MW York Space tests the market's hunger for satellite stocks as it upsizes its IPO
By William Gavin
Ahead of an expected SpaceX IPO later this year, a much smaller satellite company is headed for the public markets
York Space Systems is among the companies trying to win a piece of the Golden Dome missile-defense project talked up by President Donald Trump.
The defense contractor York Space Systems upsized its initial public offering on Wednesday, as it prepares to test investor appetite for another space-technology provider.
Earlier this month, York Space said it would be offering 16 million shares for between $30 and $34 apiece, according to a regulatory filing. But Wednesday's announcement noted that the company ended up pricing 18.5 million shares at the high end of that range. The deal raised $629 million, based on the $34 offering price.
The company was founded in 2012 by CEO Dirk Walinger and develops and operates satellites and spacecraft for customers - namely the U.S. government. As of Sept. 30, 2025, York Space had flown 74 missions and logged more than 4 million hours in orbit.
See also: The 'space economy' is booming. Here's where most of the money is going.
York Space relies heavily on the U.S. government to make money, noting in a regulatory filing that the Space Development Agency made up "substantially all" of its revenue and backlog for the first nine months of 2025. The company reported revenue of $280.9 million over that period, up from $176.9 million a year earlier.
But York Space has yet to turn a profit. It reported a net loss of $56 million over the first nine months of 2025, compared with a loss of $73.6 million over the same period in 2024. It ended 2024 with a net loss of $98.8 million, implying that the company took a roughly $25.2 million loss in the December quarter of that year.
In a filing, York Space warned that it expects to "incur net losses for the next several years" and may never become profitable, adding that it is difficult to predict the limits of the spacecraft and related software markets.
The company expects to benefit from the federal government's continued interest in the so-called space economy, including a recent push by President Donald Trump to increase investment in space companies. York Space, like many other firms in the sector, is hoping to win a slice of the Golden Dome missile-defense system, a potentially massive project.
York Space says that it builds its satellites for half the cost of what rival manufacturers spend and that the platform it uses allows the company to quickly move from design to deployment. The company also provides software for flight control and edge computing, and last July acquired Atlas Space Operations to improve its offerings on that front.
The largest shareholder of York Space is AE Industrial Partners, a private-investment firm with $7.5 billion in assets under management as of Sept. 30, 2025. It's also the majority shareholder in FireFly Aerospace $(FLY)$ and RedWire $(RDW)$, and has backed several private defense companies, such as Sierra Space.
FireFly's stock has plunged 36% from its August IPO price, while shares of Redwire have fallen nearly in half from their February 2025 peak close. Several other companies in the sector also went public last year, including Voyager Technologies $(VOYG)$ and Karman Holdings $(KRMN)$.
While York Space is the latest space company to go public, it's unlikely to be the only one this year. SpaceX, which provides most of the world's orbital launches with its Falcon 9 rockets, is expected to file for an IPO in the coming months; CEO Elon Musk has said he wants the process completed by July, according to the Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times reported Wednesday that the IPO may be timed with a rare planetary alignment and Musk's birthday in June.
Read: AST SpaceMobile's stock is on a roll. This key factor could make or break its momentum.
Musk's deal is expected to be one of the biggest IPOs of all time and could potentially surpass Saudi Aramco's (SA:2222) $29 billion public listing in 2019. SpaceX plans to raise more than $30 billion and grow its $800 billion valuation to as much as $1.5 trillion. That would generate almost as much exit value for the U.S. venture-capital market as the past five years combined, Pitchbook analyst Kyle Stanford said in a December report.
Industry experts largely expect SpaceX's public listing to spur a fresh wave of investment in the space economy, which has benefited from renewed interest in recent years. The venture-capital firm Space Capital recently compared a SpaceX IPO to the public debut of Netscape in 1995, which kicked off the dot-com boom.
"Public investors will finally have a true reference point for scale, margins and growth in space-based businesses, and that kind of price discovery tends to ripple quickly through both public and private markets," Chad Anderson, Space Capital's CEO, told MarketWatch earlier this month.
-William Gavin
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January 28, 2026 20:49 ET (01:49 GMT)
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