Preview: We think space is a decade-long story, but the stocks falling from the sky this month still hurts. Instead of guessing the bottom, we wrote down the five things we're watching this summer. Most of them have dates.

What you're reading: We built Luniter because we love science and want to know what's coming next, and which companies are actually building it. We track about 200 of them. Every Monday we pick the one story from that world we think is worth your time and explain it in plain English. It takes about ten minutes. If you're new here, welcome.

Two issues ago, the biggest IPO in history landed in a very small pond. Last week we reported, in one line, that the pond's recovery hadn't held. This week the selling got worse. Nearly every pure-play space stock we track fell between 7 and 20 percent in five days. The group now sits roughly half to two-thirds below highs most of them set in late May. SpaceX itself closed Friday at $124, about 8 percent below its $135 IPO price.

Whether you've held these names through the slide, or you're looking at them for the first time because they're down, the useful question is the same. It isn't "is this the bottom" — nobody can answer that. It's this: what are the risks, and have they been priced in yet?

We made this newsletter that list.

We think space is an important decade-long story, and we're not shy about it. Launch costs have collapsed over the past decade, and a roughly $429 billion space economy now runs on top of a launch layer that directly generates only about 3 percent of that. The real money sits above the rockets, in subscription businesses that happen to be in orbit, and the national defense demand underneath keeps growing. None of that changed this month.

But an important decade cant predict pricing this August. Between here and the long run sit specific, dated events that will reprice these stocks one way or the other.

1. The Fed, July 28–29. Space companies are long-duration bets: most of their value lives years in the future, so interest rates matter more to them than to most stocks. Markets spent the week repricing that question. After oil spiked on the Iran war, the odds of a rate hike touched 46 percent last Monday; by Friday they had fallen back under 15. We're listening for a quiet hold, and then the inflation and growth numbers that land the very next day, July 30. If the price of time stays put, this can become a space story again instead of a macroeconomic story.

2. SpaceX's first earnings, early August. The largest space company has never reported a quarter as a public company. It hasn't announced the date (it will report on its own website and X); the consensus guess is August 6. Its IPO paperwork made claims we want updated with real numbers, chief among them that launch, the famous part, lost $657 million last year while carrying about 80 percent of the entire world's mass to orbit, and that Starlink, the subscription part, is where the money is.

3. The first unlock, two trading days after that report. About 911 million insider shares become sellable, worth about $113 billion at Friday's price. That is more than the roughly $86 billion of SpaceX stock that trades freely today. Further waves follow into the fall; by one estimate (22V Research), around 44 percent of the locked shares (roughly a sixth of the whole company) could be sellable by early September. The biggest seller who can't show up is Elon Musk: his shares are locked until June 2027. We're watching the absorption: what the price does in the days after the sellers who want out finally get their window.

4. The rest of the cohort's report cards. Iridium opens the season this Wednesday, a release with no conference call; it waived the call because of the pending Rocket Lab deal. BlackSky reports August 6, Firefly August 11, Redwire August 12. Rocket Lab is expected around August 6 but hasn't said, and Intuitive Machines and Spire haven't announced. At these prices the question is less about valuation and more about arithmetic: cash on hand and how fast it burns at the small names, and at Rocket Lab, the Neutron rocket's schedule and how it plans to pay for an $8 billion acquisition. Worth knowing: the group opened about $5.9 billion of stock-sale capacity in the weeks before the SpaceX IPO, and none has filed for more since the crash began. Also worth knowing: Rocket Lab closed Friday at $67.62, twelve cents above a floor price written into the Iridium deal.

5. What we're not watching as closely. A green week, a successful Starship launch, an award headline. We’d like that, but it wont answer the real questions. Three weeks after the IPO we reported a potential recovery; a week later we reported it hadn't held.

Put together, the list reads like this: if the Fed passes quietly, the first unlock gets absorbed rather than sold through, and the August numbers show the businesses intact, then the biggest unknowns hanging over these stocks become known quantities, because the sellers who wanted out will have had their window and the prices left standing will be attached to reported numbers instead of guesses.

The list is about knowing when the picture clears, but these businesses are not all the same.

The damage is sorted by business model. The pure-plays, companies that live entirely on space revenue, sit half to two-thirds below their spring highs. The big defense contractors that also build satellites and sensors (RTX, Teledyne, Northrop) are down single digits to about a third, measured from highs they set back in March, a different flavor on a different clock.

Inside the pure-plays, the current revenue split SpaceX's paperwork exposed runs through everyone else too: launch is the fun part, and the recurring-revenue layer is the business. We wrote three weeks ago that the big investor money preferred revenue that repeats over revenue that arrives one mission at a time.

And the stock being down is not the same as it being cheap. Rocket Lab and Firefly still read expensive on our value gauge, even here. None of this says what anyone should do. It says what we'd want to understand before the list starts clearing.

Space sits 18th of our 20 themes on the ladder. The warming column is led by hard oil, with the ocean-power names we covered last month also warming.

Alongside the scores, we run a simulated portfolio picked entirely by our data, published in the open (we call it the Opinionated Machinery). It made a few small trades elsewhere in the book this week. In space it did nothing, in either direction: no bargain-hunting, and no selling, even though the five space names it holds are down 30 to 65 percent from what it paid.

That patience is design, not neglect. Four of the five are frontier bets, sized small on purpose, and the rule that cuts its losers is built to leave them alone and let it play out. The fifth is Rocket Lab, and it fell too fast to be sold. The sell rule needs three straight qualifying days in the out-of-favor zone before it acts. On Thursday the stock dropped clean through that zone into deeply-out-of-favor territory, which has proven to be an area that can bounce back hard and deserves more time.

On the ranking list, the biggest fader was Firefly, down 139 spots in a week to #179. And the name our test fleet agrees on most is still ATS, an automation builder, owned by 65 of the 105 experimental versions we run.

The picture in one line: the steadiest business model in the wreckage, subscription satellite data, with growth in the top half of our universe, but profitability and value readings near the bottom, and a price out of favor. Its numbers arrive September 14, after the August gauntlet.

Hours after this lands, Starship flies again. Thursday's attempt shut itself down on the pad at the last second; two engines were replaced, and the retry is set for Monday evening. This flight carries 20 Starlink satellites, the first operational payload Starship has ever attempted to deploy: the launch machine flying for the subscription business. Then Iridium's numbers on Wednesday, the Fed next week, and SpaceX's first report and first unlock in early August. The list is written. We’ll be watching.

Research and educational analysis only — not financial advice. Every investment carries risk.