Rocket Lab (NASDAQ: RKLB) investors are having a fantabulous week. Fresh off another successful space launch (this one for Capella Space) and a powerful earnings report that showed sales rising 71% year over year, the tiny rocket company announced this morning that it has just shipped a pair of ESCAPADE spacecraft to Cape Canaveral for launching to Mars.

Result: Rocket Lab stock is up 18% through 1:45 p.m. ET.

Rocket Lab built the Blue and Gold ESCAPADE (short for "Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers") spacecraft for the University of California Berkeley's Space Science Laboratory and NASA. Their mission will be to travel to Mars atop a Blue Origin rocket to conduct heliophysics research on the plasma and magnetic fields around the Red Planet.

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Source Fool.com