Market snapshot · September 18, 2026 close
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AEACapital Research

Independent student research — not an investment firm or financial advice

Competitive Comparison

SpaceX vs. Rocket Lab

Two space-launch holdings in the same speculative sleeve — the dominant, diversified operator against the smaller small-satellite specialist scaling toward larger payloads.

MetricSpaceX (SPCX)Rocket Lab (RKLB)
Market cap~$1.755T (post-IPO, Jun 12 2026)$50.01B
Q2 2026 resultsRevenue +92% YoY to $7.8B; adj. EBITDA +191% YoYRevenue +52%; EBITDA −56% YoY (still unprofitable)
PEG ratioN/A (not yet consistently profitable across segments)N/A (unprofitable)

Market cap, P/E, PEG, EV/EBITDA, and capex sourced via public filings and financial-data aggregators (GuruFocus, StockAnalysis, company earnings releases), as of August 2026. PEG ratio sourced primarily from GuruFocus where available; different providers use different growth-rate assumptions, so figures elsewhere for the same stock can vary by several multiples. Gold-highlighted column(s) indicate the name(s) actually held in this book.

Why I hold both, at very different sizes

SpaceX is the dominant, diversified operator — reusable rockets, Starlink, and now xAI folded in — while Rocket Lab is the smaller, more focused small-satellite launch specialist working toward larger payloads with Neutron. I hold both because they represent different points on the same space-and-satellite-infrastructure theme, sized very differently given how much earlier-stage and less-established Rocket Lab's Neutron program is relative to SpaceX's already-proven Falcon/Starlink business. Neither is a scale comparison in SpaceX's favor by coincidence — it genuinely is the larger, more de-risked business — but Rocket Lab's smaller size is also why a real commercial Neutron launch would move its stock disproportionately more.