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● THE SPACE RACE // ISSUE 001 // TUESDAY, JUNE 16, 2026
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Archive · Shop · Membership · Join Free
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Issue 001 · Our first one
SpaceX just pulled off the biggest IPO in history
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Morning Crew, and welcome to our very first issue. We built this to be the one space email worth your Tuesday: the stories that matter, in about six minutes, no jargon and no hype. This week gave us plenty.
| ● | The biggest IPO in history |
| ● | A new crew for NASA's next Moon mission |
| ● | Blue Origin's wrecked pad, China at Earth's quasi-moon, and a record 35th booster flight |
Let's get into it.
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// CAN'T MISS
Five Must-Reads of the Week
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Credit: Getty Images
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SpaceX is public, in the biggest IPO ever
CNBC · 4 MIN
SpaceX priced at $135 a share and opened on the Nasdaq as SPCX, then jumped 19% to close its first day at $161, valuing the company above $2 trillion and raising about $75 billion, the largest public offering on record. As of Monday's close, SPCX is at $192.50, up another 19.6% (full tracker below). Wall Street is split: Morningstar pegs fair value at less than half the price. More on why a rocket company commands that number is in our Make It Make Sense section, just down the page.
READ IT →
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The Artemis III crew announcement · Credit: NASA
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NASA names the crew for its next Moon mission
NASA · 4 MIN
NASA introduced the four astronauts assigned to Artemis III: Randy Bresnik, Frank Rubio, Andre Douglas, and ESA's Luca Parmitano. The 2027 flight won't land, it flies in Earth orbit to prove the Orion capsule can dock with the new SpaceX and Blue Origin Moon landers, the last big rehearsal before a crew rides one to the surface. After years of slips, it's the most concrete step toward boots on the Moon in a long time.
READ IT →
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Surveying the wrecked LC-36 pad after the New Glenn explosion · Credit: NASA
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New Glenn blew up its pad, and Blue Origin's already rebuilding
TECHCRUNCH · 4 MIN
A late-May static fire turned Launch Complex 36 into a crater. CEO Dave Limp says the booster on site came through fine and the pad can be repaired faster than expected, with the company still aiming to fly again before the year is out. The rocket is replaceable; rebuilding the only pad New Glenn flies from is the real work, and it's underway.
READ IT →
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Kamoʻoalewa · Artist's rendering
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China quietly reached Earth's "quasi-moon"
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN · 4 MIN
While the IPO soaked up the headlines, China's Tianwen-2 spacecraft pulled alongside Kamoʻoalewa, a tiny rock that orbits the Sun in lockstep with Earth (some scientists think it's a chip off our own Moon). Amateur radio observers caught the rendezvous burn on June 7. Sample collection starts in July, with a return to Earth in 2027.
READ IT →
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Falcon 9 booster landing · Credit: SpaceX
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One Falcon 9 booster just flew for the 35th time
SPACEFLIGHT NOW · 3 MIN
A single booster, B1067, launched 29 Starlink satellites on June 8 and then stuck its landing on the droneship, for the 35th time. No orbital rocket has ever flown that often. It debuted back in 2021 and SpaceX wants to push it to 40. Reusability used to be science fiction; now it's so routine it barely makes headlines, which is exactly the point.
READ IT →
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// QUICK HITS
Mission Log
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| ● | The all-male Artemis III crew drew backlash, given NASA's long-standing "first woman on the Moon" pledge. Administrator Jared Isaacman defended the picks on June 10, saying they were chosen for the mission's specific tasks, not politics, and that NASA's newest astronaut class is more than half women. |
| ● | Canada inched toward a launch industry of its own: Maritime Launch flew a suborbital Barracuda rocket from Spaceport Nova Scotia on June 10, the country's first commercial orbital complex. |
| ● | Isar Aerospace flew its second Spectrum test from Norway's Andøya, Europe's bid for a homegrown small launcher. |
| ● | The James Webb telescope mapped morning vs. evening on exoplanet WASP-121b, two completely different climates on one tidally-locked world. |
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// MAKE IT MAKE SENSE
Why a rocket company is suddenly worth $2 trillion
It comes down to cost. For decades, putting a kilogram into orbit ran about $18,500. Falcon 9 cut that to roughly $2,700, an ~85% drop. Own the cheapest road to orbit and two more businesses come almost for free: Starlink, with millions paying monthly for satellite internet, and a fast-growing slice of AI computing. How much that's worth is where the pros split: Morningstar (the investment-research firm) pegs fair value near $780 billion, while ARK Invest, an investment firm famous for bold, bullish bets on disruptive tech (it's even called for $1 million Bitcoin), says $3.1 trillion by 2030. The market just sided with the bigger number.
 Dinner Table Nugget: the IPO isn't really about rockets. It's a bet that the company that made launch cheap will own whatever gets built on top of it.
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SpaceX
NASDAQ: SPCX
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$192.50
▲ 19.6% · Mon, Jun 15
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| IPO $135 | Range $168.35–$193.00 | Vol 250M+ |
// Price as of Monday's close, Jun 15. Space Money tracks it live, twice a month.
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Artist's impression of WASP-94A b · Credit: Hannah Robbins/Johns Hopkins University
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// WILD SPACE OF THE WEEK
A planet where it rains rock by morning and clears by night
700 light-years away, the James Webb telescope watched WASP-94A b run the same forecast on repeat: mornings thick with clouds of vaporized rock, evenings clear. It's the first repeating daily weather cycle ever caught on another world. Forecast: partly rocky, with a chance of corundum, which, yes, is the mineral rubies and sapphires are made of, and the hardest natural stuff on Earth after diamond. So the clouds up there are basically crushed gemstone. (We may have led with that forecast joke just so it would land.) Read it →
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// FROM THE CHANNEL
What the SpaceX IPO Actually Means
The longer take on this week's headline: what the number means, and what SpaceX has to pull off to earn it. Watch on YouTube →
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// FROM ELON'S SIDE HUSTLE
Four posts from an unusually big week.
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Bull Theory
@BullTheoryio |
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A man working as a welder at SpaceX for $28 an hour has just become a millionaire. Juan Hernandez, who came from Mexico, welded rockets for SpaceX at $28 an hour. SpaceX gave him $10,000 in stock when he went full time in 2015, and he bought more with every paycheck for 10 years.
Jun 12, 2026 · View on X
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Elon Musk ✓
@elonmusk |
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Interesting analysis
↳ Quoting @brivael's breakdown of what the $2.1T valuation is really pricing in
Jun 14, 2026 · View on X
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@brivael's thread is in French · the English version
"SpaceX closed its first day worth $2.1 trillion, up 19%. Everyone's fixated on that number, and missing what the market actually bought. Between the cheapest road to orbit, Starlink, and AI, I think this company is on a path to $30–50 trillion."
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Rocket Lab ✓
@RocketLab |
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Rocket Lab is being added to the Nasdaq-100 Index. This is a landmark moment for the team. We're incredibly proud of what we've achieved, and even more excited about what's ahead.
Jun 12, 2026 · View on X
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Dave Limp ✓
@davill |
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True to its name, Never Tell Me The Odds has safely returned to Rocket Park.
Jun 9, 2026 · View on X
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// THE ARTIFACT
Saturn, with Earth as a dot beneath the rings, July 19, 2013 · Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The day two spacecraft photographed Earth from other worlds
On July 19, 2013, NASA's Cassini probe, which spent 13 years orbiting Saturn, slipped into the planet's shadow, turned back toward home, and caught Earth as a single pale dot beneath the rings. The same day, MESSENGER, NASA's spacecraft circling Mercury, photographed Earth from the far side of the solar system, the only time two probes have caught our planet from other worlds on the same day. In a week spent putting a $2 trillion price on a rocket company, it's a quiet reminder of where all those rockets are ultimately pointed.
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// WHAT TO WATCH
The (actual) Space Race Calendar
This week
| JUN 18 | Rocket Lab Electron launch window opens · Launch Complex 1 |
| ONGOING | SPCX trades on the Nasdaq for the first full week |
On the horizon
| JUL | Tianwen-2 begins sampling Kamoʻoalewa |
| AUG | Roman Space Telescope · NASA's widest-eye observatory yet |
| LATE 26 | New Glenn return to flight · pending pad rebuild |
| 2027 | Artemis III · crewed lunar-lander test in Earth orbit |
Look up · no telescope needed
| JUN 21 | Summer solstice · the longest day of the year |
| JUN 29 | The Strawberry Moon · 2026's smallest full moon (a “micromoon”) |
| JUL 10 | The Moon, Saturn & red Antares cluster together after dark |
| AUG 12 | Total solar eclipse · totality over Greenland, Iceland & Spain; partial across much of N. America & W. Europe |
| AUG 12–13 | Perseid meteor shower · up to ~100/hr, and a new moon keeps the sky dark. The best in years. |
| DEC 13–14 | Geminids · the year's biggest shower, up to ~75/hr |
VIEW THE FULL CALENDAR →
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// THE SPACE STATION
It's issue one, tell us what you want more of
You're here for the very first one. Hit reply and tell us what you want more of, launches, the money side, the science, the human stories. We read every reply.
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That's issue one: the biggest IPO ever, a new Moon crew, and a $28-an-hour welder who got rich off it all. Thanks for being here from the start. See you next Tuesday.
— Sean, Ted & The Space Race Crew
Gus waves goodbye. Zorp is pretending he's not impressed.
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