What you're reading: We built Luniter because we love science and want to know what's coming next, and which companies are actually making it happen. We track 200 of them. Every Monday we pick the one story from our universe we think is most worth your time.
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The biggest IPO ever landed in a very small pond
On June 12, SpaceX raised $75 billion in the largest IPO in history and finished its first day worth more than $2 trillion, the sixth-largest public company in the country. It landed in a very small pond. Put together, every other public space company was worth a small fraction of that figure. A whale that size doesn't enter the water without displacing it: the other space names we track lost roughly half their value around the debut. Three weeks later the water is coming back, and the biggest of those companies just signed an $8 billion deal to remake itself in SpaceX's image. This issue is about the splash, the recovery, and that deal.
Everyone sold the neighbors to buy the whale
The demand was enormous: retail investors alone placed over $100 billion in orders against a $75 billion offering. That money had to come from somewhere, and a lot of it came out of the smaller space names. Market analysts said it directly: positions in those names had been placeholders for people who really wanted SpaceX, and once the real thing was buyable, the proxies became the piggy bank. The selling was plumbing, not a verdict on the businesses being sold.
The selling also lasted longer than the headlines. The smaller names started falling when the offering terms landed in early June, dropped hard on IPO day, and kept sliding for almost two more weeks: eight of the ten names in the theme made their lows on June 24 or 25. The median name lost 51% from its late-May peak. The riskiest tier (Intuitive Machines, Firefly, Redwire) fell nearly 60%. Even Rocket Lab, the sector's leader, gave back 46%. The one name mostly spared was Iridium, the theme's steady cash generator, down about 20% at the low; a takeover would soon carry it past its old high. Our gauge of where the theme sits in its price cycle had been sliding since mid-April, even as prices climbed into late May, and on June 25 it touched its low for the year. June's strange arithmetic: the public space sector is now worth roughly fifteen times what it was in May, and almost every company in it is worth less.
The money is coming back, and it's choosier
The low held over a weekend. Then came the last week of June: Rocket Lab announced it was buying Iridium on the 29th, and NASA handed out two lunar awards the next day, $148 million to Intuitive Machines and $144 million to Firefly. The theme has been warming since, though it remains one of the cooler corners of our map. The recovery is a week old. This is early, not late.
This recovery is also selective. Rocket Lab, the buyer in the deal, has refilled 28% of the hole dug for it. Next come Spire and Planet Labs, about a quarter and a fifth of the way back; both sell satellite data by subscription, with revenue that shows up every month whether or not anything launches. The contract award winners sit further back. Firefly has recovered about an eighth. Intuitive Machines, fresh NASA money in hand, has clawed back barely 3%, no more than Redwire, which had no new award at all.
The investor money coming back is paying for revenue that repeats before revenue that arrives one mission at a time. A NASA award is real money, but it's a check, not a business model.
Rocket Lab is copying the answer key
SpaceX's IPO paperwork settled an old argument about where the money in space actually is. The rockets are the famous part. But Starlink, the satellite internet business, brought in $11.39 billion in 2025, and that was 61 cents of every dollar the company made. The winning shape, per the market's new $2 trillion benchmark, is launch plus a network that bills monthly.
Rocket Lab has the first half: a small rocket (Electron) with more than 50 launches flown, a bigger one (Neutron) in development, and a satellite-manufacturing business. On June 29 it signed a definitive agreement to buy the second half. Iridium operates the only mobile satellite network with true pole-to-pole coverage, 2.55 million subscribers, and its own protected spectrum. The price: $54 a share, half in cash and half in Rocket Lab stock, about $8 billion all in, expected to close in mid-2027.
If launch-plus-network is the shape the market just valued at $2 trillion, then a launch company buying a working network is the fastest route to that shape, because a constellation takes a decade to build and Iridium's is already in orbit. The caveats are real: Iridium's shareholders have to vote yes, regulators have to clear it, the close is a year away, and Rocket Lab is paying partly with its own shares and new borrowing. But as responses go, it's the most direct one available.
Scorecard — Rocket Lab (RKLB)
The picture in one line: the sector's leader, down 46% top to bottom and recovering faster than any of its neighbors, with real growth underneath (revenue up 64% last quarter, $2.2 billion of signed work in backlog) and a price that still assumes years more of it. The Iridium deal adds the one thing it doesn't have: a network that bills monthly.
From the Machine — a special edition this week
Alongside the scores, we run a simulated portfolio picked entirely by our data, published in the open (we call it the Opinionated Machinery). It's really a family: 114 paper portfolios under one rulebook, including the three production books we report on here. June 29 was a milestone day twice over. It was the first day the machine traded fully autonomously with no human approving its decisions, and that same morning, Rocket Lab announced it was buying Iridium, a stock every single one of those portfolios held.
There was no algorithm rule for that yet. So we wrote one that morning: when a holding agrees to be acquired, sell, bank the result, and don't rebuy. The upside is capped at the deal price; what's left is a year of deal risk. By that night's run, all 114 books had executed it. The three production books sold at $54.59, a shade over the $54 offer, for gains between 25% and 39% depending on when each bought in this spring. Almost none of the freed cash went back into space: it spread into healthcare, defense, factory automation, and advanced materials, with ATS, an automation builder, the most common buy across the fleet that week.
The OM’s Ranking list moved too: Rocket Lab jumped 31 spots this week, to #29.
Across the Universe: The week in numbers
Our market temperature gauge reads 58 out of 100, and that is cooler than it sounds: it has been higher on about four of every five days since we started measuring. It eased again this week.
Seven of the ten fastest-heating stocks in our universe this week are defense names, led by drone maker AeroVironment. Not one of the ten is a space stock. The strongest warming this week is next door to space, not inside it.
Three weeks ago Steel Dynamics was one of the hottest names we track, at 92 out of 100 on our heat gauge. Today it reads 36, out of favor, after a 22% price drop. Its growth and quality readings didn't move at all. When a price changes that much and the business doesn't, we pay attention.
What's moving
Space sits sixth in the warming column, behind data-and-cloud, defense, and the medical themes. The fastest cooler is AI infrastructure, giving back part of its spring run.
What we're watching
Three things. SpaceX enters the Nasdaq-100 on Tuesday, and the funds that track the index have to buy around Monday's close, the day this issue lands; J.P. Morgan puts that buying near $4.3 billion. The Iridium deal has to survive a shareholder vote and a year of regulators. And the theme's warming is seven days old; we'll see whether it outlives the deal-week glow. The pond is a lot bigger than it was a month ago; we'll keep watching how the water settles.
Research and educational analysis only — not financial advice. Every investment carries risk.