The S&P 500 closes at a new record high on below-average volume

The gains for EchoStar — seen as a backdoor play at pre-IPO SpaceX exposure — and Rocket Lab were more muted, perhaps because a deep-pocketed competitor like Jeff Bezos getting serious about space services could complicate the plans of the two largest commercial space launch companies.

Rocket Lab and SpaceX see launch services as key to their aspirations of being major providers of voice and data services from low-Earth orbit satellites.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s SpaceX is the dominant provider of such services, and the early rumors on the company’s planned IPO — expected to be the largest ever — suggest the market is very excited about the prospects for the industry.

Elsewhere in the space stock world, Intuitive Machines — a maker of space infrastructure that provides services to NASA for lunar missions — also rose.

Amazon has ambitions to compete with SpaceX to provide satellite-based internet access anywhere on the planet — a market that’s dominated by Starlink at the moment and a key pillar of the eye-watering $1 trillion valuation that SpaceX is seeking in its IPO, which it has just confidentially filed for.

Indeed, Amazon has been signing deals with airlines and doubling down on investing in its internet constellation lately, with plans to increase its ~200 satellites in orbit to about 700 by the middle of 2026 — still a fraction compared to SpaceX’s mega constellation, which has some 10,000 active satellites.

But Amazon’s not the only Big Tech giant with an interest in Globalstar. Back in 2024, Apple invested $1.5 billion for a 20% stake in the company, necessitating a negotiation between Apple and Amazon for the latest deal talks to proceed, per the FT. SpaceX also reportedly had early talks with Globalstar, Bloomberg reported last October.

Globalstar’s stock has been up ~230% in the past year, pushing its value to some $8.8 billion as of yesterday’s close.