Why space stocks have stayed below orbit this week, despite positive news for the sector

Big week for [music] space news. Over 13 hours, over the course of 13 hours, SpaceX launched three missions. NASA's Crew 13 astronauts to the International Space Station, a classified national security mission late last night using a Falcon Heavy, and a ride share launch with 130 payloads from a variety of companies and agencies. Now, that last one, Transport 18 mission getting attention because Alphabet's prototype satellite built with Planet Labs was on board. Its TPUs will be tested for Google's Project Suncatcher orbital data center plan. And speaking of, there was other orbital data center news this week. Redwire teaming up with Sophia Space and Buzzy startup StarCloud in a in a Star Cloud, she says, uh, launching a launch deal with Firefly Aerospace. We even heard from Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp about that company strategy in an interview on stage with me at the White House's AI Summit on Tuesday. The idea is to have uh you know many many metric ton data centers. You put them into suns synchronous orbit. So this is a kind of a little special orbit that's just off polar that it's you're in the sun 97 n% of the time roughly. And when they're and then we run inference workloads up in these constellations and they don't have to have a lot of communications capability because they'll beam down into these mega constellations. Uh so in our case uh we'll we'll uh ground them into Terrowave which is our constellation and they'll they'll come down to the ground and this gives us access to effectively infinite compute and uh and this will be you know we our F FCC filing here is uh is for 56,000 of these satellites. So this is what's going to move us from hundreds of launches a year to thousands of launches a year because you're going to want all as much intelligence as you can possibly get. 56,000 satellites. These are staggering numbers. Olymping that Blue Origins funding round, the first to include investors beyond Jeff Bezos is not yet closed yet, but is oversubscribed. So, all of this on the heels of SpaceX's first flight to orbit for Starship and as NASA announced a new plan to bring Boeing's Starlininer online for astronaut miss missions. So, how did the stocks do? Well, it was a down week as rising rates pressure momentum names, including the space companies. So, take a look at shares of SpaceX uh with this morning's pre-market move up fractionally for the week. Planet Labs, Alphabet, Redwire, Firefly, all actually trading lower this week. And if we get a share on Boeing, even Boeing is trading lower this week despite what has been a flurry of news for that company overall.