By Nate Wolf
The safe return of NASA's Artemis II crew last weekend and the box-office success of Ryan Gosling's astral adventure Project Hail Mary have put space exploration back in the spotlight. Investors are paying attention, too, and they have a new way to get in on the action.
Fund manager Global X ETFs is launching an exchange-traded fund on Wednesday to satiate investors' demand for exposure to the global space economy. The announcement comes as various space stocks skyrocket in price and the market gears up for SpaceX's historic initial public offering.
The Global X Space Tech ETF -- ticker OBRX -- will track companies earning at least half of their revenue from some segment of the space sector. That list includes 28 companies making launch systems, satellites, or space tech components, or offering space exploration and tourism services.
The top three holdings by weight are Rocket Lab, Planet Labs, and AST SpaceMobile. Other constituents include Richard Branson's space tourism company Virgin Galactic and the satellite company Globalstar, which Amazon.com just agreed to acquire. Half of the companies are U.S.-based.
"We see the space technology theme at a very interesting inflection point right now because you're starting to see commercialization accelerate," Tejas Dessai, director of thematic research at Global X, told Barron's. "That really increases the credibility of the theme for us."
From 2020 through 2025, the volume of successful space launches rose at a 25% compounded annual rate, according to Morgan Stanley. The cumulative number of objects launched to space, meanwhile, rose at a 20% clip. Markets have noticed.
"A combination of scientific advancements, geopolitics and economics have rekindled investor attention on the Space theme," Morgan Stanley analysts said in a research note Sunday, adding that interest is at its highest point since the firm established its space team almost a decade ago.
"From our discussions, investors are looking for derivative expressions on the theme at sub-stratospheric valuations," they added.
Relatively few funds exist to capture this growth. The ARK Space & Defense Innovation ETF is the largest space-related ETF, with around $778 million in assets, according to ETFDb. The fund is up 10% this year and 81% over the last 12 months. The smaller Procure Space ETF -- ticker UFO -- has had even stronger gains, rising 144% in the last year.
The sector now includes enough stocks -- many of them quite sizable -- that Global X is comfortable introducing its own product, Dessai said. Unlike some other funds that include space stocks, the firm's ETF will focus strictly on pure-play space companies. It will be passively managed with a 0.5% expense ratio.
Expect all of those funds to garner more interest as Elon Musk's rocket company SpaceX prepares an IPO at a reported valuation of around $2 trillion. The company handles the majority of orbital launches worldwide and wants to put artificial-intelligence data centers in orbit.
The IPO will introduce a new challenge for fund managers, since SpaceX towers over all other space-related companies in size. Rocket Lab, the largest holding in the Global X ETF, has a market capitalization of just over $40 billion.
Global X has designed the market-cap-weighted fund so no one holding comprises more than 20% of the product. In fact, many of Global X's customers are already private investors in SpaceX and want broader exposure to the industry, Dessai said.
"From our perspective, this is not a single-company opportunity," he added.
Write to Nate Wolf at nate.wolf@barrons.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 15, 2026 09:00 ET (13:00 GMT)
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