For Immediate Release
Chicago, IL – June 9, 2026 – Today, Zacks Investment Ideas feature highlights Rocket Lab RKLB, AST SpaceMobile ASTS, Intuitive Machines LUNR, Planet Labs PL, Lockheed Martin LMT and L3Harris LHX.
SpaceX Prepares to Make History: Space Stocks to Watch
For two decades, investing in the commercial space economy has come with an asterisk: the single most important company in the industry wasn’t available to own.
That changes this week. SpaceX is targeting a Nasdaq debut on June 12th under the ticker SPCX, with pricing expected after the close on June 11th, an offering of roughly 557 million shares at about $135 each, aiming to raise around $75 billion at a $1.75 trillion valuation.
That would make it the largest IPO in history by a wide margin. Whatever one thinks of the valuation, the event is a genuine milestone, and it’s worth thinking carefully about what it means for the public companies that have been quietly building this industry alongside Elon Musk’s juggernaut.
Here’s the part that matters most for investors who can’t get a meaningful allocation in the SpaceX deal itself: a listing of this magnitude gives the entire commercial space sector its first true large-cap benchmark.
Until now, public market investors have had no clean reference point for how to value a vertically integrated space business. Once SPCX is trading and analysts are publishing models, every other space stock gets repriced relative to it — and the early evidence suggests that repricing tends to run in one direction. Pure-play names have already been climbing in anticipation.
Space Stocks to Watch
The clearest beneficiary is Rocket Lab, which has matured from a scrappy small-satellite launcher into something approaching a vertically integrated space prime. Its first-quarter 2026 results were genuinely impressive: record revenue of $200.3 million, up 63.5% year over year, a record GAAP gross margin of 38.2%, and a record backlog of $2.2 billion.
The more telling shift is beneath the headline — Space Systems has now overtaken Launch Services as the larger revenue contributor, which speaks to a more diversified, higher-margin business than the “rocket company” label implies. The real catalyst ahead is Neutron, Rocket Lab’s medium-lift reusable rocket targeted for a late-2026 debut, which would let the company compete for the larger payloads and constellation contracts that have historically gone to SpaceX.
The company signed its largest launch contract ever during the quarter — five dedicated Neutron missions with a confidential customer — alongside 31 new Electron and HASTE bookings. The caveat, and it’s an important one, is valuation: at roughly 94 times sales, RKLB prices in a great deal of future success, and any slip in Neutron’s schedule would sting.
