An update on COVID-19
An update on Rocket Lab's response to COVID-19
As the COVID-19 situation has developed globally, we’ve been collaborating with our team members, customers, and health officials to ensure we’re doing all we can to protect our people and play our part in reducing the spread of the virus.
The health of our team, our families, and the wider communities we’re a part of is and always will be our top priority. For this reason, all non-production Rocket Lab team members who can work from home have been doing so this past week and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. This includes teams at our headquarters in Long Beach, California, as well as at our launch sites and facilities in Wallops Island, Virginia, and in New Zealand.
Following yesterday’s decision by the City of Long Beach and State of California to issue “Safer At Home” orders that close all non-essential businesses, we have furthered our precautionary efforts and now the majority of our Long Beach team is working from home. Because our work in aerospace manufacturing is categorized as a critical infrastructure sector under The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) directive, a significantly reduced number of mission critical personnel will remain operating from our facilities. We are committed to safely providing this essential service to our United States Government customers during these challenging times.
We’re taking additional precautions to care for these team members, including physical distancing and increased cleaning and sanitization of our work environment.
Our next mission is still on track, with lift-off currently scheduled for no earlier than 30 March UTC. We are also working with our customers and local government authorities to minimize any potential disruption to our future missions planned in the months ahead. In recent years, we have placed an increased emphasis on delivering responsive launch capability for our customers, which means having launch vehicles and pads ready for rapid call up launch capability. As a result of this approach, we’re fortunate to have enough launch vehicles ready that we can effectively manage a pause in production with minimal impact to our scheduled manifest.
As the COVID-19 situation continues to evolve, so will we. In the uncertain days, weeks and months ahead we’ll be heeding the advice of health and government authorities to keep our team and communities safe. We are grateful to city and state leaders for making the difficult but necessary decisions to limit the spread of COVID-19. We also extend our deepest gratitude to the healthcare workers, supermarket employees, and researchers who are supporting us all through these uncharted waters.
Stay safe and look out for each other.
