Rocket Lab Showcases Hypersonic Test Flight

On February 27th, 2026, Rocket Lab launched the “That’s Not A Knife” mission from Wallops Island, Virginia, carrying a hypersonic test vehicle for the Defense Innovation Unit. The mission is the company’s first from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport this year, and its unusually public nature reflects Rocket Lab’s continued support of defense-oriented missions.

The Electron rocket lifted off from Launch Pad 0C, also known to Rocket Lab as LC-2, at 3:00 PM Eastern Time. Like a majority of Electron launches from this site, That’s Not A Knife is part of the company’s HASTE hypersonic launch program. These missions usually fly payloads on suborbital trajectories that keep them relatively low in the atmosphere at high speeds.

While rockets and spacecraft frequently enter and exit the atmosphere at hypersonic speed, the U.S. increasingly views the development of vehicles and weapons that can fly in this regime for extended periods as an important frontier in warfare. To this end, Rocket Lab offers HASTE to support a variety of hypersonic mission profiles for technology demonstrations.

The payload itself is a test vehicle called DART AE, built by the Australian company Hypersonix and capable of flying as fast as Mach 7, seven times the speed of sound. The mission is sponsored by the Defense Innovation Unit, an organization within the U.S. Department of Defense which aims to accelerate commercial capabilities for defense applications.

Powered by an airbreathing “scramjet” engine, the bladelike aircraft resembles the historic X-15, and continues a history of similar testbed vehicles such as the X-43 and X-51. Scramjet engines can only operate at hypersonic speeds, often using rocket stages to boost them, and historically have only fired for a matter of seconds or minutes in flight. Accordingly, this mission used Electron to deploy the payload while still inside the atmosphere, unlike typical satellite launches.

While the HASTE program’s express purpose is to test hypersonic vehicles, it’s rare to have so much information about the payload shared publicly. Due to their sensitive nature, HASTE missions are frequently undisclosed and launched with minimal notice; That’s Not A Knife is the first such mission that media were invited to cover. The shift in policy may reflect an effort by Rocket Lab to align with national priorities under the Trump Administration.

In January, Rocket Lab hosted U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth at its facility in Long Beach, CA, as part of his “Arsenal of Freedom” tour, in which Hegseth spoke to Rocket Lab employees about their role in bolstering the American defense industrial base. Rocket Lab, like many American aerospace companies, has a long history of supporting the U.S. military, and the unusually public nature of this hypersonic mission may be a deliberate attempt to draw attention to this relationship.