Newsletter · · Ashutosh Agarwal

The Satellite & Space-Comms Race - Week of June 19, 2026: SpaceX IPOs at $1.78T as AST Stacks Three BlueBirds

Satellite and space-comms newsletter for the week of June 19, 2026. SpaceX went public at a $1.78T valuation and ripped 50%, while AST SpaceMobile stacked three more BlueBirds in orbit and the pure-plays whipsawed on the float mechanics versus fundamentals debate.

The Satellite & Space-Comms Race

Week of June 19, 2026: SpaceX IPOs at $1.78T as AST Stacks Three BlueBirds

The thing the sector spent two years waiting for finally happened: SpaceX is public. In the same 96 hours, the company everyone treats as its D2D rival quietly stacked three more satellites on a Falcon 9. The pure-plays got dumped, then half of them bounced. One housekeeping note: this issue is sourced entirely from podcasts in the trailing seven days, and not one company insider sat for a mic, everything below is investor or pundit commentary, tagged as such.

TL;DR

  • SpaceX priced at $135, a $1.78T valuation, ~4-5% float, all-primary, then ripped 50% to pass Amazon ($2.7T). Damodaran pencils $1.2-1.3T. The float, not the fundamentals, is running this tape.
  • AST SpaceMobile put BlueBirds 8, 9, 10 in orbit (total now 9; target 45 by year-end); the bull camp expects a definitive T-Mobile deal in Q4-ish, once the AT&T/Verizon/T-Mobile JV clears regulators.
  • Pure-plays whipsawed: Rocket Lab fell 11% on listing day, bounced, and is +56% YTD after a $90M Space Force win. Globalstar, Iridium, EchoStar and Apple-SOS were quiet on the pods this week.

What's New

1. The largest IPO in history broke every rule of how IPOs work. On Patrick Boyle On Finance, "What SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI's IPOs mean for investors" (Jun 14, PUNDIT), Boyle lays out the mechanics: 555M+ shares at exactly $135, ~$75B raised (up to ~$86B with the green shoe), $1.78T valuation, and only ~4-5% of the company sold versus a typical ~20%, with dual-class voting and Texas re-incorporation. A tiny float with 7:1 retail oversubscription is a mechanical squeeze, and it sets the sentiment anchor every other name now trades against.

2. AST SpaceMobile's BlueBirds 8-10 reached orbit. Per The Rundown, "OpenAI Burned $3.7B in Cash..." (Jun 17, PUNDIT/news), AST launched three BlueBirds on a Falcon 9, taking its constellation to nine satellites against a goal of 45 by year-end; the stock was +6% that morning. On the AST SpaceMobile Podcast, "Historic Deployment: Bluebirds 8-10 Reach Orbit" (Jun 17, INVESTOR), the host adds the texture: first Block 2 batch flown stacked, production ~4-5/month on composite structures (targeting 6 in Q3), BlueBirds 11-13 shipping for a late-July/August launch. Beta needs ~25 birds, cadence is the whole thesis for a pre-revenue name.

3. Damodaran says the price is a half-trillion too high. On Excess Returns, "The Trillion Dollar Gap | Aswath Damodaran" (Jun 19, PUNDIT), the NYU dean splits SpaceX into launch (60% of a market 8-10x bigger), Starlink (~$15B revenue, 60-70% of the total), and AI/Grok (he grants a $5-6T TAM, not the prospectus's $26T) for a ~$1.2-1.3T DCF. His sharpest point is the AI contradiction, SpaceX rents data-center capacity to Google and Anthropic while claiming it will out-compete them:

"That's like a manufacturing company claiming that they're going to get a big market share, but they built a big factory and they rent out two-thirds of their factory to their two biggest competitors."

4. Rocket Lab is re-rating from "launcher" to "infrastructure." On Brew Markets, "Banning Kids from Social Media & SpaceX's Ripple Effect" (Jun 15, INVESTOR/PUNDIT), Anne Berry notes RKLB just won a $90M US Space Force contract to build and operate a pair of geostationary satellites and "increasingly looks like a space infrastructure company rather than a launch provider." Recurring, owned-asset revenue earns a higher multiple than per-launch fees.

The Debate: Is the D2D TAM Real, or a Story?

Steel-man the bulls. On the AST SpaceMobile Podcast, "Why Starlink's Direct to Device Strategy is Delusional" (Jun 16, INVESTOR), the case is that D2D is a >$1T opportunity (≈$750B for direct-to-device specifically) and that architecture decides the winner. AST's first constellation uses carriers' low-band spectrum, propagation that works in tunnels, forests and indoors, while Starlink's mid-band S-band can't, and a Starlink-run mobile service would need a separate eSIM and subscription. Regulatory wins are stacking (Brazil's Anatel approved AST and handed it 10MHz x 10MHz of S-band for free; AST is testing 900 MHz for the Space Development Agency). The most aggressive framing came from VC Jason Calacanis on This Week in Startups, "SpaceX IPO Day: What Wall St. and the media missed" (Jun 13, INVESTOR), who put the odds Starlink scales from 10M to 100M subscribers via direct-to-device at "99.999%."

Steel-man the bears. The TAM numbers are theater. On Patrick Boyle (above), the prospectus's $28.5T TAM implies every financially active human on Earth spends ~$28,500/year on space-and-AI, and only ~$2T touches space at all:

"The market for space launch is about half the size of the market for potato chips."

And the model is unproven: no one has shown carriers will share economics generously, AST is pre-revenue and burning, and Starlink, armed with $75B and ~10,000 satellites, can out-spend the deployment race. The honest read: the direction is real, but the size and timing are narrative, not number.

Stocks in Play

  • ASTS: Bull: nine birds up, cadence ramping, low-band coverage edge, expected Q4 T-Mobile deal. Bear: pre-revenue, needs ~25 birds for beta, ~68M shares short (near all-time high), dependent on a carrier JV clearing regulators. Catalyst: BlueBirds 11-13 launch (late-July/Aug) and any T-Mobile MOU.
  • RKLB: Bull: $90M Space Force GEO win, +56% YTD, infrastructure re-rate. Bear: dumped 11% the moment investors could buy SpaceX directly. Catalyst: Neutron progress, further defense awards.
  • SpaceX (now public): Bull: Starlink ~$15B revenue and reportedly profitable, 10M subs in 164 countries, launch moat (7investing, Jun 16; Trappin Tuesday's, Jun 14). Bear: ~90x trailing sales, ~$9B quarterly FCF burn, a $235B cash gap through 2030 (Patrick Boyle), Damodaran's $1.2-1.3T. Catalyst: Q2 earnings (August), first real numbers and first insider-unlock gate.
  • GSAT, IRDM, SATS: Quiet week; no dedicated podcast coverage. Apple/Globalstar emergency-SOS read-through also quiet.

Read-throughs

  • Carriers (VZ, T, TMUS): the AST SpaceMobile Podcast (Jun 16, INVESTOR) notes Oppenheimer downgraded AT&T on Starlink competitive concern, and that satellite now eats ~20% of carrier earnings-call Q&A (versus near-zero two-three years ago). T-Mobile's Starlink exclusivity ends June/July; a definitive AT&T/Verizon/T-Mobile D2D JV is the gating event for AST's commercial deals, satellite has gone from footnote to swing factor on carrier multiples.
  • Launch & component suppliers: Brew Markets (Jun 15) flags Linde (LIN), ~$243B market cap, fuels ~70% of SpaceX launches, breaking ground on a Brownsville plant <30 mi from Starbase, +22% YTD, as the cleanest supplier read. Intuitive Machines (LUNR) and Redwire sold off on listing day.
  • SpaceX valuation as sentiment anchor: it priced at $1.78T and trades ~$2.7T, The Wall Street Skinny, "Elon Musk Engineered SpaceX IPO 'Perfectly'" (Jun 19, PUNDIT), details how Musk set a take-it-or-leave-it $135 (no book-build), with perpetual-futures markets pre-baking the "perfect" 20% pop. When the anchor trades on float mechanics and meme flow, the group's beta gets noisier, fade the read-through into the small-caps accordingly.

What Changed vs Last Week

I don't have last week's issue on file to diff line-by-line, so I'll anchor to what this week's pods say about the prior setup. The change is regime-level: the sector spent late May in euphoria heading into the IPO, then the Blue Origin New Glenn failure (which cost AST a BlueBird) "put a damper on things" (AST SpaceMobile Podcast, Jun 16). This week the IPO cleared, turning two years of chatter into a hard $1.78T print and a live, tradable anchor, and AST answered with a clean launch. The "will it/won't it" overhang is gone; the new debate is float mechanics versus fundamentals, and it's already pulling capital out of the pure-plays and into the mothership.