🚨 $RKLB: 21 U.S. MILITARY SATELLITES REACH ORBIT WITH ROCKET LAB-OWNED MYNARIC LASER TECHNOLOGY ON BOARD. A BIG WIN FOR ITS DEFENSE SPACE BUSINESS! Northrop Grumman $NOC just deployed 21 satellites for the Space Development Agency's Tranche 1 Transport Layer. And guess whose technology is flying on those satellites? Rocket Lab's Mynaric. Rocket Lab acquired Mynaric, the German company that manufactures laser communication terminals for satellites. These terminals allow satellites to communicate directly with each other using optical links, moving military data across orbit without routing every transmission through ground stations. That's especially valuable for missile tracking, secure communications and military operations requiring low-latency connectivity. Now connect a few dots. Northrop Grumman builds the satellites. Mynaric supplies critical optical communications hardware. SpaceX can launch the satellites. Rocket Lab gets to participate even when it isn't building or launching the spacecraft. $RKLB also has approximately $1.3B in SDA satellite manufacturing contracts covering 36 spacecraft. Investors are still looking at Rocket Lab too much through Electron and Neutron. The company is expanding into spacecraft manufacturing, satellite components, space robotics and now laser communications. As the Pentagon builds larger, interconnected satellite constellations, optical terminals become an important part of the hardware supply chain. The next thing I want to see is Mynaric scaling production, delivering its contracted terminals and securing additional orders.