The up and down tale of two rocket startups, Vector and Phantom

Jim Cantrell at Vector in 2017, shown in front of
one of his side businesses, fixing and refurbishing race
cars and rare luxury sports cars (located then at Vector).
The tales of rocket startups are often fraught with ups and downs of all kinds, often traveling in circles that no one can ever predict. This is one such tale.
In the mid-2010s there was a rocket startup called Vector, based here in Tucson, founded by a guy named Jim Cantrell. At that time Cantrell pushed the company in the style of Elon Musk, going very public for publicity and to raise investment capital.
He was remarkable successful at both. Unfortunately, his engineers were not as successful at engine building. After years of effort they all realized that their rocket engines were under-powered, and wouldn’t be able to get the rocket into orbit. In 2019 the company’s biggest investor backed out, Cantrell left the company, and new owners took over, hoping to rebuild.
Flash forward to 2021, and Jim Cantrell has reappeared with a new rocket company, Phantom Space, also based in Tucson, raising $5 million in seed capital. In the next four years he obtained a small development contract from NASA, completed another investment round raising around $37 million, and began development of a new orbital rocket, dubbed Daytona. The company also began work on its own small satellite constellation, PhantomCloud (more on this later).
As for Vector, there was little to report during those four years. The only update said the company was buying engines from the rocket engine startup Ursa Major, the same company Phantom was using.
It is now the end of 2025, and the fate of these two companies has once again intertwined, in a most ironic manner. Last week I learned from Jim Cantrell that Vector had closed shop, and that its last remaining assets, some of which Cantrell himself had helped develop when he headed Vector, had been bought by Phantom. This includes several unused rocket stages, the vertical rocket test stands, and a lot of computers, and hardware.
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