With the successful launch of SpaceX Falcon Heavy, can you invest in Elon Musk’s mission to Mars?

Key points to remember

• SpaceX has successfully launched the most powerful rocket in the world, the Falcon Heavy.
• It’s just the latest successful launch for the rocket, which is expected to help land NASA astronauts on the Moon and potentially even send humans to Mars.
• SpaceX recently completed another venture capital raise, valuing the company at $127 billion.
• Regular investors probably won’t be able to get in with SpaceX, but there are other ways to gain exposure to the private space sector and other cutting-edge technology investments.

In all the hype surrounding Elon Musk’s privatization of Twitter, sacked executives and blue tick fuss, it can be easy to forget that he also has a number of other side projects in the works.

If you can call aiming to colonize Mars a side project.

Elon Musk is surely the most prolific founder and CEO of this generation and potentially, of all time. He is currently the founder and/or CEO of Tesla, Twitter, Neuralink, The Boring Company, OpenAI and SpaceX.

It’s a little unbelievable that launching rockets into space gets mixed up with the rest of his accomplishments, but here we are. SpaceX has been around for a surprisingly long time now. It started in 2002 and the goal, even then, was to eventually develop technology that would allow the colonization of Mars.

Musk spoke at length about the importance of the human race becoming a “multi-planetary” species. This issue has come to the fore in recent years, with climate change raising concerns about what the Earth might look like in the future.

As you might expect, progress in space exploration is slow, but SpaceX essentially created the private space industry, which is now seeing several new entrants, including Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.

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SpaceX Falcon Heavy’s last launch was a success

This week, SpaceX launched its Falcon Heavy, the world’s most powerful rocket, for the first time in three years. Due to a combination of technical issues and a lack of demand for their “courier services” during the pandemic years, a lot of time went between drinks.

SpaceX operates the rockets on behalf of many other organizations seeking access to space. Their clients are wide ranging and include NASA, as well as other nations’ space programs and even wealthy individuals.

This latest flight was carrying satellites on behalf of the US military and, as you would expect with a client like this, it’s somewhat difficult to get more details.

The Falcon Heavy is still relatively new, only the fourth launch since its first in 2018. It turned out to be quite an event, with Elon Musk launching his personal Tesla Roadster into space as a test payload. He’s still out there, making a long trip around the Sun and to Mars.

There were two other launches in 2019, one of these missions being the delivery of another satellite for the US Department of Defense and the other the launch of a large television and telephone satellite for Arabsat, headquartered in Saudi Arabia.

That doesn’t mean SpaceX engineers have been sitting around drinking coffee ever since. The Falcon Heavy is only required for larger payloads due to its enormous power level. Because of this, the smaller Falcon 9 rocket is being used much more frequently, having completed almost 50 launches so far in 2022.

One of the defining characteristics of SpaceX rockets is their ability to land on Earth. Previously, rockets were thrown into the ocean, rendering them useless for future missions. By creating the technology to land them safely on the ground, SpaceX is able to reuse vital components, which aims to reduce the overall cost.

It is seen as an essential piece of the puzzle to make future space travel viable and their competitors are following suit.

SpaceX’s next missions

After the long hiatus of using the Falcon Heavy, there are a number of exciting missions in the near future.

In 2023, the company plans to launch the world’s first private lunar mission, called dearMoon. The project is funded by Japanese billionaire Yusaka Maezawa and will involve a flyby of the moon with Maezawa and six to eight other civilians on board.

The purpose of the flight was stated as an art project, with Maezawa hoping the space experience will inspire creativity, with subsequent artwork to be exhibited on Earth to promote world peace.

These billionaires don’t think small.

The Falcon Heavy is also part of the larger plan to land humans and cargo on the Moon and, eventually, Mars. SpaceX has developed its own spacecraft, Starship, to work in conjunction with Falcon Heavy rockets, which will help NASA carry out its first manned mission to the Moon since 1972.

For SpaceX, the Starship project is also the device which, according to them, could eventually be used to go to Mars.

Can you invest in SpaceX?

SpaceX is a completely private company, just like Twitter is now. This means that for regular investors, getting a slice of the SpaceX pie is probably impossible unless you’re on good terms with Elon himself.

But it is not surprising that many investors want to participate. SpaceX is now the largest private venture-backed company in the world, with the latest funding round putting it at a valuation of around $127 billion.

To put that into context, that makes it more valuable than companies like Goldman Sachs, Intel, Unilever, American Express, Starbucks, and BP.

This does not mean that you cannot invest in the private space sector at all. There are a number of players in the space (pun intended) that are publicly listed, which means investors can buy into the industry.

However, it is a high risk game. As you would expect, space exploration requires huge start-up capital and the risk of things going wrong is very, very high.

A few examples are private space company Momentus (MNTS) which has seen its stock drop almost 90% in the last 12 months, Astra Space (ASTR) which has fallen 93.95% in the last year and even the spin -off of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic (SPCE) is down more than 75% over the same period.

All of this was made public through SPACs and it hasn’t been a good trip for investors since.

There are other ways to get into the space sector without betting on high-risk startups. Many of the world’s leading aircraft manufacturers are heavily involved in the sector. Boeing (BOE) helped send Apollo 11 astronauts to the Moon and they are still working on rockets for NASA today.

Boeing is currently building the Space Launch System for NASA, which will work alongside SpaceX technology to send humans back to the moon. They also built the Starliner capsule that transports people to and from the International Space Station.

In addition to their own projects, Boeing has a joint project with another listed company, Lockheed Martin (LMT) to supply launch vehicles to Blue Origin, NASA and others.

Invest in state-of-the-art technology

Private space exploration is an emerging sector that is expected to continue to grow in the coming years, but remains high risk. With high risk comes the potential for high returns, but it’s more important than ever to ensure investors have enough diversification to weather the almost certain volatility.

As for the use of technology, we use it extensively in the creation of our investment kits, using the power of AI and machine learning to predict returns across a huge range of different assets.

For tech-focused investors, we’ve incorporated this into our Emerging Tech Kit, which invests in four key verticals within the tech industry. These include large-cap tech companies, new and growing tech companies, tech ETFs, and even cryptocurrencies through public trusts.

Every week, our AI analyzes huge swaths of data and predicts how each of these verticals will perform each week, as well as which stocks within each vertical are expected to perform best on a risk-adjusted basis.

It then automatically rebalances the portfolio based on the best expected risk-adjusted returns and repeats this process every week.

Not only that, but we also offer wallet protection with the Emerging Tech Kit. This uses our AI by assessing your portfolio’s sensitivity to risks such as interest rate risk, oil risk and overall market risk, then automatically implementing hedging strategies to counter them.

It’s like having a personal hedge fund manager in your pocket.

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