Orbit Alpha Issue 22 · 13 Sept 2026

SpaceX's $47 Billion Unlock Rattles the Sector, While Rocket Lab Fights NASA Over Mars

MARKET OVERVIEW
🌎 SpaceX's $47 Billion Unlock Rattles the Sector, While Rocket Lab Fights NASA Over Mars

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The space-equity trade spent the week digesting SpaceX's third post-IPO lockup tranche, a wave of newly tradeable stock worth up to $47.2 billion that hit the market on September 9 and triggered sympathy selling across nearly every name in the sector. The Procure Space ETF (UFO) fell 3% that day alone, and the three main space-tracking funds all closed the week lower: ARKX -1.18%, ROKT -1.08%, UFO -0.96%. Layered on top of the unlock-driven pressure was a genuine company-specific fight: Rocket Lab filed a formal protest with the U.S. Government Accountability Office over NASA's decision to hand a $700 million Mars orbiter contract to Blue Origin, plus a fresh round of analyst target cuts at Planet Labs following a post-earnings guidance stumble. With Washington's funding fight defused into December (the House passed a continuing resolution through December 11 back on September 1) and no fresh macro shock this week, nearly every move below traces back to one of those two storylines or to routine, single-name catalysts.

SpaceX (SPCX)
Wells Fargo trimmed its price target from $215 to $212 around September 8-9 (while keeping an Overweight rating), and then the big event landed: on September 9, a 90-day post-IPO share-release milestone made up to $47.2 billion of insider-held stock eligible to trade, and SPCX sank 5% to $146.35, dragging AST SpaceMobile (-4% to $63.18) and Rocket Lab (-3% to $63.92) down with it. The stock found its footing quickly. On September 10, The Information reported that SpaceX is overhauling its data-center construction practices: new leadership from the rocket division is prioritizing reliability (backup power, cooling, more pre-launch testing) over the breakneck pace that built the Memphis/Colossus compute cluster, following a construction-related outage there that hit Grok and outside compute customers including Anthropic and Google. The same day, Reuters reported that the UK Ministry of Defence has spent nearly $40 million on SpaceX satellite services ($17.6 million on military-grade Starshield and $22.3 million on standard Starlink, covering roughly 1,000 Starshield and 500 Starlink terminals), making Britain the first country outside the U.S. to publicly acknowledge using Starshield. Follow-up coverage on September 11 put SpaceX's total U.S. government contract base at roughly $6 billion for the second quarter alone, with Enterprise & Government revenue of $1.806 billion, up 108% year-over-year on airline partnerships and Starshield; SPCX closed that day at $151.21, up 2.04%, and above both its 50- and 200-day moving averages. Looking ahead, SpaceX is targeting no earlier than September 15 for Starship Flight 14, the vehicle's first attempt at reaching orbital trajectory, carrying roughly 20 operational Starlink V3 satellites, with the tower-catch attempt deliberately deferred to a later flight. We could not find an updated short-interest figure for this week specifically; the most recent published reading (roughly 11% of float, down from an early-August peak near 34%) is now a month old. Yahoo Finance's one-year consensus target for SPCX is $220.68, with an overall Buy rating.

Rocket Lab (RKLB)
On September 8, Rocket Lab unveiled a new solar cell technology ("IMM Apex") designed to cut reliance on supply-constrained critical minerals. On September 9, RKLB slid alongside the rest of the sector in the SpaceX-unlock sympathy selloff (not company-specific news), but Berenberg used the moment to initiate coverage at Buy with an $83 target, citing a space market it sees topping $1 trillion by 2030, even as Bank of America trimmed its own target from $115 to $110 (still rating it Overweight). The bigger story broke September 11-12: Rocket Lab confirmed it has filed a formal protest with the Government Accountability Office over NASA's September 1 decision to award Blue Origin a Mars Telecommunications Network contract worth up to $700 million, arguing the award "appears inconsistent with the eligibility criteria mandated by Congress" and that NASA's technical review contained "incorrect assertions and conclusions" (full story in this week's Deep Dive). The same week, Rocket Lab launched its 16th Electron mission of the year (a single Earth-observation satellite for an undisclosed customer, the company's 95th Electron flight overall), and CEO Peter Beck gave an interview conceding the "piping hot" AI/space trade "could" go pop, while insisting Rocket Lab is "fundamentally better in every single metric" than peers and that "it's SpaceX and Rocket Lab, that's it" on competitive positioning. Raymond James upgraded the stock to Moderate Buy on September 12, citing record revenue, expanding backlog, and more than $1 billion in new contracts booked since the second quarter began. Shares still closed the week down, from $64.26 on September 4 to $62.95 on September 11 (-2.04%), marking a fifth straight weekly decline even as the stock remains up roughly 34% year-over-year. All of this is unfolding against the backdrop of Rocket Lab's pending roughly $8 billion acquisition of Iridium Communications, which goes to a shareholder vote on September 24. Iridium reminded its holders by SEC filing on September 3 to vote in favor, and an unrelated SpaceX FCC complaint over potential spectrum interference between the two companies remains an unresolved overhang on the deal. Yahoo Finance's one-year consensus target for RKLB is $111.00, with an overall Buy rating.

AST SpaceMobile (ASTS)
AST SpaceMobile fell 4% to $63.18 on September 9 in the same SpaceX-unlock sympathy wave that hit the rest of the sector; there was no ASTS-specific news that day. On September 12, the company's 30-day, FCC-authorized trial of 800 MHz direct-to-device service (testing standard consumer smartphones in Lanham, Maryland and Midland, Texas under an April 2026 FCC grant) concluded, though no results have been published yet. Coverage on September 11 flagged ASTS as one of the hardest stocks on Wall Street to read right now: down 17.5% year-to-date and 16% over the trailing month, with Barchart's technical model at a 100% "Strong Sell" reading and only 2 of the last 10 weekly candles positive. Shares fell from $62.31 on September 4 to $59.86 on September 11, down about 3.9% for the week. Yahoo Finance's one-year consensus target for ASTS is $79.61, with an overall Hold rating.

Intuitive Machines (LUNR)
A Form 4 filed between September 8 and 10 disclosed that director and major shareholder Kamal Ghaffarian converted common units into Class A shares and sold a portion under a pre-arranged 10b5-1 trading plan; secondary reporting on the exact share count and price conflicted between sources and could not be reconciled by publication time, so we're not printing a specific figure we can't stand behind. Shares drifted from $14.81 on September 4 to $14.35 on September 11, down about 3.1% for the week. Yahoo Finance's one-year consensus target for LUNR is $29.50, with an overall Strong Buy rating.

Viasat (VSAT)
A batch of Form 4 filings on September 8 disclosed routine RSU vesting, stock grants, and share gifts into family trusts by several directors, equity-compensation and estate-planning activity rather than open-market sales signaling a view on the stock. The share price moved in ways we couldn't fully explain: after closing at $77.75 on September 8, VSAT dropped roughly 7% to $72.36 on September 9, then rebounded 2.5% to $74.18 on September 10, a pattern that traced to no company-specific press release or filing we could locate. For the full week, shares fell from $75.32 (September 4) to $74.31 (September 11), down about 1.3%. Viasat's third ViaSat-3 satellite entered service across Asia-Pacific on August 31, and the company beat estimates in its early-August fiscal first-quarter print. Yahoo Finance's one-year consensus target for VSAT is $103.94, with an overall Buy rating.

MDA Space (MDA.TO)
On September 10, MDA unveiled "MDA Aurora Black," a new defense-focused, software-defined MILSATCOM satellite variant built at its expanded Montreal facility, featuring anti-jamming and anti-spoofing capability; CEO Mike Greenley was quoted in the release. The following day, MDA was named to the 2026 TSX30, the ranking of the top 30 performing companies on the Toronto Stock Exchange over a trailing three-year window, landing at 14th place on 617% three-year share-price appreciation, its second consecutive year on the list. An August 7 second-quarter print showed CAD $498.6 million in revenue (+33.6% year-over-year) and a CAD $4.0 billion backlog, alongside a raised full-year guide, and an August 19 JPMorgan price-target increase to the $50 area (Overweight). We were not able to confirm a clean, two-sourced closing price for MDA specifically dated September 11 (the data available to us Sunday morning bore a stale "market open" timestamp), so we're characterizing the stock as roughly flat to modestly lower for the week rather than citing a precise percentage move. Yahoo Finance's one-year consensus target for MDA is CAD $67.55, with an overall Buy rating.

Planet Labs (PL)
Planet Labs extended a selloff that began with its September 3 earnings report (record revenue, up 58% year-over-year, but third-quarter guidance that came in weaker than the market wanted). This week brought a fresh round of target cuts confirming the market's read: Goldman Sachs cut its target to $24 from $25 on September 7, Berenberg reiterated at $25 the same day, and Deutsche Bank cut its target to $28 from $36 (sources disagreed on whether this landed September 4 or September 8; we could not resolve the exact date). Shares fell every single trading day this week: from $18.12 on September 4 down to $17.81, $17.22, $16.69, and finally $16.45 by September 11, a cumulative decline of about 9.2%, the steepest weekly move of any ticker in this issue. Yahoo Finance's one-year consensus target for PL is $34.00, with an overall Buy rating.

Firefly Aerospace (FLY)
Firefly signed a new contract on September 9 with Sweden's SSC Space for two Alpha rocket launches from the Esrange Space Center, targeted for no earlier than 2028; SSC secured the full payload capacity, to be allocated across Swedish national-security and commercial rideshare customers. Contract value wasn't disclosed, and no SEC filings turned up dated inside the window. Shares were volatile but ended only modestly lower: from $21.67 on September 4 to $21.02 on September 11 (-3.0%), with an intraweek spike to $22.90 on September 8. Yahoo Finance's one-year consensus target for FLY is $41.60, with an overall Buy rating; coverage here is thin and the analyst range is unusually wide ($25 to $65 across 10 analysts), so treat the point estimate with more caution than most other names in this issue.

BlackSky Technology (BKSY)
On September 9, BlackSky was named the exclusive provider of very-high-resolution electro-optical satellites for a new 50-satellite, roughly $1 billion international AI-infrastructure-in-space initiative unveiled alongside French President Emmanuel Macron at an International Space Summit in Paris, alongside consortium partners Marlan Space, Loft Orbital, and Mistral AI, serving customers across France, Europe, and the UAE. No specific dollar allocation to BlackSky itself has been disclosed yet (the company says further details are expected later this year), and despite the positive framing, shares actually closed down almost 2% that day. The same week brought a cluster of Form 144 filings from CEO Brian O'Toole, CFO Henry Dubois, and General Counsel Christiana Lin signaling planned share sales, with a confirmed Form 4 showing O'Toole sold 20,000 shares on September 9 at an average price of $21.83 (about $436,600), retaining just over 1.1 million shares directly. BlackSky's annual shareholder meeting was also held on September 10, though a vote-results filing had not yet appeared as of this writing. For the week, shares were roughly flat, from $20.50 (September 4) to $20.61 (September 11), up about 0.5% despite the noise. Yahoo Finance's one-year consensus target for BKSY is $38.42, with an overall Strong Buy rating.

Takeaway
Two threads ran through this week's tape: a SpaceX-driven liquidity event that pressured the entire sector on September 9, and Rocket Lab's escalating fight with NASA over a lost Mars contract that will play out alongside its own high-stakes September 24 shareholder vote on the roughly $8 billion Iridium acquisition. Planet Labs' guidance-driven slide was the week's sharpest single-name move. Next week's calendar is thin on scheduled catalysts but heavy on binary risk: SpaceX's Starship Flight 14 is targeted for no earlier than September 15, Virgin Galactic faces a mandatory $20.4 million note redemption by September 30, and the GAO clock is now running on Rocket Lab's Mars-contract protest.

BROKER PULSE
🚀 Consensus prices

Live prices for all names below at Orbit Alpha Markets

LAUNCH WATCH
🔭 Launches that could move your portfolio

Full launch calendar with live status at Orbit Alpha Launches

• Sep 13: SpaceX · Falcon 9 · O3b mPOWER-F (satellites 11-13) · Cape Canaveral SFS, FL
• Sep 15: Arianespace/Avio · Vega-C · Sentinel-3C + FLEX (Earth Explorer) · Guiana Space Centre, Kourou
• NET Sep 15: SpaceX · Starship V3 (Flight 14) First orbital-trajectory attempt, ~20 Starlink V3 satellites, tower catch deferred · Starbase, TX (some trackers list Sep 18-19;Sep 15 is the best-supported date per FCC filing)
• Sep 15: LandSpace · Zhuque-2E · Payload TBD · Jiuquan, China (unconfirmed)
• Sep 15: Orienspace · Gravity-1 · Payload TBD · Sea launch, Haiyang, China (unconfirmed)
• Sep 16: SpaceX · Falcon 9 · USSF-259 · Vandenberg SFB, CA
• Sep 16: Roscosmos · Soyuz-2.1b · Progress MS-35 (96P, ISS resupply) · Baikonur, Kazakhstan
• Sep 17: CASC · Long March 12 · Payload TBD · Wenchang, China (unconfirmed)
• Sep 17: ExPace · Kuaizhou-11 · Payload TBD · Jiuquan, China (unconfirmed)
• Sep 19: CASC · Long March 2D · Payload TBD · Taiyuan, China (unconfirmed)
• Sep 20: SpaceX · Falcon 9 · Starlink Group 15-27 · Vandenberg SFB, CA
• NET late Sep: SpaceX · Crew Dragon · Crew-13 (NASA/ISS) · Cape Canaveral SFS, FL (delayed from an earlier target after an oxidizer leak was found in prelaunch processing; no new date set)
• NET late Sep: SpaceX · Falcon 9 · Tranche 1 Transport Layer A (Space Development Agency) · Vandenberg SFB, CA
• NET late Sep: ULA · Vulcan Centaur VC6L · Amazon Leo LV-01 (Kuiper) · Cape Canaveral SFS, FL
• NET late Sep: Rocket Lab · Electron/Curie · BlackSky Gen-3 Mission 6 · Māhia Peninsula, NZ
• Oct 1-4 (window): SpaceX · Falcon 9 · Transporter-18 rideshare (incl. FORMOSAT-8B) · Cape Canaveral/Vandenberg
• Early Oct (TBD): Arianespace · Ariane 62 · MetOp-SG B1 (2nd of 6 MetOp-SG launches) · Kourou, ELA-4

DEEP DIVE
🎯 ROCKET LAB'S $700 MILLION MARS SNUB: A GAO PROTEST, A NEUTRON DELAY, AND CATHIE WOOD'S DIP-BUYING BET

Rocket Lab spent this week fighting a battle on three fronts at once: a lost NASA contract, a rocket program racing the calendar, and a transformative acquisition awaiting a shareholder vote. The way the market has reacted to each says something about how investors are pricing the company's next twelve months.

The award. On September 1, NASA awarded Blue Origin a contract worth up to $700 million to design, build, launch, and operate the Mars Telecommunications Network (MTN), a relay orbiter meant to keep future Mars missions in contact with Earth. The spacecraft is due for delivery by December 31, 2028, with the network operational by 2030. Rocket Lab, a bidder on the same award, saw its stock fall 2.16% to $62.54 that day, its ninth decline in ten trading sessions at the time, despite the stock still sitting up roughly 29% over the prior year.

The protest. Rocket Lab didn't let the loss stand quietly. On September 11-12, the company confirmed it had filed a formal bid protest with the U.S. Government Accountability Office, arguing that NASA's award "appears inconsistent with the eligibility criteria mandated by Congress" and that the agency's technical evaluation of Rocket Lab's own proposal contained "incorrect assertions and conclusions." The GAO's standard review clock runs 100 calendar days, with an expedited track available at 65 days, meaning a resolution likely lands sometime in December 2026 at the earliest. It's worth noting the irony here: this is close to a role reversal of 2021, when Blue Origin itself protested NASA's decision to award the crewed lunar lander contract to SpaceX. GAO denied that protest, and Blue Origin went on to win a second lunar-lander contract of its own in 2023 anyway, a precedent that cuts both ways for how this dispute might resolve.

Wall Street's mixed verdict. Analysts didn't treat the contract loss as a reason to bail. Berenberg initiated coverage this month at Buy with an $83 target, citing a space market it expects to top $1 trillion by 2030. New Street Research's Pierre Ferragu has kept a Buy rating with a much higher $150 target. Bank of America trimmed its target from $115 to $110 (still Overweight), while Cantor Fitzgerald actually raised its target, from $96 to $122. On September 12, Raymond James upgraded the stock to Moderate Buy, pointing to record revenue, more than $1 billion in new contract bookings since the second quarter began, and a maturing Electron launch cadence (the company flew its 16th mission of the year and 95th Electron overall this week). Street targets this month have ranged roughly from $107 to $115, implying substantial upside from current levels even after the Mars-contract setback.

Cathie Wood versus the insiders. The sentiment split shows up clearly in who's buying and who's selling. ARK Invest bought aggressively into the weakness: on August 31, the flagship ARKK fund bought 200,303 shares (about $12.8 million), and the next day three ARK funds together bought a combined 504,799 shares (about $31.6 million), a two-day total of roughly 705,000 shares worth about $44 million. That stands in contrast to a cluster of insider sales a week earlier, on August 24, when five Rocket Lab executives, including chief operating officer Frank Klein (who sold 45,692 shares worth about $3.2 million), together sold roughly $5.5 million worth of stock, mostly tied to routine RSU tax-withholding rather than open-market conviction calls. Neither side's activity, on its own, tells you much; together, they illustrate a stock where institutional believers and insiders cashing out routine compensation are both active at the same time.

Neutron's narrowing window. The Mars-contract loss matters more because of what's riding on Rocket Lab's own next-generation rocket. Neutron suffered a fuel-tank rupture during hydrostatic testing back in January, and while the company has since cleared several milestones (its "Hungry Hippo" fairing completed flight-like testing in late August, and the Archimedes engine has now logged more than 400 hot-fire tests), CEO Peter Beck has publicly acknowledged that "the time window to complete the maiden flight before the end of the year is narrowing." A first flight remains targeted for the fourth quarter of 2026. Given that Rocket Lab's valuation increasingly depends on Neutron unlocking larger, higher-margin missions (including, potentially, future NASA deep-space work of exactly the kind it just lost to Blue Origin), any further slip would sharpen the question of whether this month's bullish analyst calls are underwriting execution risk that hasn't fully played out yet.

The Iridium overhang. All of this is unfolding while Rocket Lab tries to close its largest deal ever: a roughly $8 billion acquisition of Iridium Communications, structured as $27.00 in cash per share plus a variable stock allotment on a 0.24-to-0.40 collared exchange ratio, backed by a $3.6 billion bridge facility. The deal's Form S-4 was declared effective on August 26, and Iridium reminded its shareholders by SEC filing on September 3 to vote in favor ahead of a September 24 special meeting, warning that failing to vote counts as a vote against. A wrinkle remains unresolved: SpaceX filed an FCC complaint in late August urging regulators to scrutinize the deal over alleged spectrum interference between next-generation Starlink gateways and Iridium's systems in shared frequency bands. No FCC docket movement was reported this week, but the complaint is still live heading into the vote, and because Iridium shareholders' ultimate payout depends on a volume-weighted average of Rocket Lab's own stock price ahead of closing, any volatility in RKLB shares between now and the vote directly affects what Iridium holders actually receive.

Takeaway. None of Rocket Lab's three open storylines (the GAO protest, Neutron's development timeline, and the Iridium vote) will resolve within the next few weeks, but all three are now converging on roughly the same window: a GAO decision likely in the fourth quarter, a targeted Neutron debut before year-end, and an Iridium shareholder vote on September 24. The market's current read, reflected in Street price targets that still imply substantial upside despite this week's setback, is that Rocket Lab's diversified backlog and expanding government relationships outweigh any single lost contract. That thesis gets tested hard over the next month.

This newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not investment, legal, or financial advice. We believe our sources are reliable but can't guarantee accuracy or completeness, and all figures should be independently verified before you rely on them.

Previous: Issue 21: Flat Sector, Wild Stocks - SpaceX Rallies Into Its Next Lockup Week While Viasat Surges and BlackSky Slides · Next: Issue 23: Starship Slips, Insiders Cash Out, and the Sector Catches a Chill