Rocket Lab trades at 0.8% of SpaceX's valuation

SpaceX is public and Rocket Lab trades at 0.1% of its valuation

SpaceX completed its IPO in June 2026 at a $1.75 trillion valuation. That number is worth sitting with for a moment, because it reshapes how you should be thinking about every other public space company right now.

The problem with SpaceX being private for so long was that investors who wanted launch exposure had nowhere to put money. The sector had no anchor. Valuations on the smaller public players drifted around without a reference point, and institutional money largely stayed away because the biggest name in the room wasn't on any exchange.

That changed six weeks ago. Now there's a publicly traded comp, and it's the most valuable aerospace company in history. Institutions that run space-themed mandates, thematic ETFs, and sector rotation strategies can finally price the rest of the field against something real.

Rocket Lab USA (NASDAQ:RKLB) is the most direct beneficiary of this repricing. It is the only other company currently flying an operational orbital rocket on a commercial basis. Full stop. The Electron rocket has completed over 60 launches. Neutron, the medium-lift vehicle that competes more directly with Falcon 9, is on track for its first launch later this year. RKLB trades at a market cap somewhere around $14 billion as of this writing, which is 0.8% of SpaceX's current valuation. You can argue about the right discount, but 99.2% seems like a lot.

The chain reaction here runs through institutional allocation. A fund building a space portfolio post-SpaceX IPO needs liquid, public names. RKLB has real revenue ($436 million in FY2025), a growing backlog, and a path to profitability. It isn't a concept stock. It builds and flies rockets, manufactures spacecraft components through the SolAero and Sinclair acquisitions, and has built itself into one of the most vertically integrated small space companies on the planet.

The second-order effect is what most people are missing. SpaceX's IPO didn't just validate launch. It validated the entire commercial space economy, from satellite connectivity to lunar logistics. AST SpaceMobile (NASDAQ:ASTS) builds direct-to-phone satellite broadband, a model Starlink proved had massive demand. Intuitive Machines (NASDAQ:LUNR) flies lunar landers on SpaceX rockets and holds NASA contracts that now sit inside a sector with a public, trillion-dollar anchor.

The bear case is straightforward: SpaceX dominates launch so thoroughly that the scraps left for competitors are thin. RKLB's Neutron enters a market where the incumbent has 20 years of manufacturing experience, reusability mastered, and a cost structure nobody can match. If Neutron slips on schedule or underperforms commercially, the RKLB repricing thesis stalls.

But here's how I'd frame the risk. In 1995 you could have argued that Microsoft's dominance meant no other software company was worth owning. The sector expanding was more powerful than any single player's lead. SpaceX going public at $1.75 trillion tells every capital allocator on earth that space is a legitimate investment category. That capital has to go somewhere, and the public float of all non-SpaceX listed space companies combined is a fraction of one SpaceX. The pressure on prices is one direction.

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Quick Takes

Three more stories worth knowing about

Anthropic's IPO filing puts a clock on every AI-native stock

Anthropic filed confidentially on June 1 and is targeting a fall listing. When it lands, it will almost certainly be valued in the hundreds of billions, possibly crossing a trillion depending on market conditions by then. That kind of debut resets the comp table for every public AI company. SoundHound AI (NASDAQ:SOUN), UiPath (NYSE:PATH), and Serve Robotics (NASDAQ:SERV) all sit in the blast radius of an AI-lab listing that forces the market to ask what the application layer is worth. The window before that repricing is the interesting window.

Golden Dome defence spending is real money, not a press release

Washington has moved past announcing missile defence ambitions and into actual procurement. Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT) and RTX (NYSE:RTX) are the obvious institutional buys because they already sit inside the program architecture. The more interesting angle is Kratos Defense (NASDAQ:KTOS), which builds the kind of lower-cost autonomous systems and drones that a distributed, layered shield actually requires. The big primes win on dollars. Kratos wins on repricing if the program scales the way the Pentagon's stated doctrine suggests it should.

AAOI's 39-point score jump in four days is worth a look

Applied Optoelectronics (NASDAQ:AAOI) moved 39 points in our scoring model over the past four sessions, reaching 81. AAOI makes optical networking components, particularly transceivers and modules used in data center interconnects. With hyperscaler capex running at record levels and data center bandwidth demand still accelerating, the optical components running the physical connections between servers have become a critical supply item. AAOI has had a volatile history, but a move of this magnitude in our model usually means something worth investigating has changed in the underlying demand picture.

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Overlooked Stock

CRDO

Credo Technology Group Holding Ltd

Credo Technology Group (NASDAQ:CRDO) makes the high-speed connectivity chips that move data between servers inside AI data centers. Its HiWire active electrical cables and SerDes chiplets sit at the intersection of two trends that aren't slowing: hyperscaler spending and the shift to denser, faster AI cluster architectures.

What makes Credo interesting rather than obvious is where it fits in the supply chain. Nvidia gets the headlines for the GPUs. The memory companies get attention for HBM. But the interconnect layer, the silicon that actually moves data between all those expensive chips at 400G, 800G, and now 1.6T speeds, is a genuine constraint in cluster design. Credo sells into hyperscalers, OEMs, and optical module manufacturers, which means its customer list reads like a who's-who of AI infrastructure spending.

With a score of 92 in our model and True North tier classification, this is one to research properly before the next wave of data center earnings confirms what the order books already suggest.

The Contrarian Take

The Neutron rocket is more important than any satellite constellation

Consensus in the space sector right now is that satellite constellations, connectivity, and in-orbit services are where the value gets created. Launch is a commodity, the story goes, and SpaceX has already won it.

I think that framing is badly wrong, and here's why. The constraint on every space business over the next decade isn't ideas or capital, it's lift. If you need to get hardware to orbit and SpaceX is unavailable, overbooked, or politically inconvenient for a given customer, your options are thin. Rocket Lab's Neutron is the only vehicle in development from a company that has actually demonstrated it can build and operate a rocket commercially. That makes it a critical piece of infrastructure for any customer who needs launch redundancy.

A world where one company controls almost all medium-to-heavy lift to orbit is a world that will pay a serious premium for a credible alternative. That premium isn't priced into RKLB today.