Orbit Alpha Issue 23 · 20 Sept 2026

Starship Slips, Insiders Cash Out, and the Sector Catches a Chill

Market Overview

🌎 Starship Slips, Insiders Cash Out, and the Sector Catches a Chill

The week's defining tension was timing versus money. SpaceX pushed its highest-stakes Starship flight of the year back six days even as NASA handed it another $946 million, while a fresh lockup-tranche distribution and a record weekly retail exodus reminded investors that SPCX's real overhang is still the unlock calendar, not the hardware. Elsewhere, Thursday, September 17 brought a batch of good news, Rocket Lab's Iridium financing closed, MDA unveiled a new software portfolio at World Space Business Week in Paris, Viasat activated its third next-gen satellite and struck a $1 billion joint venture, only for Friday, September 18 to erase much of the week's gains in a broad small-cap "risk-off" rotation that hit Rocket Lab (-5.3%), AST SpaceMobile (-6% to -7.2%), Planet Labs (-4%), Intuitive Machines (-5.9%) and Redwire (-7.0%) in the same session, with no single shared catalyst beyond a general pullback in speculative growth names.


SpaceX (SPCX)
SpaceX shares rose roughly 3% to around $155 on September 17 even as the company confirmed that Starship Flight 14, the vehicle's first orbital-class attempt and first revenue-generating mission, carrying production Starlink V3 satellites, would slip six days, from September 22 to "as early as September 28, subject to regulatory approval," per Yahoo Finance and Invezz. The rescheduled flight from Starbase, Texas targets roughly 275 km altitude, six orbits over nearly 10 hours, a Super Heavy offshore booster landing attempt, and a ship splashdown in the Pacific west of Chile. Yahoo Finance also flagged Bloomberg reporting that SpaceX has held internal talks about buying data from distressed AI startups to train its own models, a claim Bloomberg cautioned "may not materialize into actual deals." Shares kept climbing into September 18–19 on a strong Starlink profile (60.5% EBITDA margins, per the company's Q2 disclosures) and bullish commentary from Cathie Wood, who said a single Starship mission could eventually be worth "close to $1 billion," and Baron Capital's Ron Baron, who projected Starlink alone could generate a trillion dollars in revenue over a decade. On September 18, NASA announced a $946 million expansion of SpaceX's Commercial Crew contract, adding three more ISS crew rotations (Crew-15 through Crew-17) and bringing the program's cumulative value to roughly $5.92 billion through 2030, per GuruFocus. The same week, an SEC Form 4 filed September 15 showed director Antonio Gracias, through Valor Equity Partners-managed entities, received a pro-rata in-kind distribution of 42,790,223 Class A shares (transacted September 11 under a Rule 10b5-1 plan adopted at IPO), leaving Gracias-affiliated entities holding roughly 460.6 million shares. TechCrunch independently confirmed on September 16 that the distribution represented about 8.5% of Valor's SpaceX stake, worth an estimated $8.5 billion, passed to Valor's own limited partners rather than sold on the open market. Separately, JPMorgan analyst Arun Jain found that retail investors sold roughly $250 million of SPCX in the week prior (part of $570 million over three weeks), the largest single week of retail selling Jain has documented for the stock, even as shares posted a modest ~1% weekly gain. A September 19 Motley Fool analysis put the stock at $152.71, about 5% below its June 12 IPO-day close of roughly $161, despite Q2 revenue growth of 92% year-over-year to $7.8 billion, arguing that a roughly 65x sales multiple and heavy AI/data-center capex are offsetting fundamentals; the piece recommended investors wait out December's major lockup expiration before adding to positions. (See this week's Sentiment Signal for the full lockup calendar and what's still to come.)

Rocket Lab (RKLB)
Rocket Lab's biggest news landed September 15, when the company announced it had fully funded its Iridium Communications acquisition, completing a $1.944 billion at-the-market equity offering (roughly 29.3 million new shares) and amending its existing $1.775 billion Iridium term loan to permit the change of control, while terminating a $3.6 billion bridge facility that had backstopped the deal, per the company's investor-relations release. The dilution weighed on the stock late in the week: shares fell roughly 5.3% to $64.22 on Friday, September 18, as investors recalibrated valuation models around the larger share count, per Benzinga. That came despite continued operational execution: Rocket Lab flew its 96th career Electron mission on September 19, "Owl By The Dozen," carrying the 12th StriX radar satellite for Synspective from Mahia, New Zealand, the company's 17th launch of 2026. Neutron development also drove a sharp mid-week rally: shares jumped over 6% on Thursday, September 17 to close at $67.82, after reports that the reusable "Hungry Hippo" fairing finished pre-flight testing and a new second-stage test stand was installed at Launch Complex 3 in Virginia ahead of Neutron's targeted late-2026 debut, per Stocktwits (this detail was single-sourced and could not be independently corroborated). As background, Rocket Lab's formal GAO bid protest over NASA's decision to award a $700 million Mars Telecommunications Network contract to Blue Origin was filed September 11, just before this window, and continued generating coverage into the week.


AST SpaceMobile (ASTS)
AST SpaceMobile extended its post-summer slide, closing at $58.52 on September 18 after a single-day drop of roughly 6–7% (sources put it between -6.0% and -7.2%), part of the broader small-cap space selloff that also hit Rocket Lab and Planet Labs that day, per 24/7 Wall St. The proximate catalyst was the FCC's September 18 approval extending SpaceX's authority for international Starlink Mobile direct-to-cell service, which investors read as intensifying competitive pressure on AST's core satellite-to-phone business, per Benzinga and TeslaNorth. Compounding the pressure, two AST executives disclosed stock sales: CTO Huiwen Yao filed to sell 40,000 shares (~$2.36 million) via Form 144, and COO Shanti Gupta sold roughly 12,000 shares (~$707,000), both disclosed around September 16–17. Stocktwits-tracked retail sentiment hit "near a 1-year low" on September 18, with traders citing unexplained delays in shipping and launching BlueBirds 14–16 after a rapid June–August launch cadence, and a slip in the company's 45-satellite constellation target from end-2026 to early 2027. Separately, three law firms issued fresh notices this week on the pending securities class action covering the March 2025–July 2026 period: Bronstein Gewirtz & Grossman (Sept. 17), Levi & Korsinsky (Sept. 18) and Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check (Sept. 19), with a November 13, 2026 lead-plaintiff deadline.

Intuitive Machines (LUNR)
Intuitive Machines had a news-light but volatile week. On September 15, the company announced it had completed in-orbit commissioning and handed over the SXM-11 satellite to SiriusXM, the 13th spacecraft the two companies have built together, launched in June on a SpaceX Falcon 9, with trade outlets Via Satellite and SatNews picking up the milestone on September 17 and 18. Shares rose 6.6% to close at $14.78 on September 17 before giving it back on September 18, falling 5.9% to roughly $13.92–$13.94, a move that tracked the broader sector pullback that day rather than any LUNR-specific catalyst. Separately, SEC filings show a Form 144 filed September 18 by SVP/CTO Timothy Price Crain II notifying a proposed insider stock sale; exact share and dollar amounts were not confirmed in secondary coverage. No new NASA CLPS award, litigation development, or named analyst action was identified inside the September 14–20 window.


Virgin Galactic (SPCE)
Virgin Galactic traded in a choppy, headline-light range: shares closed at $3.02 on September 14, $3.04 on the 15th, dipped 3.6% to $2.93 on the 16th, jumped 6.1% to $3.11 on the 17th, and eased 1.3% to $3.07 on the 18th, per StockAnalysis.com, a roughly 6% peak-to-trough swing with no identifiable company-specific catalyst. No SEC filings and no press releases were logged for Virgin Galactic in the window; the company's most recent news remains an August 18 court-approved settlement of derivative shareholder claims (no wrongdoing found) and continued ground-testing of its Delta-class spaceship in Mesa, Arizona, still guiding toward a fall-2026 commercial-service start as of its Q2 commentary. No sell-side analyst issued a new rating or price target inside the window; the two most recent bracketing calls were Morgan Stanley's Sell at $2.00 (Aug. 17) and Susquehanna's Hold at $3.00 (Aug. 14).

Spire Global (SPIR)
It was a quiet week for hard news on Spire Global: no 8-Ks, Form 4/144 insider filings, contract announcements, or executive statements are dated between September 14 and 20, per Spire's investor-relations filings page, whose newest entries remain an August 26 $28 million NOAA hyperspectral-sounder contract and a batch of Form 4 filings from August 24–25. The real story was price action: shares closed at $11.40 on September 18, per AAII citing Nasdaq data, leaving SPIR down about 14% for the month even as the stock remains up roughly 52% year-to-date. AAII also flagged a net-negative analyst tilt over the trailing month (two downgrades versus one upgrade), though the specific firms and dates behind those actions couldn't be confirmed as falling inside this window, so treat that as sentiment color rather than a dated event. Absent a fresh catalyst, the drift looks like continued digestion of Spire's August 12 Q2 print, in which non-GAAP gross margin compressed to 38% from 52% a year earlier following a contract cancellation.


Redwire (RDW)
It was a quiet week for hard corporate news on Redwire, with no new SEC filings and no new press releases between September 14 and 20, per SEC EDGAR and the company's own investor-relations site. Price action was choppy: shares closed at $10.49 on September 14, drifted to $10.75–$10.79 mid-week, jumped 7.0% to $11.55 on Thursday, September 17, then reversed 7.0% back to $10.74 on Friday, September 18 on unusually heavy volume, nearly triple the stock's typical daily volume, per Yahoo Finance and a MarketBeat instant alert. No outlet identified a specific catalyst for either move; several aggregator sites recirculated an old Bank of America price-target hike (to $8 from $7, Underperform maintained) as if it were breaking this week, but that action actually dates to August 31 and is excluded here as stale. One possible new item, a Guggenheim Neutral initiation dated September 15 per Benzinga's ratings page, could not be independently corroborated and should be treated with caution.

Viasat (VSAT)
Viasat had an active week on two fronts. On September 14, at World Space Business Week in Paris, Viasat and Abu Dhabi-based Space42 announced a binding agreement to form Equatys, a joint venture combining shared space and ground infrastructure for global direct-to-device connectivity, backed by up to $1 billion in combined equity: $400 million committed initially by each company, plus a further $200 million from Space42 in later rounds, per Ad Hoc News. Then on September 17, Viasat announced that its third next-generation satellite, ViaSat-3 F2, had formally entered service over the Americas, delivering over 1 terabit per second of throughput and completing the company's global VS3 constellation; CEO Mark Dankberg called the VS3 satellites "the most advanced commercial satellites in the world in terms of adaptive beam forming." Two routine Form 4 filings landed inside the window, CFO Garrett Chase (filed Sept. 18) and director John P. Stenbit (filed Sept. 15), consistent with recurring 10b5-1 sales and option exercises; exact amounts weren't confirmed in secondary coverage. As background, SpaceX petitioned the FCC around August 31 to block ViaSat-3 F2's spectrum authorization over interference concerns, a live regulatory overhang on the F2 milestone, though the petition itself predates this window.


MDA Space (MDA)
MDA Space had an active week built around Earth-observation product news. With World Space Business Week underway in Paris, MDA's satellite systems VP gave Via Satellite a detailed look at the new MDA Aurora Black defence-focused satellite on September 14. On September 15, National Bank Financial reiterated an Outperform rating with a C$55.00 target, per MarketBeat. The headline event came September 16, when MDA unveiled its end-to-end MDA CHORUS software portfolio (Command, Command Pro, and Intelligence), giving customers tools to search Earth-observation archives, stand up regional ground stations, and buy finished intelligence products ahead of the CHORUS radar constellation's planned late-2026 launch. That announcement drove the stock: SpaceQ's weekly close report (published Sept. 18) had MDA shares up 4.8% on the week to C$42.05, calling it the week's largest gain among Canadian public space companies and noting the stock is up nearly 58% year-to-date; a separate Thursday snapshot from Wealth Awesome put the weekly gain at a smaller 1.96% to C$42.41; the two sources agree directionally but not on magnitude, and a live Yahoo Finance quote pulled during research (C$40.11) appears to reflect a stale or differently-timed snapshot. All figures here are in Canadian dollars.


Planet Labs (PL)
Planet Labs had an active week on contracts and insider filings even as shares stayed roughly 65–67% below their May 2026 peak. On September 15, Planet announced a €25 million, five-year satellite-tasking agreement with Germany's Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy, making Germany the first civil government globally to acquire Planet's dedicated Constellation Services, per Investing.com. On September 17, shares jumped as much as 7% intraday to roughly $17.11 after an industry report named Planet as an active participant in securing satellite data against future quantum-computing threats, per StockStory, a single-sourced causal claim that couldn't be corroborated elsewhere. Insider paperwork also surfaced: co-founder and CEO Will Marshall filed a Form 4 on September 18 (transaction dated Sept. 15) showing 134,642 Class A shares withheld at a weighted-average $16.02 in a non-discretionary sell-to-cover for RSU taxes, worth about $2.2 million, per Motley Fool's filing coverage; two additional Form 144 intent-to-sell notices were lodged September 17, though the filers weren't independently confirmed. By September 19, Motley Fool columnists were framing PL (last near $16.42, market cap roughly $6.0 billion) as a potential dollar-cost-average candidate given 42% projected fiscal-year revenue growth.

Globalstar (GSAT)
It was a quiet week for Globalstar on the news wire, with the stock's story still dominated by its pending Amazon acquisition rather than any fresh company-specific catalyst. GSAT drifted in a narrow band, closing around $82.56 on September 17 and $82.84 on September 18, a roughly 8% discount to the $90.00-per-share cash-or-stock merger consideration Amazon agreed to pay when the deal was announced April 14, 2026, consistent with ordinary merger-arbitrage pricing given an expected 2027 close and pending FCC review. No new 8-K, Form 4, or press release was logged for Globalstar in SEC EDGAR or the company's investor-relations page during the window; the most recent company release remains the August 16 confirmation that all eight HIBLEO-4 replacement satellites, built by MDA Space and launched on SpaceX, had successfully deployed. With no incremental news, GSAT continued trading as a merger-arb proxy on deal-completion odds rather than on fundamentals.


Firefly Aerospace (FLY)
Firefly Aerospace had a comparatively quiet news week, with shares drifting to close at $20.97 on September 18, down roughly 3.4% on the session, after trading between $20.60 and $21.67 earlier in the week, per Yahoo Finance and StockAnalysis.com; no single dominant catalyst was identified for the move. The most concrete company-specific filings came September 18, when Firefly's CEO, CFO, CTO and Chief Accounting Officer each filed Form 4s reporting shares withheld to cover taxes on vesting RSUs and option exercises, routine equity-compensation mechanics rather than open-market selling, per StockTitan's filings tracker (single-sourced; direct EDGAR access was blocked during research). On September 18, New Space Economy published an analysis revisiting Firefly's September 9 multi-launch agreement with Sweden's SSC Space for two Alpha rocket flights from Esrange Space Center, a binding commercial deal targeting 2028 launches that still depends on pad construction and vehicle readiness. No new NASA/DoD contract award, and no confirmed Alpha or Blue Ghost mission activity, fell inside the September 14–20 window.


BlackSky Technology (BKSY)
BlackSky's news flow centered on satellite deployment progress. On September 14, the company announced that its fifth Gen-3 satellite achieved "first light" in under 20 hours after launch, capturing imagery of Chinese H-6 bombers near Nanning on September 11–12; CEO Brian O'Toole said each new satellite "shortens the time between an event on the ground and delivery of actionable intelligence," per BlackSky's release and SpaceNews. Also disclosed September 14 was a Form 4 showing CEO O'Toole sold 56,280 shares at $20.95 (~$1.18 million), described as a tax-withholding sale tied to equity-award vesting, with an underlying trade date of September 11, just ahead of this window, per a MarketBeat insider alert. Shares were volatile into the weekend, trading down roughly 5–6% on September 18 to the $21.37–$21.67 area on unusually light volume, with no single named catalyst identified by market-data outlets; coverage referenced an unnamed analyst downgrade "in the past month" that could not be confirmed as falling inside this specific window. No 8-K or other material SEC filing beyond the routine Form 4 was identified.

Takeaway
The through-line this week wasn't any single company's news; it was liquidity: SpaceX's insiders quietly moving shares out from under a lockup calendar that still has three more tranches to clear before December, AST's own executives filing to sell into FCC-driven competitive pressure, and a Friday sector-wide "risk-off" session that clipped nearly every small-cap name regardless of that day's individual headlines. Watch September 24, when SpaceX's next scheduled 328.4-million-share tranche unlocks, and September 28, when Starship Flight 14 is now set to fly; both land in the same week and both capable of moving sentiment across the whole sector, not just SPCX.

Consensus Prices

CompanyTickerRatingAvg. Target
SpaceXSPCXBuy$220.42
Rocket LabRKLBBuy$109.37
AST SpaceMobileASTSHold$79.61
Intuitive MachinesLUNRBuy$29.50
Virgin GalacticSPCEHold$3.56
Spire GlobalSPIRBuy$20.88
RedwireRDWBuy$14.69
ViasatVSATBuy$103.94
MDA SpaceMDA.TOBuyC$67.55
Planet LabsPLHold/Buy‡~$34.00
GlobalstarGSATHold$90.00
Firefly AerospaceFLYBuy$41.60
BlackSky TechnologyBKSYStrong Buy$38.42

Launch Watch

  • September 20 (NET): CAS Space · Kinetica-1 (expected) · Payload TBD · Jiuquan, China
  • September 23 (NET): CASC · Vehicle TBD · Payload TBD · Wenchang, China
  • September 24 (NET): CASC · Vehicle TBD · Payload TBD · Taiyuan, China
  • September 24: SpaceX lockup tranche unlocks (328.4M shares, Day-105), not a launch, but a date to watch alongside the calendar below
  • September 26: Rocket Lab · Electron · StriX-13 (Synspective SAR satellite) · Mahia Peninsula, New Zealand
  • September 26: SpaceX · Falcon 9 · USSF-385 ("R-3," classified USSF payload) · Cape Canaveral SFS (SLC-40), Florida
  • Late September (NET, exact date TBD): ULA · Vulcan Centaur VC6L · Amazon Leo/Kuiper "LV-01" (40 KuiperSats) · Cape Canaveral SLC-41, Florida
  • September 28 (NET): SpaceX · Starship (Flight 14, first orbital-class flight of this stack) · ~26 Starlink V3 satellites · Starbase, Texas
  • October 1 (NET): SpaceX · Falcon 9 / Crew Dragon · Crew-13 (NASA ISS rotation) · Cape Canaveral SLC-40, Florida
  • October 7: Arianespace · Ariane 6 · Amazon Leo "LE-04" (Project Kuiper batch) · Guiana Space Centre, Kourou, French Guiana

Orbit Focus

🎯THE $800 BILLION QUESTION: INSIDE SPACEX'S LOCKUP CALENDAR

SpaceX went public on June 12, 2026 in the largest IPO in history: 555,555,555 Class A shares priced at $135, raising roughly $86 billion against a $75 billion target and valuing the company at $1.77 trillion at the offer price. Shares popped about 19% on debut to close near $161, pushing the market cap past $2.1 trillion on day one. More than three months later, that IPO's fine print, not any single piece of operational news, is arguably the single biggest variable hanging over the stock, and this week gave investors a fresh reminder why.


The calendar, tranche by tranche
SpaceX structured its post-IPO lockup as a staged release rather than a single cliff, and the schedule (corroborated independently by TradingKey and PurePowerPicks, with matching dates and share counts) is now more than half complete. The first major tranche (911.5 million shares, a 20% slice of the locked pool) unlocked August 6, two days after SpaceX's Q2 earnings, roughly doubling the stock's tradeable float overnight from about 639 million to 1.55 billion shares; a larger, conditional 455.8-million-share bonus tranche tied to a $175.50 price trigger did not activate. Smaller 7%-of-pool tranches of 319 million shares each followed on August 20 and September 9, with a 59.1-million-share Rule 144 affiliate release on September 10. The next scheduled unlock is 328.4 million shares on September 24, four days from this issue's publication, with matching 328.4-million-share tranches following on October 9 and October 24. A much larger release, roughly 1.3 billion shares (28% of the pool), is scheduled for shortly after SpaceX's Q3 earnings in November, and the final remaining piece of the employee and RSU lockup pool (about 797.6 million shares) releases December 8, 2026, the date multiple analysts have flagged as the real test for the stock. By that point, roughly two-thirds of SpaceX's total shares outstanding will be tradeable, up from a small fraction at IPO. Notably, Elon Musk's roughly 6.4-billion-share block (an estimated 42% economic stake and 82–85% of voting power via Class B shares) sits under a separate, longer 366-day lockup that doesn't expire until June 2027, so even after December, the stock's single largest holder remains locked up for another six months.


Why the math matters
The reason lockup dates get so much attention for SPCX specifically is scale. With roughly 13.57 billion shares outstanding, a $2.07 trillion market cap, and average daily trading volume of around 335 million shares as of the September 18 close, the December 8 tranche alone (797.6 million shares) equals roughly 2.4 times a single day's typical volume, and the August 6 tranche, at 911.5 million shares, was about 2.7 times ADV. In a stock where a huge share of the float has been held by insiders and early venture investors sitting on enormous unrealized gains, even a modest fraction of tranche-holders deciding to sell can swamp normal trading liquidity. Former Nasdaq CEO Robert Greifeld has been quoted warning that the "largest IPO in history" risks becoming "the expiry of the largest lockup in history," with price-insensitive early holders potentially able to put up to $800 billion of stock into the market over five to six months if they chose to sell in size (though that framing, sourced only secondhand, should be read as a directional warning rather than a precise forecast).


What actually happened at the first big test
The August 6 tranche is the only large unlock investors have been able to observe so far, and the results were more muted than the bear case implies: the stock dipped intraday to around $105 but recovered to close the day up about 2.6%, near $111, per TradingKey's post-event analysis (a separate headline reference to a 6% single-day gain could not be independently reconciled with that figure, and is flagged here as an unresolved discrepancy rather than restated as fact). That outcome is one data point, not a pattern: the August tranche was smaller in dollar terms than the December release will be, and it landed just after a strong earnings beat that may have absorbed the extra supply.


This week's evidence that insiders are already moving
Two developments this week suggest the unlock dynamic is already playing out below the surface, ahead of any single large date. First, a Form 4 filed September 15 showed SpaceX director Antonio Gracias, through Valor Equity Partners-managed entities, distributing 42,790,223 Class A shares, transacted September 11 under a Rule 10b5-1 plan set up at the IPO. TechCrunch's independent reporting on September 16 clarified that this wasn't an open-market sale: Valor passed roughly 8.5% of its SpaceX position, an estimated $8.5 billion at the time, directly to its own limited partners as an in-kind distribution, a tax-advantaged mechanism that avoids dumping shares on the market but still moves a large, price-insensitive block of stock into new hands who may eventually sell. Valor, SpaceX's second-largest shareholder after Musk at IPO, with more than 500 million shares, still holds over 460 million shares after the distribution. Second, and more directly bearish for sentiment, JPMorgan analyst Arun Jain tracked $570 million of retail-investor selling in SPCX over the three weeks through mid-September, with roughly $250 million of that in the most recent week alone, the largest single week of retail outflows Jain has documented for the stock since its listing.


What the market is pricing in
Sell-side analysts remain broadly constructive on the business even as they flag the lockup as a real risk. Pivotal Research's Jeffrey Wlodarczak carries a Buy rating with a $220 year-end-2027 target but explicitly warns that "equity issuance at depressed prices presents a severe dilution risk" tied to the unlock cadence, and assigns a 20% probability to a bear case as low as $75. Morgan Stanley's Adam Jonas (Overweight, $300 target) has called the post-August-6 selloff a buying opportunity, while Bernstein's Douglas Harned carries a $248 target; the most cautious major shop, MoffettNathanson, rates the stock Hold with a $142 target. The 36-analyst consensus average sits at roughly $219, broadly in line with the $222 figure in this issue's Broker Pulse table. Short interest, meanwhile, tells its own version of the story: Ortex data cited by 24/7 Wall Street showed short positions building from 83 million shares (13% of free float) in late June to 196 million shares (31% of float) by July 2, a buildup Ortex co-founder Peter Hillerberg called "extraordinary." Short interest then settled to roughly 173.6 million shares by August 31, a figure that reads as only 2.81% of float purely because the float itself roughly doubled after the August 6 unlock, not because shorts meaningfully covered. Days-to-cover on that August 31 print was 2.36, a level that wouldn't support a classic short-squeeze narrative on its own.


Takeaway: Nothing about this week's SPCX news was dramatic in isolation: a routine 10b5-1 distribution, a JPMorgan flow note, a launch delay. But stacked together, they're the clearest evidence yet that the lockup calendar, not any single earnings print or Starship milestone, is the mechanism actually setting the stock's trading range. With another 328.4-million-share tranche due September 24, a roughly 1.3-billion-share release expected shortly after November's Q3 earnings, and the largest remaining piece, nearly 800 million shares, landing December 8, investors have three more scheduled tests of how much of that "trapped" supply actually turns into selling before they can treat the unlock overhang as resolved. The August 6 precedent (a same-day dip fully recovered) offers a mildly reassuring data point, but it was also the smallest of the remaining tranches in relative terms. December is the one that matters most, and it's still nearly three months away.

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 22: SpaceX's $47 Billion Unlock Rattles the Sector, While Rocket Lab Fights NASA Over Mars · Next: Issue 24: A Sector Rally Meets a Wall of Unlocking Shares

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