Can we just say "to the moon" about secondary SpaceTech activity?

"The industry expects space to be the next big thing. It's a very similar idea to what AI was a few years ago and continuing on." — Todd Sohn, Chief ETF Strategist, Strategas told to CNBC.

We're one week after SpaceX's IPO. Let's look at what's happening in private SpaceTech — and whether this is really just a SpaceX story or a broader market move.

The IPO pipeline is forming fast. The Information reported this week that several SpaceTech companies are preparing to follow SpaceX onto public markets. Sierra Space is taking steps toward an IPO that could happen as soon as this year. Vast Space, the Los Angeles-based space station developer, has discussed a listing for late 2026 or early 2027. Axiom Space is repeatedly named in IPO speculation, though the company itself has not publicly committed to a timeline — and notably just closed an oversubscribed $525M private round in June, suggesting it has runway before needing public markets.

On the secondary market, the response is unusually broad. We're tracking 16 SpaceTech names with meaningful activity right now — not one or two breakouts, but a deep bench across launch, satellites, in-space infrastructure, and defence crossover. So why a basket rather than one or two names?

Private market investors appear to be taking the same approach that public markets used to evaluate SpaceX itself: don't underwrite a single monolithic bet, but think instead in terms of cash-generating core plus long-dated optionality. That architecture rewards diversified operators — Varda with pharma plus defence, Axiom with NASA contracts plus a commercial station — over pure-play moonshots. And it also rewards portfolio construction over trying to pick the single name that will mirror SpaceX's trajectory.

The public SpaceTech universe is thin and unevenly distributed.

Only ~16 pure-play space stocks trade publicly worldwide, and exactly one of them is a launch company (Rocket Lab). A Reuters analysis of the seven existing pure-play space ETFs found all of them hold the same four stocks — including Rocket Lab — in their top 10 holdings, with 50% or more overlap across funds. Retail investors chasing the theme through ETFs are largely buying the same handful of names, even though they could in principle build a more diversified basket of individual stocks.

The bigger gap is structural. Entire categories — orbital compute, in-space manufacturing, spacecraft bus platforms, hosted payload services, hypersonic reentry — simply don't have public-market equivalents yet. If you want exposure to the next wave of SpaceTech, not just the names already public, the depth is in the private secondary market.

The map below shows what that looks like: no single name dominating, and entire categories (orbital compute, in-space manufacturing, spacecraft bus platforms) that simply don't exist in public markets yet.