My wife occasionally wanders into my office early in the morning to find me talking to Claude on one screen while a collection of very colorful, constantly updating charts fills another. She used to laugh. Then I showed her the returns my specialized sector portfolios have been generating, and the laughing stopped.
It turns out that actively managing a small set of focused portfolios, in quantum computing, AI applied to biopharma, energy and grid resilience, biomed acquisition targets, and space technology, with Claude as a research and analysis partner, is one of the more engaging things I've done in retirement. It keeps me connected to the technology world I spent a career in, scratches the investing itch, and, not incidentally, has been very profitable this year.
I've written about the broader approach before; this post is about what that research turned up when I started pulling on the upcoming SpaceX IPO thread. Should I invest? If so, when?
The IPO pattern problem
The comparison set for modeling SpaceX matters a lot. Cult-driven consumer IPOs, Tesla (2010), Facebook (2012), and Uber (2019), follow a recognizable behavioral arc: large day-one pops as retail enthusiasm swamps available supply, meaningful giveback over the next four to eight weeks as momentum traders exit, then a more significant drop around the 180-day lockup expiration when insiders can finally sell. The day-one move is almost irrelevant to long-term investors. The lockup windows are where the entry opportunities tend to appear.
Fundamentals-driven enterprise tech IPOs behave differently. Snowflake (2020) doubled on day one, but institutional investors who had valued it on cash flows provided a floor that purely retail-driven IPOs lack. Palantir, also 2020, bypassed the traditional IPO entirely with a direct listing, which compressed the usual day-one dynamics considerably.
SpaceX sits in a hybrid category. The Musk premium on retail enthusiasm looks like Tesla. But the institutional investor base, which includes defense primes, sovereign wealth funds, and major enterprises with existing Starlink relationships, will anchor the valuation more analytically than a consumer brand IPO would. The model Claude helped me build says: watch the lockup windows, not the opening bell. That framing held for most of the comparison set. What complicated the analysis is that IPO mechanics themselves have been shifting: lockup periods have shortened, some companies now stagger releases across multiple tranches, and direct listings like Palantir's sidestep traditional lockups entirely. Accounting for those structural variations across a comparison set spanning 15 years required building a more adaptive model than any spreadsheet I'd attempt to maintain. (I'll concede that "Excel jockey" is a generous description of my pre-Claude quantitative capabilities.)
What turned out to be more interesting than the IPO mechanics, though, was what the research uncovered underneath: a structural shift in the space industry that carries a different and arguably more durable investment thesis than "SpaceX goes public, figure out timing, buy it."
SPaaS
The industry term is Space as a Service, or SPaaS. (Quick disambiguation: SPaaS is also used in commercial real estate for flexible office space, the WeWork model. The space industry got there second but has the better story.)
The concept follows the same arc as cloud computing, roughly 15 years behind. Amazon Web Services didn't start as a product. Amazon built infrastructure for its own operational needs, discovered it had surplus capacity, and realized that thousands of other businesses needed the same capability but would never build it themselves. The recurring revenue and switching costs that followed made AWS worth more than Amazon's retail business.
Space is tracing the same path. SpaceX's reusable Falcon 9 cut the cost per kilogram to orbit by roughly 90% over 15 years. Satellite manufacturing industrialized alongside it. Constellations that once required tens of billions can now be assembled for hundreds of millions. The hard infrastructure problem is largely solved. What's being built now is the software, data pipelines, and service contracts that turn persistent space presence into predictable, recurring revenue, sold to customers who need the capability but have no intention of ever owning a satellite.
Those customers are everywhere. Agriculture companies want daily crop health monitoring across millions of acres; no farm operator is building a constellation. Insurance companies need satellite-derived flood mapping and wildfire perimeter data that terrestrial sensors can't supply at the resolution actuarial models now require. Shipping and aviation need continuous global vessel and aircraft tracking. Telecom carriers want coverage in regions where cell towers will never be economical. None of these customers cares how the satellite works. They want a data feed, an API, a monthly invoice.
The sub-categories have already standardized into a stack that mirrors the cloud model: Launch-as-a-Service (ride-share payload slots, no dedicated rocket required), Satellite-as-a-Service (hosted payloads on existing platforms), Data-as-a-Service (processed imagery, weather data, and RF geolocation via subscription), and Space Operations as a Service (SOaaS) for organizations that want to operate payloads without building the operational infrastructure themselves.
A few companies illustrate where this is actually generating revenue today. Spire Global operates a nanosatellite constellation and sells the output, weather analytics, vessel tracking, atmospheric data, and RF geolocation, as subscriptions to meteorological agencies, shipping companies, airlines, and defense customers. Spire itself uses "SPaaS" as an explicit product descriptor. The customer gets an API; Spire manages the constellation and the underlying complexity. Iridium is the more mature case: after a decade rebuilding its constellation at substantial capital cost, it has transitioned into the cash-flow phase, now in its third consecutive year of dividend growth. Its IoT platform, connecting remote sensors, maritime vessels, and aviation assets across every latitude including the poles, carries high switching costs baked into every contract. AST SpaceMobile is the most speculative but potentially the largest addressable market: direct-to-device satellite connectivity that reaches standard mobile phones without specialized hardware, with carriers as resellers paying per subscriber.
Where SpaceX fits
SpaceX is both the cause of SPaaS and a participant in it. The cost reduction that made the model economically viable came largely from Falcon 9 reusability. And Starlink, SpaceX's own constellation, is currently the largest SPaaS business operating at scale: direct internet subscriptions to consumers, enterprises, governments, and maritime operators, with no expectation on any customer's part that they understand orbital mechanics.
The IPO will generate enormous visibility for the entire sector. The analogy that keeps coming up is Google's 2004 IPO, which didn't just create a new public company; it accelerated venture and public market investment across the whole internet ecosystem. The attention and capital that flowed into the infrastructure, the applications, and the adjacent plays arguably mattered as much as Google stock itself over the following decade.
But there's a deeper pattern worth naming. SaaS didn't just make enterprise software cheaper; it collapsed the implementation barrier so completely that millions of small businesses that could never have afforded on-premise software now run their operations on it. AI-as-a-service did the same thing a generation later: what only large tech labs could build in 2020 is now something any developer can call via an API. Each cycle, the "as-a-service" model takes a complex, expensive infrastructure technology and expands who can actually use it by an order of magnitude. SPaaS is that pattern applied to space. A Colombian sugar cane farmer monitoring crop health via daily satellite imagery doesn't need to know what a LEO orbit is. Neither does the insurance actuary modeling flood risk, or the shipping company tracking its fleet. They just need the invoice.
That demand acceleration is what makes the structural thesis interesting beyond the IPO timing question. SpaceX going public will do for space infrastructure what Google's IPO did for the internet: raise the capital, raise the profile, and pull forward a decade of investment into the whole ecosystem. Most of that capital will chase the rocket. The recurring invoice from the customer who will never build one is worth more.