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Category Space

The War Economy

The market is no longer treating Middle East escalation as a passing geopolitical shock. It is increasingly pricing it as a broader economic regime: one that reprices oil and LNG, lifts defense and dual-use space names, pressures airlines and small caps, and forces investors to rethink the physical vulnerability of cloud infrastructure

Planet Labs ( $PL ) Europe, defence and sovereign satellite demand

Planet is no longer a simple “satellite imagery story” to be judged on a vague promise of future demand. The company now sits at the intersection of recurring Earth-data subscriptions, defence and intelligence workflows, sovereign demand for dedicated capability, and a broader European push toward strategic autonomy in space and geospatial data. The stock has already been re-rated hard, so the real question is no longer whether Planet has become more relevant. It clearly has. The real question is whether this growing strategic relevance can convert into cleaner revenue quality, stronger margins, and a more durable case into the next earnings event.

Intuitive Machines Inc ( $LUNR )

L3Harris selects Intuitive Machines to provide satellite platforms for the Tracking Layer of the Space Development Agency’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA): a key step in LUNR’s transition from “lunar lander pure play” to integrated space-infrastructure and defense supplier, with rapidly changing fundamentals and a capital-intensive profile.

AST SpaceMobile Inc ( $ASTS )

Revenue $54.3M in Q4 · $70.9M in FY 2025
First year as a revenue-generating company: gateway deliveries and initial U.S. government contracts pushed 2025 sales to $70.9M, with Q4 alone at $54.3M. The model is still loss-making: FY 2025 net loss attributable to common stockholders was about $342M, with Q4 loss around $74M and EPS of –$0.26 per share.

BlackSky Technology Inc ( $BKSY )

Q4 2025 delivered record quarterly revenue and a sharply narrower net loss, while management doubled down on Gen-3 very-high-resolution satellites and real-time AI analytics. At the same time, the new $100 million at-the-market equity program changed the risk-reward for equity holders. This report puts the latest numbers, the 2026 guidance and the capital structure into context, with a focus on how BKSY fits into the broader “Golden Dome” and space-defence narrative we follow at Merlintrader.

Rocket Lab and DART AE($RKLB) The night Australia aims for its first hydrogen scramjet flight (Updated feb26)

On many launch days at Wallops, you could drive past Launch Complex 2 and, at a glance, not realise that a rocket is waiting. The Atlantic haze flattens the horizon, the gantry is half-hidden in mist and sodium lights, and only the traffic at the gate and the rhythm of the countdown clocks betray that something is about to happen. Today, that something is a little different from the usual satellite run.

Satellogic Inc ($SATL) Update Feb 19

Pure-play Earth observation and satellite delivery name listed on Nasdaq, riding a wave of new government contracts and capital raises. This report looks at the real size of the backlog, the evolving mix between satellite sales and data-as-a-service, the cash runway after multiple offerings, and where the risk/reward sits for event-driven traders.

War Ai and the X Ecosystem

SpaceX launches satellites, Starlink keeps front lines online, X shapes the information space, and xAI’s Grok is being wired into military networks. A new Pentagon contest for voice-controlled autonomous drones shows how these pieces are starting to lock together into a single, highly political war-tech stack.

Top 10 Space Mid & Small Caps 2026

A simple way to think about this basket is to imagine the space stack as layers: access to orbit, sensing, communications, infrastructure and exploration. Each of the ten names here owns a useful slice of that stack, often in niches that the mega-caps either do not want or cannot address efficiently.

Space Stocks in Free Fall

In the last 30 days the “space trade” has flipped from poster child of risk-on to textbook case of brutal risk-off. Launch, satcom and geospatial names are bleeding double-digit days, while some defense-linked players hold up. Under the surface, it is a story of funding, dilution anxiety, macro rates and a sector where AI and defense still pull in structural demand.

AST SpaceMobile Inc ($ASTS)

In January you saw the “National Defense Strategy / Deep Tech” macro piece: defense budgets, uranium enrichment, electronic warfare and reusable launch infrastructure all moving at once. In that map, AST SpaceMobile sits on the space-based connectivity layer: a company trying to build cell towers in orbit that can serve both civilian and military customers, at a time when governments explicitly talk about resilient communications, contested environments and independent infrastructure. This note takes that macro lens and zooms back into ASTS.

Golden Dome $PL $BKSY $SATL

For years, “space” was mostly a story about launch costs and broadband dreams. In 2026 the narrative is shifting: satellites are becoming the nervous system of a new defence architecture built around missile warning, tracking and resilient communications

2026 The New Era – Watchlist Space-AI-Defense

2026 opens in a geopolitical environment that looks like a “Cold War 2.0” – but running at a much higher speed and across more domains than anything we have seen before. Classic threat pillars – nuclear deterrence, air and sea control, conventional superiority – are still there, but they have been reshaped by disruptive technologies that make them far more lethal and unpredictable.

SIDU Sidus Space Inc

From “space-as-a-service” niche player to SHIELD radar contributor: what changed for Sidus Space after our first deep dive, how the December 2025 capital raise reshaped the runway, and why LizzieSat-4 plus AI/ML payloads make 2026 a crucial execution year.

LUNR Intuitive Machines Inc

Intuitive Machines is a Houston-based space infrastructure company working on lunar landers, cislunar communications and defense-focused satellite platforms. The stock is one of the purest public plays on the Artemis + Golden Dome “space infrastructure” theme.