SpaceX Just Tested a Secret Cargo Delivery Vehicle That Could Ship Goods Anywhere on Earth From Space. Here's What Investors Should Know.
Yahoo Finance ·
On Tuesday, June 23, a SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral carrying a vehicle most people had never heard of. The payload was called Starfall -- a disc-shaped reentry pod, 10.2 feet wide and 2.5 feet tall, designed to carry up to 1 metric ton of cargo from low-Earth orbit back to Earth's surface. Space Exploration Technologies ( SPCX +0.13% ) described it publicly as a "microgravity lab" for scientific research and in-space manufacturing. What the Federal Aviation Administration's environmental assessment called it was more specific: a vehicle to "enable point-to-point delivery of critical cargo through space on rapid timelines." Those two descriptions are both accurate, and the gap between them is where the investor story lives. The vehicle is not capable of de-orbiting itself. It relies on its launch vehicle -- a Falcon 9 today, potentially Starship later -- to guide it back toward the atmosphere, after which it orients its heat shield using compressed nitrogen gas and descends by parachute to a splashdown zone. It's smaller than SpaceX's Crew Dragon, built exclusively for cargo, and recoverable -- SpaceX intends to retrieve the vehicle and its parachutes for reuse.
DYAX Investor Sentiment
Bullish (Long) 48% · Bearish (Short) 52%
495 participants
Related News
- The Bond ETF Most Investors Overlook -- and Why It Belongs in Your Portfolio Right Now
- Goldman Sachs sees strong Q2 earnings season on AI boom
- Is American Express Built for the Next Decade of Spending?
- Why Wall Street thinks US memory maker Micron is the next Nvidia
- Anthropic Could Become the Most Valuable Software Company in History. These Stocks Have Exposure to the AI Giant.
- Austria urges EU to court Anthropic as AI access becomes geopolitical contest