Orbit Alpha Issue 19 · 23 Aug 2026

A Second Unlock, a Split Verdict, and a Sector-Wide Selloff

MARKET OVERVIEW
🌎 A Second Unlock, a Split Verdict, and a Sector-Wide Selloff

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SpaceX spent the week absorbing its second major lockup event since June's IPO, and the market's reaction complicated the simple "unlocks equal selling pressure" story that's dominated coverage since August began: the stock dipped toward its IPO price on unlock day, then rebounded to close the week only slightly lower, even as analysts grew further apart on where the shares belong. Beyond SpaceX, the week's dominant force for the rest of the basket wasn't company-specific news at all; it was macro. A broad, rate-driven selloff hit U.S. equities on Tuesday, August 18, as the 30-year Treasury yield climbed to its highest level in nearly two decades and chip stocks sold off, and high-beta, small-cap space names took an outsized hit, several falling 9 to 13% on the week with no negative company news to explain a move that size. Against that backdrop, a handful of names generated real, standalone catalysts: Intuitive Machines landed two contract wins, Rocket Lab both launched and picked up a new satellite-manufacturing order, and AST SpaceMobile was hit with a lawsuit. Details on each below.

SpaceX (SPCX)

SpaceX's second scheduled lockup release landed Thursday, August 20: roughly 319 million shares (the "Day 70" tranche, about 7% of the restricted share block) became freely tradable, and the stock fell 4.05% that day to $134.00, briefly dipping toward its $135 IPO price. SPCX rebounded 2.22% on Friday to close the week at $136.97, helped along by news that SpaceX's Starlink constellation crossed 11,000 satellites in orbit and by a wave of fresh analyst notes. Net for the week: SPCX finished down 2.16%, sitting just 1.46% above where it opened trading in June. Tradable float now stands at roughly 1.87 billion shares, about 14% of the 13.4 billion shares outstanding following SpaceX's $60 billion acquisition of Cursor, which formally closed August 15.

Wall Street, for its part, could not agree on what any of this means. DZ Bank initiated coverage this week (August 21 to 22) with a rare Sell rating and a $100 price target, pointing to $18.37 billion in quarterly capex, including $15.83 billion directed at AI infrastructure, and a $541 million quarterly net loss. Phillip Securities had gone further three days earlier (August 18), slapping a $75 target on the stock, a roughly 47% implied downside at the time. Both bear calls sit against Morgan Stanley's standing $300 Buy target from analyst Adam Jonas, and against a consensus average target that different aggregators pegged anywhere between roughly $213 and $232 this week, an unusually wide spread for a stock now three months into public trading. We dig into the mechanics behind the split, and what September's unlock calendar means for it, in this week's Sentiment Signal.

Starship added its own subplot: SpaceX conducted a single-engine static fire of the Flight 14 vehicle on August 20, with the flight itself targeting no earlier than August 28. But Elon Musk walked back earlier optimism about attempting a tower catch of the upper stage, posting on X around August 20 to 21 that a catch attempt is now "a few months" away; Flight 14's upper stage will instead splash down in the ocean, as Flight 13's did on July 24.

Intuitive Machines (LUNR)

The busiest of the smaller names this week. On Monday, August 17, the company disclosed authorization to proceed on a multi-satellite GEO communications program worth more than $600 million over 30 months (customer undisclosed at their request), formalizing work management had previewed on its prior earnings call. The next day, August 18, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory selected Intuitive Machines to provide the spacecraft platform and system-level integration for the EAGLE-VSWIR Earth-science mission, targeting a 2028 launch, the company's second major NASA Earth-science win. Shares rose roughly 6%+ across the early part of the week on the combined news.

Rocket Lab (RKLB)

Rocket Lab launched its 93rd Electron mission on August 21 (NZST) from New Zealand, carrying a QPS-SAR radar satellite for Japan's iQPS, the ninth of ten dedicated launches under an existing multi-mission agreement. Separately, on August 17, Viasat selected Rocket Lab to build a GEO satellite on Rocket Lab's "Lightning" bus for the U.S. Space Force's Protected Tactical SATCOM-Global program, an award referred to as "Swarm 1" (contract value undisclosed), a win for Rocket Lab's growing satellite-manufacturing business.

AST SpaceMobile (ASTS)

Named this week (August 20) in a lawsuit from Delclaux Partners over more than $15 million in disputed finder's-fee payments tied to past financing arrangements; shares continued drifting lower, down 5.7% on August 18, as the market kept digesting the prior week's earnings miss.

Viasat (VSAT)

Beyond being selected by Rocket Lab as the manufacturer for its new Space Force GEO satellite (see Rocket Lab, above), Viasat had no standalone news of its own this week, but its shares fell nearly 10%, among the sector's steepest declines, as part of the broad Tuesday selloff.

Planet Labs (PL)

Planet's SkySat constellation was integrated into Australian firm HEO's space-domain-awareness network, in a partnership announced August 17 to 19. Shares still fell roughly 9.7% on the week, tracking the broader selloff rather than reacting negatively to the news itself.

Globalstar (GSAT)

Downgraded to Hold from Buy by Craig-Hallum on August 18, with a $90 price target (single-sourced to one wire item; treat with some caution). Globalstar was notably the most stable name in the basket this week, essentially flat despite both the downgrade and the sector-wide selloff.

Firefly Aerospace (FLY)

Signed a NASA payload-processing contract at Vandenberg Space Force Base (August 17) and onboarded Zeno Power to a Blue Ghost lunar lander mission to test radioisotope heating technology (August 19), two positive announcements that did not stop the stock from falling nearly 13% on the week, the steepest decline of any name in the basket and consistent with a recent-IPO name's elevated beta amid the broader macro selloff.

MDA Space (MDA.TO)

No fresh company-specific headline in the window, but MDA was the week's steepest decliner by percentage in its own currency, down roughly 12.5% in Toronto trading. Commentary pointed to dilution overhang from MDA's July acquisition of Collecte Localisation Satellites and a negative first-half free cash flow position, layered on top of the broad Tuesday selloff.

Takeaway

The week's real story wasn't any single headline; it was that the market shrugged off a 319-million-share unlock without the capitulation some had priced in, even as analysts grew further apart on where SpaceX stock belongs. That divergence, plus a Treasury-yield-driven selloff that hit small-cap space names harder than their own fundamentals justified, sets up a tense stretch into September: SpaceX's next lockup tranche lands September 9, Starship Flight 14 is targeting no earlier than August 28, and ISRO's return-to-flight GISAT-1A mission, its first launch attempt since a seven-month stand-down, could be a binary catalyst for India-linked space names in the first week of September.

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SENTIMENT SIGNAL
🎯 THE SECOND UNLOCK: INSIDE SPACEX'S LOCKUP CALENDAR AND THE WALL STREET SPLIT IT'S EXPOSING

SpaceX's June IPO priced at $135 a share. Ten weeks later, the stock closed this week at $136.97, essentially flat against its debut price, despite two lockup events, a $60 billion acquisition, an earnings report, and a growing chorus of analysts who can't agree on whether the stock is worth $75 or $300. That gap between where the price sits and where analysts think it should sit is the story of the summer, and this week's unlock is the clearest window yet into why it exists.

The calendar. SpaceX's restricted-share structure releases in staggered tranches rather than one cliff-edge date, a design explicitly meant to avoid the kind of single-day flood that has hammered other high-profile IPOs. The first major tranche, roughly 911.5 to 912 million shares, unlocked August 6. Contrary to the standard "sell the unlock" playbook, the stock actually rose about 6% that day and roughly 16% the day after, according to reporting from the Motley Fool and CNN. A secondary, price-triggered tranche of 455.8 million shares tied to a $175.50 hurdle did not activate, because the stock never traded there. This week brought the second scheduled release: on August 20, the "Day 70" tranche of approximately 319 million shares, described variously as about 7% of the restricted block or roughly 2.4% of total shares outstanding depending on which denominator a given source uses, became eligible for trading. The stock fell 4.05% that day to $134.00, its lowest close of the week, before recovering 2.22% on Friday to $136.97.

Why the market didn't fully sell the news. Two forces appear to have blunted the Thursday drop. First, Friday's rebound coincided with reporting that SpaceX's Starlink constellation had crossed 11,000 satellites in orbit (the exact day, August 18 or 19, is disputed between sources, but the milestone itself is confirmed), a reminder of the underlying business's scale even amid unlock-driven volatility. Second, and more structurally, the tradable float remains small relative to the company's total share count: at roughly 1.87 billion shares versus 13.4 billion shares outstanding (following the $60 billion Cursor acquisition that closed August 15), only about 14% of SpaceX is actually free to trade. That scarcity has, so far, cushioned each unlock more than bears expected, but it also means every future tranche adds proportionally more supply to a still-thin market than it would for a more seasoned large-cap.

The short interest puzzle. Here the data gets genuinely murky, and it's worth being upfront about that rather than papering over it. The most recent short-interest print available is a FINRA settlement-date figure from July 31, not from this week, showing approximately 207.78 million shares short. Two data providers who cite that same share count disagree sharply on the derived metrics: one puts days-to-cover at 3.09 (versus 67.22 million average daily volume), while another calculates 2.33 days-to-cover and a startling 101.79% of float sold short, a number greater than 100% that's plausible only because of how thin the tradable float is, but which underscores how differently "short interest" can be measured on a stock this newly public. Nasdaq's own short-interest page for SPCX showed no data available at all as of this week. No fresh short-interest figures were actually reported during August 17 to 23 itself; we flag this gap explicitly rather than present stale July data as current.

A widening analyst split. If the unlock calendar is the mechanical story, analyst positioning is the interpretive one, and this week it snapped further apart. DZ Bank's Markus Leistner initiated coverage August 21 to 22 with a Sell rating and a $100 target, about 25% below Thursday's close, citing $18.37 billion in quarterly capital expenditure, of which $15.83 billion went to AI infrastructure, alongside a $541 million quarterly net loss and lingering questions about the durability of "temporary cloud contracts" underpinning some of that AI-linked revenue. He was described in coverage as the lone bear among more than 40 analyst actions logged that Friday. Three days earlier, Phillip Securities' Glenn Thum had gone further still, setting a $75 target, implying nearly 47% downside from the price at the time, on similar capex and customer-concentration concerns. Set against both is Morgan Stanley's Adam Jonas, who has maintained a $300 base-case Buy target since late July, and a broader Wall Street consensus that different data providers pegged this week anywhere from roughly $213.50 to $232.35, itself an unusually wide range for a stock with more than three months of public trading history and dozens of analysts now covering it.

What September brings. The calendar doesn't let up. September 9 brings the next scheduled "Day 90" tranche, another approximately 319 million shares, followed a day later by a smaller Rule 144 affiliate release of 59.1 million shares. Three more roughly 328-million-share tranches are scheduled for late September and October (Days 105, 120, and 135). Taken together, cumulative unlocks are on pace to reach approximately 4.9 billion shares by the end of 2026, more than a third of total shares outstanding, well before the real test: Elon Musk's own roughly 6.42-billion-share stake stays locked until June 12, 2027, the "Day 366" event that multiple analysts have flagged as the moment that will actually reveal whether institutional demand can absorb founder-scale supply.

Takeaway

Two unlocks into SpaceX's post-IPO life, the pattern so far is that the market has absorbed scheduled supply better than the bear case assumed, but "better than expected" is not the same as "resolved." A thin float, a genuinely contested short-interest picture, and an analyst community split by more than $200 a share between its highest and lowest targets all point to the same conclusion: SPCX's price action over the next several months will likely be driven less by SpaceX's operating results than by the mechanics of how much stock hits the market and when. September 9 is the next data point. June 2027 is the one that matters most.

Previous: Issue 18: Five earnings reports fell on the print this week. The stock that fell hardest last week was the only one that gained. VanEck JEDI Fund Dive. · Next: Issue 20: A Fed Shock, an FCC Fight Over Iridium, and a SpaceX That Weathered Both