Kiyosaki's 'One Company Every Rocket Needs' — The Three Space Stocks Behind the Pick-and-Shovel Pitch

The Hook

Robert Kiyosaki’s “Kiyosaki Letter” has been running a space-economy campaign this month, with analyst Garrett Baldwin supplying the actual stock picks. We already looked at the headline tease, the “Launch Cheat Code”, which pointed to a sub-$7 stock operating in “SpaceX’s shadow.” Today’s follow-up, published August 12, bundles three more “special reports” into the same promotion: “The All-Seeing Eye,” “Fuel the Race: The One Company Every Rocket on Earth Cannot Launch Without,” and “All of the Above: The Single Investment That Captures Every Winner in the Space Economy.”

The whole campaign rests on a single, genuinely useful idea: you do not have to guess whether SpaceX, Blue Origin, or Rocket Lab wins the space race. You can own the companies that get paid no matter who launches, who wins, or who fails. That is the classic “pick and shovel” play, applied to orbit, and it is a fair way to frame a sector that has become almost comically dominated by one company. SpaceX now handles something like 85% of all U.S. launches and more than half of global launches. Betting on a SpaceX competitor is a bet against a company that lands its own rockets and reuses them. Betting on the companies that supply the whole launch industry, regardless of whose name is on the side of the rocket, is a smarter framing.

Baldwin is not the first analyst to make this argument. The “pick and shovel” framework has been the default for space investing ever since the sector became too concentrated to pick individual launch winners. What distinguishes this campaign is the quality of the picks. These are not micro-cap lottery tickets. Two of the three are large, established industrial companies. The third is a satellite-imagery company with a real intelligence-agency customer base. None of them are frauds. But as always, the gap between the marketing framing and the underlying economics is where the real story lives.

The Big Claim

The promotion makes three specific claims, one per report, and each is structured to make you feel like you are getting the answer to a different question about how to invest in space.

First, there is a satellite-imagery company with “200-plus satellites photographing every inch of the earth every single day” whose “committed future revenue backlog just grew 245% in a single year” and whose customers “read like a who’s-who of the world’s most powerful intelligence and defense agencies.” The framing: this is the company that sees everything, and defense agencies are paying it a growing subscription to keep watching.

Second, there is “one company” supplying the cryogenic propellants that every rocket needs, so it “collects its toll” before “anyone makes a single dollar from space.” The framing: this is the fuel station at the base of every launch pad, and the toll is collected every single time a rocket leaves the ground.

Third, there is a single investment vehicle that “lets you own the entire space economy,” including “early access to some of the most important companies in this space at prices that were not available to you at the IPO.” The framing: you do not even need to pick the fuel supplier or the imagery company. Just buy the whole sector in one ticker.

Each claim has a real company behind it. The question is whether the framing matches what you are actually buying.

The Mechanism

Report one: “The All-Seeing Eye” is Planet Labs (PL). This is the one that actually matches the “pick and shovel” pitch most cleanly. Planet Labs operates a constellation of 200-plus small satellites, called Doves, that image essentially the entire land surface of Earth every day. The company does not launch rockets or build satellites for sale. It sells a subscription to a continuously updating picture of the planet. Farmers use it to monitor crops. Governments use it to track troop movements and infrastructure. Insurance companies use it to assess damage after natural disasters.

The customer list, as the promo says, includes the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the German military, and the Swedish Armed Forces, among others. These are not speculative customers. They are multi-year, recurring contracts with sovereign governments, and Planet Labs has been building this book of business for more than a decade. Revenue has grown 20% to 25% a year for several years, and analysts model roughly 30% growth out to 2029.

That is a real business with real recurring revenue. The catch is what that revenue has not yet become, which is profit. The company’s margins have been getting worse, not better, which is odd for a business that can sell the same imagery to many customers at near-zero marginal cost. That is the profile of a software company, and a software company growing at 25% with recurring government contracts should be printing cash by now. Instead, analysts see Planet Labs operating at roughly break-even for the next several years. At about 18 times forward revenue, you are paying a premium for a growth story that has not yet shown it can convert growth into earnings.

Planet Labs is also a “cool space stock,” which means it rode the same speculative wave as the rest of the sector, collapsing from a 52-week high around $51.76 down to roughly $24 today after the SpaceX IPO reset expectations for the entire group. The stock has more than tripled from its lows, but the revenue story has not tripled. The price move is mostly sentiment, not a change in fundamentals.

Report two: “Fuel the Race” is Linde (LIN), most likely, with Air Products (APD) as the alternate. The clues point to the industrial-gas giants that supply liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen, helium, and nitrogen to launch pads. StockGumshoe’s Thinkolator narrows it to two names: Air Products, with the bigger legacy NASA footprint and a long history of supplying the Space Shuttle program, and Linde, with the bigger commercial footprint and a tight SpaceX relationship. Baldwin calls it “the single most inevitable investment in the entire space economy.”

Here the “chokepoint” framing runs straight into a wall of arithmetic. Linde is a roughly $220 billion company with more than $35 billion in annual revenue. Its space-propellant business, even if it doubled overnight, would move total revenue by only 1% to 2%. The company may earn something like $5 million per Starship launch, and Starship has not even begun commercial flights in any meaningful volume. It would take thousands of launches for space to matter to Linde’s bottom line in a way that changes the investment thesis. We covered these same supplier dynamics in more detail when examining the broader SpaceX supply chain.

That does not make Linde a bad company. It is one of the best-run industrial-gas franchises in the world, with a diversified customer base spanning healthcare, manufacturing, electronics, and energy. It has raised its dividend every year for decades. It generates enormous free cash flow. But none of those reasons to own Linde have anything to do with space. The space business is a rounding error attached to a great company, which is the opposite of what the “chokepoint” pitch implies. A real chokepoint is a small company where a niche customer makes up most of the revenue. Linde is the reverse: a giant where a niche customer is barely visible on the income statement.

Air Products has the bigger historical NASA footprint, but the same math applies. It is a $65 billion company. The legacy business supplying liquid hydrogen to launch pads is a footnote. If you buy Air Products because of the space angle, you are buying a hydrogen-and-industrial-gas company for a reason that accounts for a negligible share of its revenue.

Report three: “All of the Above” is the Tema Space Innovators ETF (NASA). The “one investment” that owns the “entire space economy” is, per StockGumshoe, the Tema Space Innovators ETF, launched in late March 2026. It is now the largest pure-play space ETF, with roughly $1.2 billion in assets under management, and it spiked earlier this year on its large SpaceX position ahead of the IPO. The alternates are the Procure Space ETF (UFO) and the Ark Space and Defense Innovation ETF (ARKX).

The pitch leans hard on “early access to private companies at pre-IPO prices,” but that angle is now stale. SpaceX and most of the private space names investors were excited about have IPO’d over the past year, so no space ETF holds meaningful private exposure today. What you are buying is a basket of publicly traded space and space-adjacent companies, heavily concentrated in SpaceX, which dominates the index. That is not early access. That is buying a sector ETF after the biggest name in the sector has already gone public.

The Real Picks

Does the Math Check Out?

For Planet Labs, the “245% backlog growth” figure is the kind of number that sounds enormous and is directionally consistent with a company growing 20% to 30% a year. A doubling of committed future revenue is what you expect when a company is winning large multi-year government contracts. The problem is not growth. The problem is economics.

A company trading at 18 times forward revenue with break-even expectations is priced for a software-like margin profile it has not yet demonstrated. Gross margins are in the mid-50s, which is good but not software-good, and operating margins are still negative. If Planet Labs can eventually push gross margins to 70% or 80%, like a SaaS company, and keep operating expenses flat as revenue scales, the stock will look cheap in retrospect. But that is the “if,” not the “when,” and the company has been public long enough that the margin story should be further along than it is. The stock’s 52-week range, $6.10 to $51.76, tells you how much sentiment, not fundamentals, has driven this name.

For Linde and Air Products, the math simply does not support the “chokepoint” framing. A doubling of space revenue adding 1% to 2% of Linde’s top line is not a thesis. It is a rounding error attached to a good company. You could be right about the space sector growing tenfold over the next decade, and it would still not be the reason to own Linde. The right way to own Linde is for its diversified industrial-gas franchise, its pricing power, and its capital-return program, and if the space tailwind happens to add a few basis points of growth along the way, that is a bonus, not the story.

For the ETF, the “own the private companies early” claim is the weakest part of the pitch. Post-IPO, a space ETF is essentially a bet on the public space sector, which today is dominated by SpaceX. That is concentration risk, not diversification. A single company doing more than half of global launches is the same concentration problem the “pick and shovel” pitch was supposed to solve.

What They Got Right

• The “you do not have to pick the rocket winner” framing is genuinely sound. In a single-company-dominated sector like space, owning the infrastructure layer avoids the binary risk of betting on the wrong launch provider. This is not a novel insight, but it is the right insight, and it applies cleanly here.
• Planet Labs is a real pick-and-shovel business with a genuine intelligence and defense customer base, including the NRO and NGA, and its revenue is recurring and subscription-based. It is not a speculative pre-revenue space company trading on a press release.
• Naming Linde and Air Products correctly identifies the actual industrial-gas suppliers to launch pads. The propellant supply chain is a real thing these companies dominate. Liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen at the scale launch pads require come from a very small number of suppliers, and Baldwin correctly identifies the two biggest.
• The Tema Space ETF did hold a large SpaceX position and was the largest pure-play space ETF at the time of the pitch, so identifying it as the likely “one investment” is directionally accurate, even if the “early access” framing has passed its expiration date.
• Being honest that Planet Labs is “more appealing than yesterday’s Shadow SpaceX stock” shows the campaign is capable of discriminating between its own picks, which is more than most promo bundles do.
• The historical detail and sector education in the reports, from the role of cryogenic propellants to the satellite-constellation business model, gives readers actual knowledge they can use, not just a ticker symbol and a sense of urgency.

What They Got Wrong

• Calling Linde the “single most inevitable investment in the space economy” overstates space’s relevance to a $220 billion diversified company by roughly two orders of magnitude. You could be right about the space sector growing tenfold and still wrong about Linde being a space investment. The framing is misleading in a way that matters.
• The “early access to private companies at pre-IPO prices” claim is stale. The private space names the pitch leans on, most notably SpaceX, have already gone public. There is no meaningful private-company exposure in any space ETF today, and saying otherwise in mid-2026 is either outdated or disingenuous.
• The “245% backlog growth” figure is presented without the margin context that would show why growth has not translated into profit. A reader who hears “245% backlog growth” and buys the stock is buying a growth story without understanding why the growth has not yet paid off.
• The “one investment captures every winner” framing ignores that a space ETF is now heavily concentrated in a single stock, SpaceX, which is the opposite of diversification. Capturing “every winner” is not the same thing as owning a cap-weighted index dominated by one name.
• “No matter who fails” oversells the propellant suppliers, since a rocket program that fails simply stops buying fuel. The sector’s biggest customer, SpaceX, dominates demand for launch propellants the same way it dominates launches. If SpaceX stumbles, the propellant “toll” shrinks dramatically, and there is no second customer of comparable size to fill the gap.

The Verdict

Planet Labs is the most interesting of the three picks and the only one where “space” is actually the whole story. It has a real subscription business, real government customers, and a genuinely unique asset in its constellation of 200-plus satellites. But at roughly $24 and 18 times forward revenue, it is a growth story without a profit story yet, and it is trading at a multiple that assumes the profit story shows up soon. The honest take is to wait for either a clearer path to positive cash flow or a more reasonable valuation. If Planet Labs can eventually convert 25% revenue growth into expanding margins, the stock will work. It just has not done it yet.

Linde is a fine industrial-gas franchise. Buy it for the diversified cash-generative business, the decades-long dividend growth record, and the pricing power in an oligopolistic industry. Do not buy it for the space tail, which is real but amounts to a rounding error on a $220 billion company. If you already own Linde, the space angle is a nice footnote in the annual report, not a reason to size up.

The Tema Space ETF is a reasonable way to hold a basket of public space names if you believe in the sector’s long-term trajectory and you are comfortable with the SpaceX concentration. The fee is not zero, and the “early access” pitch is no longer operative, but as a pure-play sector ETF it serves its purpose. Just do not mistake it for something it is not.

This campaign is well-framed, mostly names real companies, and includes genuine sector education that most promo bundles skip. The gap is not between the picks and reality, it is between the “chokepoint” framing and the underlying economics. Linde is not a space chokepoint. It is a great company where space does not matter. Planet Labs could be a chokepoint, but it has not shown it can profit from being one. And the ETF is a reasonable product with a pitch that has aged out. The picks are better than the pitch, which is about as good as these campaigns get.

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