What happened
Shares of Stable Road Acquisition Corporation (SRAC)popped as much as 10.4% in 2 p.m. EST trading Thursday. The special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) is engineering a reverse-merger IPO to make the space-tug company Momentus a publicly traded entity next year.
It's not, however, at all clear why this pop is happening.
Image source: Momentus.
So what
No one's upgraded Stable Road stock today for one thing. No one's so much as suggested Stable Road deserves a higher price target, to my knowledge. Nor has Stable Road published any news of particular note today. Meanwhile, the actual effectiveness of the merger that gives Stable Road most of its value isn't scheduled to take place before sometime in the first quarter of next year.
And yet, there is news about Momentus itself. Earlier this week, Momentus announced it has signed its "first lunar customer contract" in which privately held Canadian space company Canadensys will hire a Momentus Ardoride space tug to "deliver a 50 kg spacecraft to LLO [low lunar orbit] for Canadensys in the 2023 to 2024 timeframe."
Now what
No value was stated for the contract in question, and the timeframe of the work to be performed (plus the fact that Momentus hasn't actually yet built the Ardoride space tug that will perform the contract) means that any financial boost from this contract is still quite a ways off in the future.
Still, there being a limited number of pure-play space companies out there for investors to invest in, it's perhaps understandable that even a bit of news as tenuous as this is generating outsized interest in Momentus -- and in Stable Road stock -- today.
