Rocket Lab Terminates $3.6B Bridge as Iridium Lenders Consent, Open Cosmos Raises €300M, and Vega-C Orbits FLEX and Sentinel-3C

Rocket Lab said it has raised about $1.944 billion in gross proceeds by selling roughly 29.3 million shares under its at-the-market program and has terminated in full the $3.6 billion 364-day bridge facility that Deutsche Bank and Wells Fargo committed for the Iridium acquisition. Iridium's required lenders signed a fourth amendment to its credit agreement that carves the deal out of the change-of-control test, so $1.775 billion of term loans can stay outstanding after closing under a Rocket Lab USA guarantee, with the margin stepping up to SOFR plus 2.50% to 3.00% depending on Rocket Lab's ratings.

European growth capital kept flowing. Open Cosmos closed a €300 million ($348.6 million) round led by Lightrock with ETF Partners, Institut Català de Finances and Entrepreneurs First to expand its four European satellite factories and its UK, Spanish, Portuguese and Greek engineering base, a week after The Exploration Company's $450 million Series C. Avio flew the day's headline mission, lofting ESA's FLEX fluorescence explorer and the Copernicus Sentinel-3C ocean and land satellite from Kourou at 01:21 UTC on its second Vega-C flight run without Arianespace, with CEO Giulio Ranzo pointing to an early-December IRIDE launch to close 2026.

The procurement fight over Blue Origin's $700 million Mars Telecommunications Network award sharpened. Rocket Lab filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office on Friday, arguing NASA's selection appears inconsistent with congressional eligibility criteria and that the review of its technical volume was punitive; Blue Origin, which is working toward a 2028 launch, warned any delay could cost the Mars window. At AFA in National Harbor, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink publicly acknowledged for the first time that the United States has deployed on-orbit space control weapons, declining to describe the systems.