Space digest — Nov 6, 2026
Top line: Space stocks sank with AI: SpaceX fell 9% as Goldman Sachs and Apollo weighed selling pieces of its roughly $40 billion AI-chip financing, while Rocket Lab slid 13%, about 70% below its peak, ahead of its November 9 earnings. Taiwan-based researchers report Artemis II's April 1 launch disturbed the ionosphere enough for potential GPS errors of several metres.
Space stocks sink with AI, and SpaceX's $40B chip financing may be syndicated
Sources TIKR via Yahoo Finance The Motley Fool
What happened: SpaceX shares closed 9% lower on November 5 as a broad sell-off in AI and chip stocks pulled the Nasdaq-100 down 5% — Rocket Lab fell 13% and AST SpaceMobile 15%, neither with news of its own, though AST did announce a Space Force contract the same day. A Bloomberg report relayed in the coverage adds that Goldman Sachs and Apollo are in talks to sell parts of SpaceX's roughly $40 billion financing for Nvidia chips to other investors. SpaceX is increasingly priced as an AI stock: its Super Intelligence compute segment brought in $7.56 billion of its $14.6 billion third-quarter revenue, the company spent $48.1 billion on capital expenditure in the first nine months of 2026, and it guides to another $35–40 billion in the fourth quarter.
What's genuinely new: the Goldman Sachs–Apollo talks, a next structural step for the $40B GPU-debt package closed in late October, and confirmation that the AI-compute mix now drags the stock down with the wider chip tape. Rocket Lab's fall leaves it roughly 70% below its all-time high close of $150.23 on May 27, at a market value near $31 billion including shares convertible from preferred stock.
Watch: Rocket Lab's third-quarter report on November 9 — guidance of $250–265 million revenue with an adjusted EBITDA loss of $17–23 million and gross margin falling to 35–37% — whether the chip-financing syndication completes and on what terms, and where SpaceX's fourth-quarter capex lands against its own $35–40 billion guide.
More context: Goldman Sachs and Apollo have begun approaching investors to buy slices of as much as $500 million each in SpaceX's roughly $40 billion Nvidia-chip financing before formal syndication starts, a package structured to keep the debt off SpaceX's balance sheet (The Edge Singapore). Deal documents state that SpaceX's rent on the leased chips is "absolute" and cannot be paused under force majeure, a tighter term than the clause Bloomberg reported Oracle invoking to defer its data-centre obligations (The Edge Singapore). The financing, plus a $7 billion lease prepayment, covers about $47.3 billion of Nvidia's latest Rubin chips and equipment, with deliveries expected in the first half of 2027 (Billionaires.Africa).
Sources The Edge Singapore Billionaires.Africa
Brief
- France's SyLEx suborbital launcher has its first operational flight: a write-up of ArianeGroup's announcement says the second launch of the single-stage rocket took place on November 4 from the DGA Missile Testing Centre at Biscarrosse, carrying an experimental payload for DGA and the French armed forces ministry — about eleven months after the November 2025 demonstration flight, with no altitude, mass or payload detail released. Sourcing caveat: only one write-up of ArianeGroup's announcement so far; no independently fetched report yet. Shattered
- Researchers at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, in a preprint via ESS Open Archive, report that NASA's Artemis II launch on April 1 disturbed the ionosphere across roughly 3,100 miles (5,000 km) of North America — effects up to ten times more intense than those observed after SpaceX Starship test launches — implying potential GPS positioning errors of several metres. Co-author Charles Lin told Space.com that "a positioning error of a couple of metres is enough to cause an autonomous car to change lanes," but the study documented no real vehicle errors or malfunctions, and the peer-review status is unconfirmed. International Business Times UK
- Expedition 75 astronauts Anil Menon and Joshua Kutryk completed EVA-101 outside the station, installing the eighth and final iROSA roll-out solar array and closing out years of planned ISS power-system upgrades. NASA Spaceflight on X