Top Space Technology Stocks 2026: After the SpaceX IPO

For twenty years, "investing in space" meant buying Lockheed and hoping.

Not anymore.

SpaceX went public on June 12. Ticker SPCX, Nasdaq. It priced at $135, raised $75 billion (the biggest IPO in history), popped 19% on day one, hit $225 four days later, and then fell in half. In ten weeks it went from "most exciting stock on Earth" to "cautionary tale" to "hmm, maybe it's a buy now."

But here's what's actually going on underneath the noise:

Launch costs keep dropping. Falcon 9 has flown 100+ missions this year. Starship V3 has flown twice and is targeting its first real orbital flight in September. Rocket Lab's Neutron rolls to the pad in Q4. Blue Origin's New Glenn blew up in May but has a fix. When getting to orbit gets cheap, everything you can put in orbit gets interesting.

The Pentagon is spending like it's 1962. Golden Dome, the missile-defense shield, requested $24.9 billion for fiscal 2026 and another $17.5 billion for 2027. Contracts are landing at Rocket Lab, L3Harris, Lockheed, Sierra Space, Intuitive Machines, and a dozen others. Space is now a defense trade as much as a tech trade.

Real revenue is showing up. Rocket Lab did $234 million last quarter. Intuitive Machines did $206 million (4x last year). Firefly grew 659%. These are companies with backlogs measured in billions.^[1]

The sentiment right now? Bruised but constructive. July was ugly. Investors got cranky about cash burn and dilution. Then August happened: earnings beats, defense awards, satellite launches, and nearly every name in the sector bounced double digits while SpaceX sat still.

Here's how we're slicing the sector:

• Launch — the rockets. Nothing happens without them.
• Connectivity & Data — satellites that beam internet or take pictures.
• In-Space Infrastructure — landers, stations, manufacturing, the "picks and shovels" of orbit.
• Private Bellwethers — companies you can't buy yet, but need to watch.

Rockets are the toll road. Every satellite, lander, and space station has to pay to get up there. For a decade, SpaceX collected nearly every toll. That's finally changing.

SpaceXNASDAQ: SPCX

Let's get the elephant out of the way.

SpaceX is three businesses: launch (Falcon and Starship), connectivity (Starlink), and AI (it absorbed xAI and X in February). Starlink alone did $11.4 billion in 2025, which was 61% of company revenue. By Q1 2026 it was 69%. The rocket company is now mostly an internet company that happens to own the best rockets ever built.

Starship Flight 14, expected in September, is the first attempt to reach orbit and deploy Starlink V3 satellites. If that works, launch costs drop again and Musk's pulled-forward $1 trillion revenue target for 2030 stops sounding insane. There's also a $920 million-a-month compute deal with Google that Wall Street hasn't fully digested.

The company has never turned an annual profit. It has burned $41 billion since 2002. The first lockup expired August 6 and dumped 911 million insider shares onto the market, roughly doubling the float. More lockups are coming. At a ~$1.85 trillion market cap, you're paying for perfection.

Treat SPCX as the sector's index fund. Own it if you want the whole thing. Own the others if you want beta.

Rocket LabNASDAQ: RKLB

If SpaceX is the toll road, Rocket Lab is building the second one.

Q2 was a monster: $234 million in revenue (up 62%), $2.36 billion backlog, 90+ launches on the books, and Q3 guidance of $250-265 million. Electron is the most-flown small rocket in the world. HASTE is the Pentagon's favorite hypersonic testbed. And the company just won a $397 million Space Force contract to build and launch a batch of Flatellite satellites, one of only two vendors picked to do both.

Then there's Neutron. The medium-lift reusable rocket has been "next year" for three years. Now it's Q4 2026, and the Stage 1 tank is on schedule. First flight is the single biggest catalyst in the sector outside Starship.

And then there's Iridium. Rocket Lab announced an $8 billion deal to buy the satellite phone operator, turning itself into a company that designs, builds, launches, and operates constellations. Bold. Also expensive. The stock dipped on the news because investors are tired of dilution, and the bottom line still missed. But if you believe in vertical integration, this is the purest play on it.

Firefly AerospaceNASDAQ: FLY

Firefly is the sector's sleeper. Retail sentiment is bearish, message volume is low, and the company just posted the strongest quarter of anyone: $117.7 million in revenue, up 659% year over year, crushing the $88 million estimate.

Two things make Firefly interesting. First, it's the only company besides SpaceX to land softly on the Moon, and Blue Ghost Mission 2 is aiming for the far side, something no American mission has done. Second, its SciTec subsidiary keeps winning quiet defense work, including a $94 million radar-modernization award in August.

Management guided conservatively, though, and the Alpha rocket still needs to prove it can fly on a schedule.

Getting to orbit is half the game. Making money once you're there is the other half. These two companies sell the things satellites are actually for: signal and pictures.

AST SpaceMobileNASDAQ: ASTS

The pitch is simple enough to explain to your grandmother: your regular phone gets a signal anywhere on Earth, straight from a satellite. No special hardware. No dish.

AST SpaceMobile has been "almost there" for a while, but 2026 is when it gets real. The FCC authorized commercial service in the U.S. BlueBirds 11, 12, and 13 launched August 5, with speeds approaching 200 Mbps to an ordinary smartphone. The target is roughly 45 satellites in orbit by year-end, and the factory in Texas is churning out BlueBirds 11 through 33. Over 60 carrier partners covering 3 billion subscribers are waiting on the other end.

Now the hard part. Q2 revenue was $31.5 million. Net loss was $231 million. Full-year guidance is $150-200 million, which means H2 has to be enormous. This is the highest-risk, highest-reward name on the list. If commercial service activates on schedule, it re-rates. If it slips, the burn rate will get scary.

Planet LabsNYSE: PL

Planet photographs the entire Earth every day. Governments, militaries, and insurers pay for that. Turns out a lot of them want it badly right now.

Fiscal Q1 revenue was $94 million, up 42%. Backlog is $906 million, up 72%. Cash is $731 million. Full-year guidance is $425-441 million, and the company expects to be adjusted-EBITDA profitable. Planet launched a sovereign reconnaissance satellite for Sweden just four months after signing the contract, which is the kind of speed that gets defense ministries excited.

The next leg is resolution. Gen-2 Pelican satellites are designed for 30 cm imagery, which puts Planet in territory once reserved for spy agencies. Q2 results land in early September. The stock has run hard (up 700% in a year at one point), so the bar is high.

Landers. Space stations. Manufacturing. Ground stations. The unglamorous stuff that turns orbit into an economy. This segment had the best August of anyone.

Intuitive MachinesNASDAQ: LUNR

A year ago, Intuitive Machines was a Moon lander company that tipped over on landing. Today it calls itself a "next-generation space prime," and the numbers back it up.

Q2 revenue: $206 million, more than 4x last year. Backlog: $1.8 billion, up from $213 million at year-end. Bookings: $1.2 billion in the quarter, including 18 Golden Dome tracking satellites (as a supplier under L3Harris) and $600 million of commercial GEO satellite work. The company bought Lanteris, KinetX, Goonhilly Earth Station, and COMSAT in rapid succession, and national security went from 3% to 30% of revenue.

Full-year guidance is $900 million to $1 billion with positive adjusted EBITDA. IM-3, the third lunar lander, is in assembly. The risk is indigestion: five acquisitions in a year, heavy capex for a lunar communications constellation, and a $235 million equity raise to pay for it all.

RedwireNYSE: RDW

Redwire makes the parts. Solar arrays, sensors, structures, the components inside other people's spacecraft. It's the least sexy company on this list and one of the best-performing.

Q2 revenue was a record $117 million. Gross margin went from negative 31% a year ago to positive 28%. Backlog hit $542 million. Full-year guidance of $450-500 million was reaffirmed. The stock jumped 38% in the first week of August on the news.

When every company above builds more spacecraft, Redwire sells more parts.

Voyager TechnologiesNYSE: VOYG

Voyager is building Starlab, a commercial space station with Airbus, to replace the ISS when it retires around 2030. That's the headline. The quieter story is defense.

Q2 revenue was a record $52.7 million, bookings were $113 million, and $84 million of those bookings came from Golden Dome. The company raised 2026 revenue guidance to $275-305 million, well above the $241 million consensus. CEO Dylan Taylor's line was blunt: demand is building faster than the company can convert it.

The stock returned 54% in a single week in August. It's small, it's volatile, and it's now a proxy for both commercial stations and missile defense.

You can't buy these yet. But they'll move the stocks you can buy.

Blue Origin (Private)

Jeff Bezos's rocket company had a rough spring. New Glenn exploded in May, the company delayed months of launches, and it paused New Shepard tourism in January to focus on the Moon. Then in August it traced the failure to a BE-4 oxygen valve, said the fix is a small retrofit, and set a year-end return-to-flight target.

New Glenn is the only non-SpaceX heavy rocket with real payload capacity (~45,000 kg at under $2,000/kg). Blue Origin is also reportedly weighing its first outside fundraising, which is the first step toward a public listing, even if Bezos says otherwise. No IPO is scheduled.

Stoke Space (Private)

The most technically ambitious rocket startup in the country, based in Kent, Washington. Stoke's Nova is designed to be fully reusable, both stages, with a claimed cost under $1,000/kg. That would rival Starship on price at a fraction of the size.

Stoke raised $510 million in October 2025 at a ~$1.95 billion valuation, got picked for the Space Force's $5.6 billion NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 program, and is activating Launch Complex 14 at Cape Canaveral. It hasn't reached orbit yet. Until it does, the Space Force will keep handing task orders to SpaceX. Watch for a first launch; an IPO conversation follows quickly if it works.

Sierra Space (Private)

Sierra Space won up to $798 million in July to build 18 missile-defense satellites, matching L3Harris's order. It also builds Dream Chaser, a reusable spaceplane, and inflatable habitat modules. There's been IPO chatter around Sierra for years; a Golden Dome-sized backlog makes it more plausible.

Two ways.

Starship stalls. The entire "space gets cheap" thesis is downstream of one rocket. Starship V3 has flown twice; neither flight was clean. Flight 14 is the first orbital attempt. If SpaceX can't get to high-cadence reuse over the next 18 months, launch costs plateau, Starlink V3 slows down, orbital data centers stay a slide deck, and every company that planned around cheap mass-to-orbit has to rework its math. Watch Flight 14 for orbit and Starlink V3 deployment, then ship catch attempts and FAA approval cadence.

The money runs out. Almost nobody on this list makes a profit. AST lost $231 million last quarter. Intuitive Machines raised $235 million through an ATM. Rocket Lab's bottom line missed and the share count keeps growing. SpaceX has never had a profitable year. July's selloff was investors saying "we're done funding burn." If rates stay high and the SpaceX lockups keep pressuring the sector, capital gets expensive fast. Watch for dilutive raises announced alongside "record" quarters, and for Golden Dome cuts in the FY27 appropriations fight.

Then there's China. LandSpace landed an orbital-class booster on August 19, the first commercial Chinese company to do it. Reusable rockets are no longer an American monopoly.^[2]

The next 12-18 months are catalyst-dense. Mark these:

• September 2026: Starship Flight 14, first orbital attempt with Starlink V3 satellites. Planet Labs Q2 results.
• Q4 2026: Neutron rolls to the pad; first launch targeted late 2026 or early 2027. Blue Origin New Glenn return to flight. AST SpaceMobile targets ~45 satellites and broader commercial activation. Voyager's Griffin-1 lunar mission.
• H1 2027: Rocket Lab–Iridium deal closes. Firefly Blue Ghost Mission 2 to the lunar far side. Intuitive Machines IM-3.
• 2027-2028: Artemis III. Golden Dome space-based interceptor demos due. SDA Tranche 3 tracking satellites deliver.

SpaceX going public moved space from a venture bet to a public-market sector with a benchmark, real quarterly numbers, and a $1.85 trillion anchor. The companies underneath it now get judged on execution, not vision.

That's harder. It's also how you tell the real businesses from the ones that just had a great SPAC deck.