Publicly traded space startups, many of them the result of Special Purpose Acquisition

Company or SPAC deals, have seen their stocks crash back to Earth.

Collateral damage of a frothy equity market, a wash and stimulus that then faced the fastest pace of interest rate hikes in a generation.

Shares of some space stocks are trading down drastically from their all-time highs.

Take Virgin Galactic, the first pure-placed space flight name

to go public via SPAC in 2019.

At one point, it traded near $60 a share.

Today, after quarterly results and news of its next human flight

test spurred big gains this week, SPCE still trades at just about $4. Galactic is largely pre-revenue, hoping to launch its suborbital

commercial service before the end of June,

so the argument does exist that it perhaps never should have,

been trading, that high to begin with.

But it does raise a broader question.

Was the SPAC boom good for space investment or bad?

There are companies that benefited from going public during the snack boom and a company like a rocket lab and some others it might actually be better positioned to win government contracts as a publicly traded company than they might have as a private company.

Andrew Shannon is the CEO and co-founder of Procure AM, a firm issuing exchange-traded products,

including the first Pure Play Space EDF, ProCare Space E. Tooker, UFO. The fund is down 4% this year

versus the S&P 507% gain. It might not be rocket science. But in this

episode, Shannon digs into the complicated business of investing in space.

I'm Wergen Brennan and this is Manifest Space.

Well, this is a fund that we launched over three years ago now.

It's been, yeah, four years now, wow, since 2019 we had the world's first pure play space EDF.

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