clear to you now I suspect it will be before 2024 ends. They are still just getting started.