Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Class A Common StockSPCX
▲ PositiveDemandrelevance
SpaceX's Starfall venture signed its first customer, Space Cargo, for a 2028 Starship reentry mission.
Impact on stocks 1
Space Economy▲ · 1 stocks
Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Class A Common StockTheme Impact 2
Off-coverage companies 1
Space Cargo UnlimitedPrivate▲ Positive
Demandrelevance
Space Cargo secured a mission contract to install its BentoBox system aboard SpaceX's Starfall, expanding its orbital transport capacity.
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Merck Rises as Keytruda Space Research Seeks New Orbital Home
Merck shares rose approximately 1.0% to $146.39 Thursday as the pharmaceutical and oncology heavyweight entered the next era of commercial space research, with its blockbuster cancer drug Keytruda already benefiting from work conducted in orbit. Research aboard the International Space Station helped scientists better understand protein crystallization, contributing to the development of a faster subcutaneous formulation of Keytruda, and NASA's research overview explains that microgravity can produce larger and more orderly protein crystals, potentially giving researchers clearer structural information. As the ISS approaches retirement, commercial stations could offer drugmakers dedicated equipment and more predictable research schedules, although regulators still lack a purpose-built approval framework for medicines manufactured in space. The commercial stakes are already enormous: Keytruda generated about $8.37 billion of Merck's latest $16.61 billion quarter, roughly half of total revenue, while the subcutaneous version contributed $463 million, or around 5.5% of Keytruda sales. At $146.39, Merck trades 21.85% above its GF Value estimate of $120.14, signaling that investors are already paying a meaningful premium to the model's estimate of fair value.
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Redwire Expands Microgravity Platform With 11 ISS Payload Facilities
Redwire Corporation is expanding its microgravity capabilities beyond traditional space missions into scientific research, biotechnology and advanced manufacturing. The company has built a growing microgravity platform with 11 active payload facilities on the International Space Station as of Dec. 31, 2025, and has launched 42 Pharmaceutical In-space Laboratory – Bio-crystal Optimization eXperiment, or PIL-BOX, payloads. During 2025, Redwire entered a licensing agreement with ExesaLibero Pharma under which it is eligible to receive royalties from commercial sales of resulting pharmaceutical products. Bristol Myers Squibb and Eli Lilly have both partnered with Redwire on PIL-BOX missions to study pharmaceutical molecules and crystal growth in microgravity. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2026 and 2027 earnings per share suggests year-over-year growth of 57.32% and 40%, respectively, while Redwire trades at a forward 12-month price-to-sales of 4.92X versus an industry average of 2.29X.
impact 4
Musk Says SpaceX Will Build Exclusively on Nvidia Chips
Elon Musk said SpaceX has decided to build exclusively on Nvidia hardware, citing the Vera Rubin architecture as the best AI computer, during the company's second-quarter earnings call. The call was Space Exploration Technologies' first earnings call as a public company. SpaceX is using clusters of Nvidia GPUs to design orbital data centers, integrate with Starlink operations and Starship mission planning, and its near-term buzz centers on Starmind, an optimized satellite payload built on Nvidia's Vera Rubin NVL72 system. SpaceX has turned its Nvidia procurements into a fast-growing AI infrastructure business, leasing large clusters of Nvidia compute rather than using the chips solely to train its home-grown generative model, Grok. Anthropic entered a cloud services agreement with SpaceX worth $1.25 billion a month through 2029 for access to compute capacity across SpaceX's supercomputers Colossus and Colossus II, which feature roughly 325,000 Nvidia GPUs, while Google Cloud committed $920 million a month for access to roughly 110,000 Nvidia GPUs, CPUs, memory, and related networking kits through the middle of 2029, and Reflection AI signed a multiyear deal worth up to $6.3 billion to access Nvidia GB300 chips at a reported $150 million per month. Nvidia's data center revenue reached $89 billion in the second quarter, up 117% year over year, compared with AMD's $6.7 billion in data center sales, an increase of 107% year over year.