SpaceX Gets the Headlines, But These Three Companies Get the Contracts
Listen to the audio version of this article (generated by AI).
Editor’s Note: A space essay that starts in Antarctica is a strange pitch, I know. Stay with it – because buried under the snow is one of the cleaner investing frameworks I’ve come across this year: headlines are one-time events, but operations are annuities. A historic landing gets the coverage. Keeping the base running is what signs the checks – for decades.
Jonathan Rose brought me this one, along with three stocks attached to it. He’s earned the consideration: nearly three decades on trading floors from the CME to the CBOE, a bond futures desk he helped grow from six people to 150, and a live YouTube session every morning at 11 a.m. Eastern – Masters in Trading LIVE – where he works through what’s moving and why.
He’s also hosting a free live event later in October – the $10K to $100K Challenge – where he’ll walk through the exact signals he uses to find trades and how he thinks about risk. We’ll have more details on that event real soon.
In the meantime, here’s Jonathan.
Imagine building a house where there are no roads, no hardware stores, and no power lines.
Now imagine that every gallon of fuel, every part needed to build that house or replace a part of the house, has to travel nearly 1,000 miles across one of the most hostile landscapes on Earth.
That’s the problem engineers spent decades solving at the South Pole.
The U.S. Navy built the first American research station at the South Pole in 1956. Scientists moved in. And over the next several years, windblown snow just started burying it.
They had to build a replacement – a geodesic dome in 1975 – and eventually the snow started covering the entrances to that one too.
Today’s Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station stands on columns. The shape channels wind beneath it, sweeping the snow away.
It took 10 years to build and more than 900 flights to haul materials from the Antarctic coast to the South Pole.
And to keep it running today, overland crews drive 990 miles from McMurdo Station, hauling fuel and cargo across Antarctica. More than a century after the first expedition reached the South Pole, people are still solving the practical problems of working there.
Now I want you to consider the Moon.
One of the biggest infrastructure buildouts of the next decade will happen 240,000 miles away. And this isn’t the 1960s. The first Space Race was the USA versus the USSR. Space Race 2.0 is the USA versus China.
And the winner of this race will be whoever builds a working research station there first.
China is publicly targeting a crewed lunar landing before 2030 and a base by 2035. NASA’s Artemis program is targeting its first crewed surface landing for 2028.
Both of them are zeroing in on the same tiny patch of the Moon – the lunar south pole – because that’s where the water ice is.
Water isn’t just water up there. Break it into hydrogen and oxygen, and you’ve got life support and rocket propellant. The Moon stops looking like a destination and starts looking like a supply chain.
Here’s what I find interesting as a trader. NASA can’t do everything itself. It’s the anchor, with private companies building the launch systems, communications, power, logistics, and more.
NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program already has 17 planned deliveries carrying more than 60 payloads. Earlier this month, NASA put out proposals for surface power, oxygen extraction, and lunar construction materials.
So the question I’m asking isn’t “Who builds the rocket?” That answer is pretty easy: SpaceX, Blue Origin, and a few other big players.
The better question is “Who builds and operates everything a Moon base needs once someone’s actually living there?”
In this piece, I’ll try to answer that question by showing you three publicly held companies – all trading on the stock market – that are competing to be the one of the answers to that question.
Three Companies Building What Comes After the Landing
The Utility Company for the Moon: Most people know the first stock I want to show you as a lunar lander company. I’m more interested in what it’s trying to become – the utility company for the Moon. In March, NASA awarded Intuitive Machines Inc. (LUNR) a $180.4 million mission to deliver payloads to the lunar south pole region. This Houston-based company has a $1.8 billion backlog and $367 million in cash. A lander gets you to the destination. A company that can also handle communications and navigation once you’re there takes on a role that doesn’t end after a single landing. That’s the story I’m watching develop.
The Repeatable Delivery Play: The second stock I want to show you already landed its Blue Ghost spacecraft on the Moon in March. And in June, Firefly Aerospace Inc. (FLY) announced a $144 million NASA contract for another mission targeted for 2028 – bringing it to six contracted lunar missions total. Landing once is an accomplishment. Building a dependable service around it is a business. I’m watching the less glamorous stuff: production capacity, schedules, what they learn from each flight. The stock pulled back hard after the initial SpaceX enthusiasm wave. Sometimes the market just hands you a better entry. You wait for it.
The Sleep-at-Night Space Stock: My third space stock today is the different animal in this group. It’s a much larger company, less directly tied to the young lunar delivery business. But L3Harris Technologies Inc. (LHX) has delivered the four RS-25 engines for NASA’s planned 2027 Artemis III mission. That makes it the firm selling the engines and the avionics – and that company wins regardless of which rocket startup succeeds. If you want exposure to the lunar buildout with less volatility than the smaller names, LHX is how you get there. Don’t expect it to move like LUNR or FLY when the narrative heats up. But don’t ignore it either.
Three different jobs behind the same buildout. Three different risk profiles.
Now here’s the part I want to be straight with you about.
A Good Story Still Needs a Good Trade
When I went through these names on my Masters in Trading LIVE show last week (sign up for that free here), I noted that LUNR, FLY, and a couple other small space stocks had all made sharp moves together when SpaceX was in the news, and then pulled back together. That correlation tells me investors are trading the industry story, not the individual companies.
That’s fine. Industries move together all the time. But it means you have to be careful about what you’re actually buying and when.
I watch contract awards. I watch how these stocks move relative to each other. And I look for unusual trading activity – big, concentrated trades that tell me whether serious money is starting to build positions before the broader market figures out why. When I see that kind of footprint in names like these, that’s when I start paying real attention.
But that activity is a clue, not an instruction. I still have to look at the company, the setup, and how much I’m willing to lose before I’d put a trade on.
The timing matters in a specific way here too. A Moon base is a project measured in years. The trades I do have expiration dates. I can be completely convinced the infrastructure story is real and still wait for a better moment to trade it.
Nothing is cheap or expensive on its own. LUNR at $12 is not automatically cheap because it was at $20. It’s cheap or expensive relative to the backlog, the contract pipeline, the competition, and what comparable companies have traded at in similar situations. That’s the work.
LUNR, FLY, and other small space stocks all move together – when one goes, they all go. So you’re not really picking the winner of the Moon race. You’re buying the industry. That’s actually fine with me. I’d rather own a basket of names tied to a real structural trend than try to pick the one company that survives the shakeout in a new industry where execution risk is genuinely high.
Now let’s go back to where we started.
The Antarctic South Pole story ends like this: More than a century after the first expedition arrived, keeping that research station running still takes a full supply chain. Overland crews are still driving 990 miles across Antarctica.
Getting to the South Pole was the achievement. Keeping a research station operating there is still a job: crews drive roughly 990 miles from McMurdo hauling fuel and cargo across Antarctica.
A lunar base will need its own supply chain. And if people intend to keep working there, that work continues long after the first landing.
That’s the industry I’m watching. The trading question is when the market gives us a sensible way in.
I go live every day the market is open – 11 a.m. Eastern, for free, on YouTube. At Masters in Trading LIVE, we take on different topics each day, look at what’s moving, and work through the questions together. If this kind of thinking is useful to you, come join us.
