Electron Rocket Delivers Third Batch of HawkEye 360 Sensors to Orbit

Rocket Lab launched three commercial signals-intelligence satellites from New Zealand early Thursday morning. The Electron rocket lifted off at 3:11 a.m. EDT, a time that coincided with 8:11 p.m. local time at the company's launch site.

The payload included three spacecraft built for HawkEye 360, a company based in Virginia. Rocket Lab designated the mission "We're Not Hawking Around" in reference to the customer's satellite fleet. If the mission proceeds as planned, the three units will separate into low Earth orbit at an altitude of 323 miles.

Once commissioned, the satellites will scan the planet for radio frequency emissions. Rocket Lab stated that the vehicles operate in clusters of three to collect data across the RF spectrum. This data supports maritime tracking, GNSS jamming detection, radar monitoring, communications mapping, and space defense operations.

HawkEye 360 provides this intelligence to the U.S. government and allied nations. The company aims to enable faster and better decision-making through its space-based collection and AI-powered analytics. Its first satellites reached orbit in 2018, and the firm has since placed nearly 50 of them in low Earth orbit.

This deployment followed a previous HawkEye 360 launch by only two days. Three sensors from that earlier group flew on SpaceX's Bandwagon-5 rideshare mission. The current flight represents Rocket Lab's 98th launch overall and its 19th of 2026.

Sixteen of the company's flights this year used the two-stage, 59-foot-tall Electron rocket. The remaining three utilized HASTE, a suborbital variant of the Electron that allows customers to test technologies in a hypersonic flight environment.