Rocket Lab Stock Has Crashed Even Harder Before. Here's How Long the Last Comeback Took.

Rocket Lab (NASDAQ:RKLB) stock has seen a brutal five months. Shares finished May 27 at $150.23, their highest close ever, and as I write they trade near $52 -- about 65% under that high.

That's a painful drop, but it isn't the worst one the space company has gone through. After a then-record close of $20.72 on Sept. 9, 2021, the stock sank about 83% to a low of $3.53 in April 2024. And then it came all the way back.

Going by daily closing prices, that round trip took over three years from the old high, but just around seven months from the last low. And I think what happened in between matters, because the business behind the comeback traded at a small fraction of today's price.

Image source: Getty Images.

An 83% drop

The slide came in two legs, with a close of $3.56 on Dec. 27, 2022, and then, around 16 months later, a slightly lower close of $3.53 on April 15, 2024.

The business wasn't standing still over that time. Revenue rose 16% in 2023, and Rocket Lab flew a record 10 Electron missions that year, even though a September launch failure left the rocket grounded until the fourth quarter.

Yet its net loss widened to $183 million in 2023 from $136 million in 2022.

Even what management called its biggest contract at the time didn't stop the slide. In December 2023, Rocket Lab signed a deal worth up to $515 million to make 18 satellites for the Space Development Agency. Four months later, the stock hit its low.

What turned the stock around?

Mainly, what turned the stock around was faster revenue growth. Rocket Lab's revenue climbed 69% year over year in the first quarter of 2024 -- a sharp acceleration from 16% growth for all of 2023. Second-quarter growth hit 71%, taking revenue to a record $106 million. By the third quarter, growth was still 55%, and backlog (the value of contracted work not yet recognized as revenue) had reached $1.05 billion. By then, Electron had also flown 12 times that year, a new annual record, and the company had signed a multi-launch Neutron deal with a satellite constellation operator.

The growth stock rallied through those reports. It had already quadrupled from its low when the third-quarter numbers came out on Nov. 12, 2024, and it jumped about 28% the next trading day.

On Nov. 21, it closed at $22.41, finally beating the 2021 high. Rocket Lab ended 2024 with 16 launches and revenue up 78% to $436 million.

Notably, profits weren't part of the turnaround. The company's net loss grew again in 2024, to $190 million. And Neutron, its bigger reusable rocket, hadn't flown yet.

In other words, the stock arguably came back on just revenue growth and contracts, from a price that expected very little. At $3.53 a share, the whole company was worth around $1.7 billion, or about seven times its 2023 revenue.

This time, the growth is already here

Most of what turned the stock around in 2024 is already in place. Rocket Lab's second-quarter 2026 revenue rose 62% year over year to $234 million, and backlog jumped 137% to that record $2.36 billion.

By Nov. 2, the company had launched 20 times this year, more than in all of 2024. And last year, it landed an $816 million Space Development Agency contract, which it called its largest single contract so far.

Unlike in 2024, losses are shrinking, too. The second-quarter net loss under generally accepted accounting principles narrowed to $49 million, from $66 million in the same quarter of 2025.

But the stock dropped 65% anyway, and one likely reason is where it started.

At roughly $52 a share, and counting the preferred shares that convert to common stock, Rocket Lab is worth about $35 billion, or about 20 times its market value at the 2024 low. Revenue for the last four reported quarters, about $769 million, is just a bit more than three times its 2023 total. That number leaves out Iridium, which Rocket Lab agreed to buy in an $8 billion deal (including debt) expected to close in mid-2027. Even after the drop, the share price has run far ahead of the business.

The other difference is Neutron, whose first flight Rocket Lab delayed to 2027 in mid-October. Sure, the stock didn't need Neutron to recover in 2024. At today's price, I think it does.

In the end, I don't think the last comeback says much about how long this one might take. Rocket Lab's business is in far better shape than it was in 2024. But the stock is still priced for lots more growth, and for Neutron to fly. For now, I'm in no rush to buy shares.

Daniel Sparks and his clients do not have positions in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Rocket Lab. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.