Electron

Eighteen metres tall and 1.2 metres across, with 190 kilonewtons at liftoff and 300 kilograms to low orbit. Rocket Lab also quotes a 224 kilonewton peak, which is a different thing and gets misreported as the liftoff figure often enough to be worth naming. Two stages, plus an optional kick stage that does the orbit trimming.

The engines are electric-pump-fed, which is the genuinely novel piece of engineering here: batteries and motors drive the propellant pumps instead of a gas generator, trading dead mass for a drastically simpler engine that can be printed and produced at rate. At this scale that trade closes. At Falcon 9 scale it would not.

The economics are honest about what they are. At a commonly quoted 7.5 million dollars a launch, 300 kilograms works out around 25,000 dollars a kilogram, several times the Falcon 9 rideshare rate. Nobody buys an Electron because it is cheap. They buy it because they choose the orbit, the date and the deployment sequence instead of riding as a passenger on somebody else's schedule.

The reuse story is the useful counterexample to all the reuse triumphalism elsewhere on this page. Rocket Lab tried mid-air helicopter capture, gave it up for ocean recovery, and has so far reflown a single Rutherford engine rather than a whole booster. The company markets the vehicle as reusable-capable; the honest reading is that Electron flies expendable and the reuse ambition moved wholesale to Neutron, which is designed around it from the first sketch.

Ninety-four launches by early September 2026, ninety successes, and no failures at all in 2025 or 2026. Neutron, meanwhile, has qualified stages, a finished pad and regulatory approval, and still has not flown.