The Crow's Nest 'Galactic Supply Chain' — The Two Space-Defense Stocks Behind the $71 Billion Military Mobilization

The Hook

Jason Simpkins has spent most of his recent newsletter career writing about defense and military-adjacent investing, so it is no surprise that his newest pitch reframes the space boom as a Pentagon story. The email for Power & Profits, the newsletter he now runs under Angel Publishing after The Crow’s Nest was renamed, opens with a counterintuitive twist: SpaceX’s dominance is the reason to buy smaller space names, not a reason to buy SpaceX itself.

“SpaceX is booked,” the email argues. “It can’t absorb the flood of overflow demand about to hit this market.” Because SpaceX is prioritizing its own Starship rocket and Starlink constellation ahead of outside satellite operators who simply want a ride to orbit, that overflow “has to land somewhere else.” The ad then pivots hard into the military angle: “This Isn’t a Space Race… It’s a $71 Billion Military Mobilization.” The urgency mechanism is the SpaceX IPO itself, which the ad says “priced the entire space economy” and left the “most important American suppliers underneath” un-re-rated.

Simpkins has been working this exact corner of the market for years. Our profile of his “Uber Air” pitch walks through the same playbook applied to the air-taxi and eVTOL boom, so readers of that piece will recognize the shape of this one immediately: a real industrial trend, a named presenter, and a set of small-cap suppliers positioned as the overlooked beneficiaries.

The Big Claim

The specific promise is a re-rating story. The three “Galactic Supply Chain” companies “could easily run up 2-10 times from current levels” as the market begins comparing them to a newly public SpaceX, a roughly $2 trillion giant. The special report carries the title “The Galactic Supply Chain: 3 Stocks to Own for Generational Wealth.”

Two of the three names are new to NewsletterVetter, and they are the focus of this teardown. The first reveal, Rocket Lab (RKLB), we have already covered at length in our Motley Fool “Total Conviction” analysis, and the bonus “Uber Air” report is a repackage of Joby Aviation (JOBY), which we dissected in our Crow’s Nest “Uber Air” piece. Here we look at the two we have not yet vetted: Voyager Technologies (VOYG) and Kratos Defense & Security Solutions (KTOS).

The Mechanism

Voyager Technologies (VOYG). The promo’s second pick is “the dual-engine firm building both the Golden Dome AND the new International Space Station.” The clues are specific: 84% of revenue comes from the U.S. government, across NASA, the Air Force, the Space Force, and the Missile Defense Agency.

Voyager holds multiple contracts on the Golden Dome missile-defense architecture and is working on the Next Generation Interceptor program. It just won a contract from Raytheon tied to the Standard Missile interceptor. Its defense backlog is $275.3 million, up 54% year over year.

The space-station side is the more distinctive claim. Voyager is the lead designer and prime contractor on Starlab, a 400-cubic-meter commercial space station planned to succeed the ISS with continuous operation into the 2050s. NASA paid Voyager $24 million in cash in Q1 as lead contractor on its seventh Private Astronaut Mission. At a roughly $2 billion market cap, the ad calls it “1/800th the size of SpaceX,” which is a fair description of the size gap against SpaceX’s roughly $1.75 trillion IPO valuation. We covered the Starlab and the wider commercial space station race separately, and the point worth carrying over is that Starlab is one of several credible contenders, not a monopoly.

Kratos Defense & Security Solutions (KTOS). The third pick is “the company that won both the Pentagon’s $1.45 billion hypersonic testing contract AND the Space Force’s $446.8 million missile warning ground network in a huge double-win.” The two contracts are real.

The $1.45 billion award is for the Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonic Test Bed (MACH-TB), a five-year program that alone is roughly a full year of Kratos’s current revenue. The $446.8 million award covers a Space Force missile-warning ground network.

The hook that caught our eye is Kratos’s software story: OpenSpace, a “software-defined ground systems” platform the ad likens to “the AWS of satellite ground systems.” Instead of building dedicated hardware ground stations for every satellite mission, customers can spin up software-defined ground capability on demand. That is recurring subscription revenue with software margins inside a defense contractor, which is genuinely unusual. Kratos’s space and satellite division posted a 3-to-1 book-to-bill ratio in Q1, meaning it booked $3 in new orders for every $1 of revenue recognized.

The Real Pick

Prices are the September 2, 2026 close from Polygon. The “tease price” is the July 14 close, since the ad campaign first hit inboxes in mid-July. Both names still trade close to where they were when the promo started, so the reference price is a reasonable starting point rather than a cherry-picked low.

Does the Math Check Out?

The “2-10 times” claim is a range, not a forecast, and it rests entirely on a re-rating argument rather than a fundamentals argument. Let us test the pieces.

The SpaceX comparison is doing the heavy lifting, and it cuts both ways. On one hand, the logic that a $2 trillion SpaceX “prices the entire space economy” and gives smaller suppliers room to re-rate is defensible: when an industry’s anchor company gets a public multiple, investors do start applying comparables to the rest of the sector.

On the other, the ad quietly omits that SpaceX’s valuation is mostly a Starlink and xAI-compute story, not a launch story. SpaceX’s growth is mostly coming from Starlink and from xAI’s new deals to lease out compute to Alphabet and Anthropic, not from launch revenue. A defense-and-satellite supplier that does not own a constellation or a compute business is not automatically entitled to a SpaceX-shaped multiple.

The valuation math on the two new names is mixed. Voyager is not expected to be profitable for a couple of years, so there is no earnings multiple to anchor it; at ~$2 billion, it trades on the optionality of Starlab and Golden Dome contracts that mostly have not converted to revenue yet.

Kratos is the more concrete case: at ~$1.12 per share in expected next-year earnings, the stock trades at more than 40 times 2027 earnings. Analysts expect 20%-plus top-line growth in 2027 and 2028, which could justify the multiple if the earnings growth follows, but the stock was already bid to roughly 400 times earnings last December before the correction.

A reader entering at $47.78 is paying a premium multiple for a story that has already had one blow-off top and round-trip. Our separate teardown of Kratos digs into the defense backlog numbers in more detail.

The headline contract numbers also deserve a date check. Kratos’s “book-to-bill 3-to-1” is real but applies only to the satellite and space division, which is still a small slice of overall revenue; company-wide book-to-bill is closer to 1.5-to-1. And the “$1.45 billion contract won in January” was January 2025, not 2026, a detail the ad does not volunteer.

Voyager’s Starlab, meanwhile, is the most audacious part of the pitch, and it is the furthest out. The station has not been delivered yet; it is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Starship in 2028 or 2029, and Axiom Space is likely to reach operational status first by attaching modules to the ISS. The “American Defense Complex” manufacturing facility in Pueblo, Colorado is real and meaningfully sized for a $2 billion company, but it is not transformative relative to prime-contractor scale.

What They Got Right

• The core supply-and-demand argument is sound: SpaceX is genuinely prioritizing its own constellation and Starship cadence, which does create real overflow demand for launch and satellite capacity that smaller providers can capture.
• The defense framing is accurate. Space is now a substantial military budget line, and the “Pentagon as the biggest customer” framing reflects how these contractors actually earn their revenue, with Voyager at 84% government revenue.
• The two picks are real, credible businesses. Kratos’s OpenSpace software-defined ground-systems platform is a genuine differentiator, and Voyager’s Starlab prime-contractor role is a real, named position in the commercial space-station race.
• The presenter’s angle fits his track record. Jason Simpkins has been writing about defense and military-adjacent investing for years, so this pitch is consistent with his expertise rather than a forced pivot.
• The offer is transparent and low-risk on its face: $99 a year with a six-month refund period is a reasonable, honest subscription price for a newsletter.

What They Got Wrong

• The “2-10 times” re-rating claim leans on a SpaceX comparison that does not transfer. SpaceX’s multiple is a Starlink and xAI-compute story; a $2 billion and a $9 billion contractor are not entitled to the same comparables.
• The ad implies the Kratos contract wins are fresh, but the headline $1.45 billion MACH-TB award was January 2025, not January 2026, and the “3-to-1 book-to-bill” is a space-division figure, not a company-wide one.
• Voyager’s Starlab is presented as if the “new ISS” is imminent, when the station will not launch until 2028 or 2029 and Axiom Space likely gets to orbit first. The promo’s “delivered in a single deployment” phrasing papers over that timeline.
• The “1/800th the size of SpaceX” framing is presented as an opportunity signal, but it also reflects that Voyager is a pre-profit, sub-$2-billion contractor with concentration risk in a small number of government programs.
• The pitch omits the recent history: Kratos was bid to roughly 400 times earnings late last year before a sharp correction, so the “mispriced” framing ignores that the market has already had one round of enthusiasm for this exact story.

The Verdict

This is a coherent, genuinely interesting defense-and-space thesis wrapped in a re-rating narrative that outruns the fundamentals. The underlying companies are legitimate. Kratos has a real, differentiated software platform and a full pipeline of hypersonic and missile-warning work. Voyager has a credible claim to a meaningful role in the post-ISS commercial space-station era and a growing defense backlog. Our broader map of the space-defense stocks covers the other names caught up in this trade.

But the entry point matters, and neither name is cheap right now. Kratos trades at more than 40 times forward earnings on a story that has already round-tripped once this year. Voyager is a pre-profit company whose marquee asset, Starlab, will not fly until 2028 or later. “Buy at the right price” is the honest verdict here: the thesis is worth tracking, and a pullback in either name would make the story much more interesting, but chasing the promo’s “2-10 times” framing at current prices means paying a premium for contracts that have not yet shown up in revenue.

This is not financial advice. NewsletterVetter has no position in any stock mentioned.