SpaceX's IPO makes RKLB, ASTS, and LUNR look cheap

SpaceX is public at $1.75 trillion. Here's who gets repriced next.

The largest IPO in history closed last week, and the number that keeps rattling around in my head isn't $1.75 trillion. It's the gap between that number and the rest of the public space sector combined.

SpaceX going public doesn't just validate one company. It creates a problem for institutional allocators. If you run a $50 billion fund and you believe in the commercial space thesis, you now have a benchmark. SpaceX is the benchmark. And for the first time, you can own it. Except the float is tight, the valuation is steep, and most mandates won't let you load up at nose-bleed multiples on day one.

So the money looks sideways.

Rocket Lab (NASDAQ:RKLB) is the most obvious next stop. It's the only other company currently flying an operational orbital rocket on a commercial basis. There's no other public company in that sentence. Institutions wanting launch exposure but unable to justify paying 200x revenue for SpaceX will find RKLB's comparatively modest market cap looks different now than it did three months ago. The rerating math is simple: if SpaceX is worth $1.75 trillion with its launch, Starlink, and Starship programs combined, what is a company with a proven orbital rocket, a growing constellation ambitions program, and a pipeline of government contracts worth? The market hasn't answered that yet.

AST SpaceMobile (NASDAQ:ASTS) gets repriced for a different reason. Its direct-to-device satellite broadband thesis was always going to live or die on whether the market believed that kind of infrastructure could actually be built. SpaceX spent a decade proving it could. Starlink is now a $30+ billion annual revenue business beaming internet from orbit to ordinary dishes on the ground. ASTS is betting it can skip the dish entirely and connect standard mobile phones from space. That's a harder technical problem, but the underlying premise, that you can build a meaningful commercial satellite network, is no longer speculative. A public SpaceX at those numbers is the most expensive proof-of-concept in history, and ASTS inherits some of that credibility.

The least obvious name, and the one worth studying, is Intuitive Machines (NASDAQ:LUNR). It flies its Nova-C lunar landers on Falcon 9 rockets, meaning SpaceX isn't a competitor here, it's a supplier. LUNR holds NASA contracts tied to the Artemis program and the broader Commercial Lunar Payload Services architecture. As SpaceX's public valuation makes space infrastructure a mainstream institutional category rather than a venture curiosity, the supporting ecosystem around it gets a fresh look. LUNR is small enough that even modest institutional inflows move the stock materially.

The practical question for readers isn't which one to buy. It's whether you believe the SpaceX IPO represents a permanent recategorization of space as an investable sector or just a one-time liquidity event. If it's the former, the gap between SpaceX's valuation and the rest of the public space market is an opportunity that persists for years. If it's the latter, the halo effect fades inside six months and you're left holding speculative small-caps with nothing new to say.

I think it's the former. A $1.75 trillion IPO doesn't leave allocators' memory quickly. The benchmarks get updated, the mandate language gets revised, and the category gets a permanent line item in portfolios that previously had none. That process takes 12 to 24 months to fully play out. RKLB, ASTS, and LUNR are all sitting in the path of it.

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Quick Takes

Three more stories worth knowing about

Anthropic's IPO filing changes the AI pricing floor

Anthropic filed confidentially on June 1 and is targeting a fall listing. The market will debate valuation, but the more consequential effect is what a successful AI-lab IPO does to the discount rates applied to every AI-native software company below it. When OpenAI eventually lists in 2027, the same thing happens again. Two of the three most valuable private AI companies going public in 18 months compresses the risk premium the market currently assigns to the whole category. Pure-play AI software stocks, already re-rating, get another leg.

Golden Dome funding is real money, not a press release

Washington's missile defense push is past the announcement stage. Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT) and RTX (NYSE:RTX) are already embedded in the program architecture, which means they don't need to win new contracts so much as avoid losing the ones they hold. The more interesting repricing is at Kratos Defense (NASDAQ:KTOS), where the autonomous systems and lower-cost drone platforms match the specific capabilities Pentagon planners say they need for distributed layered defense. LMT and RTX are the defense floor. KTOS is where the asymmetric upside sits if the spending scales as advertised.

SoundHound proves voice AI has a business model before Anthropic's IPO

SoundHound AI (NASDAQ:SOUN) is building conversational voice interfaces for restaurants, automotive, and enterprise, and it's doing it at a time when every Fortune 500 procurement team is being told to show AI adoption results. The Anthropic IPO will pull those timelines forward. SOUN is small enough to be genuinely moved by any acceleration in enterprise AI deployments, and its voice-first architecture sits in a part of the AI application layer that the big labs haven't commoditized yet. Worth watching ahead of the fall listing window.

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Overlooked Stock

CRDO

Credo Technology Group Holding Ltd

Credo Technology (NASDAQ:CRDO) makes the chips that move data at extreme speeds inside data centers, specifically the serializer/deserializer silicon and active electrical cable solutions that hyperscalers need when they pack AI accelerators together at scale. As cluster sizes grow from thousands of GPUs to tens of thousands, the interconnect problem gets harder, not easier, and Credo's products are already designed into some of the largest builds in the market.

The company sells to hyperscalers, original equipment manufacturers, and optical module makers, which gives it exposure to the infrastructure buildout without depending on any single platform vendor winning the AI race. It doesn't matter much if the dominant model is trained by Google, Microsoft, or a dark-horse player. The data has to move regardless.

With a score of 93 and a small enough market cap that institutional ownership is still building, this is a name worth spending time with before the next major data center capex announcement moves it.

The Contrarian Take

The SpaceX IPO might be the top for the space sector, not the floor

The bull case for RKLB, ASTS, and LUNR assumes the SpaceX IPO creates permanent institutional demand for space exposure. There's a reasonable counter-argument: the IPO absorbs it.

When a category-defining company goes public at a valuation that prices in decades of future growth, allocators who were underweight space can now check that box with one trade. The pressure to own the second and third names in the category actually decreases once you can own the category leader directly.

The historical pattern in tech IPOs supports this more than the halo narrative does. When Facebook went public in 2012, it didn't immediately re-rate Twitter and LinkedIn upward. It created a benchmark against which the smaller names looked expensive on a relative basis for months afterward.

If SpaceX's float loosens in 2027 as lockups expire, even more capital chases the original rather than the proxies. The small-cap space names could spend the next 18 months trading in SpaceX's shadow rather than its draft.