Zaid

Next up, let's talk about Intuitive Machines.

Intuitive Machines became a household name in the space community after it successfully became the first commercial company to land and operate a spacecraft on the moon back in 2024.

They followed that up by landing on the Lunar South Pole, which is the southernmost moon landing in history.

See, Intuitive's focus is on lunar exploration and infrastructure, which is obviously on everyone's mind right now with the Artemis mission.

In fact, they're going after NASA's contracts for lunar deployment.

Beyond that, they also acquired a satellite manufacturing company that aims to deploy communication satellites around the moon.

So they're trying to like build the internet and communication platform for the moon.

The stock has gone up 30% this year and it's up nearly 17% since the Artemis 2 mission launched on April 1st.

Finally, let's talk about Firefly Aerospace.

Firefly is a direct competitor to Intuitive Machines.

They have their own lunar lander called Blue Ghost, and they've already won a NASA contract for moon missions.

Now, what sets Firefly apart is that they also build their own rockets.

They have a small launch vehicle called Alpha and a medium-class rocket called Eclipse in development.

The biggest space event this year might not be this Artemis 2 mission.

It might actually be the SpaceX IPO.

Elon Musk's space company, SpaceX, confidentially filed for an IPO on April 1st, which was the same day as the Artemis 2 launch, which is kind of poetic.

Now, SpaceX is looking to raise $75 billion in the IPO and targeting a valuation north of $1.75 trillion.

this would make spacex the largest ipo in history i mean a 1.75 trillion dollar valuation would instantly make spacex one of the most valuable publicly traded companies in the world it'd be even more valuable than elon's other company tesla now personally i'm really curious to see what spacex's financials look like since they confidentially filed for an ipo we won't see the numbers until closer to the ipo date which is rumored to be sometime in june

There's a lot of hype around the IPO, and it's helping push up other space stocks in the process.

What I do find interesting, though, is that SpaceX was not involved in the Artemis II mission at all.