Al Root
America is about to do something great: send astronauts around the moon on a giant rocket that is taller than the Statue of Liberty.
The sheer scale of space and what's being attempted makes tuning in to NASA's Artemis II mission worthwhile. There are some investment implications, too.
The Artemis group of missions aims to return Americans to the lunar surface and establish a permanent presence on the Moon. Artemis II is slated to blast off at about 6:24 p.m. Eastern time today.
It can be watched here.
The prior mission, Artemis I, blasted off in 2022, testing NASA's huge space launch systems, or SLS, and the Orion spacecraft, which circled the moon without a crew. Artemis III is slated for 2027 and will test Orion and lunar landers built by Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin. Artemis IV is slated for 2028 and is intended to be the first U.S. moon landing since 1972. Artemis V should go later that year, marking the beginning of moon base construction.
As for Artemis II, four astronauts, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen, will slingshot around the Earth's satellite on a 10-day mission. If all goes according to plan, the four will travel a total of almost 700,000 miles and travel farther from Earth than any humans have ever gone.
They will ride in an Orion spacecraft built by Lockheed Martin and Airbus. Northrop Grumman, L3Harris Technologies, and Honeywell supply components and systems for Orion.
The spaceship sits on top of NASA's roughly 320-foot-tall SLS rocket. (The Statue of Liberty is about 305 feet tall, including the pedestal.) SLS isn't as big as SpaceX's fully reusable Starship, though, which is roughly 80 feet taller.
SLS is NASA's rocket, but it is built from parts supplied by Boeing, Northrop, and others. To some extent, SLS is a vestige of a bygone era. In the future, NASA is far more likely to rely on commercial providers, such as SpaceX, to provide launch capacity.
The reason is obvious. NASA has spent more than $30 billion developing the rocket and another $25 billion-plus on Orion. SpaceX has raised an estimated $12 billion over its entire corporate life. With that money, SpaceX built a dominant launch franchise and profitable communications business.
SpaceX accounts for more than half of all orbital launches worldwide, and its Starlink broadband service has more than 10,000 satellites in orbit and more than 10 million subscribers.
That doesn't mean the Artemis missions aren't impressive or important. And the mission demonstrates to investors that space activity is rising, which benefits a number of new space stocks, including mini-SpaceX Rocket Lab, communications provider AST SpaceMobile, lunar lander maker Intuitive Machines, FireFly Aerospace, which makes rockets and lunar landers, satellite maker York Space Systems, and components supplier Redwire, among others.
Those six stocks have a combined $81 billion market value, or 23 times estimated 2026 sales. Pricey. But 2026 sales are expected to roughly double.
Those valuations are dwarfed by SpaceX, at about $1.3 trillion. It is planning a record initial public offering that could raise up to $75 billion.
That money will help fund Elon Musk's ambitions to build AI data centers in space. It sounds like science fiction, but space is becoming a strategic asset for companies and governments worldwide.
Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 01, 2026 01:00 ET (05:00 GMT)
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