SpaceX prepares for liftoff

SpaceX is gearing up for its biggest launch yet.

Elon Musk’s rocket company is reportedly preparing to file its IPO prospectus as soon as this week, ahead of a planned June listing, targeting a $75 billion raise at a $1.75 trillion valuation, potentially the largest IPO ever.

Even for Musk that sounds pretty ambitious, but his enthusiasm is not entirely unfounded. The company generated $16 billion in revenue and $7.5 billion in EBITDA last year, implying EBITDA profit margins near 50%—well above the 20% average in the aerospace industry.

At its core, SpaceX still runs a launch business, and accounted for over half of global orbital launches last year. But following its merger with xAI, the company is evolving into something more unique: a vertically integrated space and AI infrastructure platform, with much of the capital raised set to fund Musk’s Terafab project, orbital data centers, and lunar infrastructure.

Zoom out: The IPO could re-rate the entire space sector at the exact moment it needs the money. Just yesterday, NASA paused its Gateway project, redirecting $20 billion toward a separate lunar base effort, sending space stocks down.

Today’s SpaceX momentum reversed that sentiment:

• Rocket Lab jumped 10.31% this afternoon
• Firefly Aerospace surged 16.01%
• EchoStar, which has a 3% stake in SpaceX, popped 7.43%
• Intuitive Machines gained 14.68%, also boosted by a new $180.4 million NASA contract

The space trade is just getting started

Some investors are worried about a perhaps unjustified rally in space stocks, drawing parallels to the hype surrounding Netscape’s 1995 IPO, which helped ignite the dot-com bubble.

But the thing about space is that it’s endless—containing business possibilities as numerous as the stars. Even with near-term setbacks like NASA’s pause, the long-term opportunities include launching rockets, providing in-orbit services, extracting resources from the lunar surface, constructing low-orbit data centers, and more.

"I like to think of space like a highway: when you first only had a handful of cars there, everybody had to bring their own gas tank. Once you get thousands of cars up there, you can start to invest in a gas station." Delian Asparouhov, Partner at Founders Fund, told TBPN.

Intuitive Machines, for example, has a pipeline of additional catalysts, including delivering satellites into orbit, additional NASA missions, and key lunar and defense contract decisions on the horizon, according to Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Andres Sheppard.

Other space stocks may soon see their businesses expand as well, as the SpaceX IPO sends the whole sector into orbit.—SY