SpaceX vs Honeywell Aerospace: HONA +19% vs SPCX +11% Upside

SpaceX vs Honeywell Aerospace looks like the easiest pairing in space stocks: the rocket company for growth, the avionics maker for safety. The filings say the risk sits somewhere else. Honeywell Aerospace (HONA) has already been marked down 25.5% since its first regular-way session on 29 June and trades at about 15 times this year’s guided adjusted EBIT on an enterprise-value basis. SpaceX (SPCX) has to lift December revenue to roughly 3.2 times its second-quarter monthly rate to reach the $100bn annualised run-rate management has promised, while up to about 4bn more shares become transferable by June 2027. On Monday 14 September SPCX closed at $148.15 and HONA at $164.08, according to stockanalysis.com. Our 12-month base cases: HONA $195, or +19%, and SPCX $165, or +11%.

Monday’s tape gave the clearest tell. Before the open, Melius Research cut five aerospace names to Hold, trimming its HONA target from $216 to $190, and HONA traded more than 3% lower pre-market, Yahoo Finance reported. It opened at $154.00 and closed up 3.68%. The other four downgraded names all closed lower: GE Aerospace -1.88%, HEICO -3.88%, TransDigm -2.55% and Woodward -3.73%. HONA was the only one to finish green. A stock that absorbs a guidance cut, an S&P 100 exit and a downgrade inside six weeks and still finds buyers is trading like a de-risked value name. SPCX, meanwhile, is priced at 19.5 times a revenue run-rate it has not yet reached. That asymmetry, not rockets versus avionics, drives our verdict.

SpaceX vs Honeywell Aerospace: two very different ways to own space

The two tickers get filed together as space stocks, but space is a different share of each business. SpaceX reported three segments in the second quarter: Space revenue of $962m, Connectivity (Starlink) of $4,291m and AI of $2,561m, per its Q2 release. The launch business itself lost $542m at the operating line as Starship spending rose. Starlink carried the quarter, doubling subscribers to 12.0m year on year, although average revenue per user fell to $66 a month from $85. And of the $18.4bn SpaceX spent on capex in the quarter, $15.8bn went to AI compute.

Honeywell Aerospace is a supplier to the whole flying fleet. Its Q2 sales split into $2,026m of commercial aftermarket (+8%), $679m of commercial original equipment (+6%) and $1,817m of defence and space (+3%), according to the company’s release. Space is a slice of that third bucket, not the core. Full-year 2025 sales were $17,404m, of which $4,604m came from the US government, per the spin-off information statement.

A plain-language analogy helps. SpaceX is building a utility-scale network (satellites, launch capacity, data centres) and financing it like a growth company, with a $25bn bond issue and $85.7bn of IPO proceeds. HONA is closer to a toll road: 45% of Q2 sales came from the aftermarket, meaning parts and repairs on aircraft already flying. Toll roads rarely double, and they also rarely need December to be 3.2 times better than June.

One data trap is worth flagging for anyone screening HONA. Quote screens show a 52-week high of $297.50. That was a when-issued trade on 16 June on just 7,321 shares, before the stock existed as a standalone listing. Honeywell distributed one HONA share for every two HON shares held at the 15 June record date, and regular-way trading began on 29 June, with a first close of $220.19. Measured from $297.50 HONA looks 45% below its high; measured from its first real session it is 25.5% lower. We covered the standalone thesis in our Honeywell Aerospace HONA stock prediction on 7 August and SpaceX in our SPCX stock prediction on 24 August.

The reset that explains most of HONA’s slide came with its first quarterly report as a public company. Jim Currier, Chief Executive Officer at Honeywell Aerospace, framed it in the Q2 release: “For the second half of 2026, we believe it is prudent to align our guidance to our supply chain’s demonstrated capabilities at the end of the second quarter.”

How management and the Street have responded

SpaceX has answered its critics with a single number. On the 4 August call, Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen said the company was on “a trajectory, including contribution from Cursor, to reach $100 billion of ARR, or annualized revenue run rate, by the end of this year, based on our expected revenue in the month of December of this year,” according to the edited transcript. He cited $6.7bn of cloud services revenue contracted in the first weeks of the third quarter, spread over six months from October. SpaceX also closed its Cursor acquisition on 14 August, issuing 389.3m Class A shares at an implied $60.0bn equity value, per its 8-K.

The contracts behind that target are large and short-dated in a legal sense. The prospectus says Anthropic agreed to pay $1.25bn a month through May 2029 for access to about 325,000 Nvidia GPUs, but “after the initial three-month period, the agreements may be terminated by either party upon 90 days’ notice.” The 10-Q adds that one AI customer, Customer B, supplied 19.5% of consolidated Q2 revenue. On 14 September Bernstein’s Douglas Harned lifted his SPCX target to $248 from $239, while MoffettNathanson’s Julie Zhu, rated Hold, moved to $142 from $131, per stockanalysis.com. The spread of published targets, $117 to $450, is itself a measure of how little anyone can model December.

Honeywell Aerospace’s response has been operational and financial. It says it is qualifying more than 50 new suppliers, with 50 more due in the second half, raising supplier tooling spend 20% in the second half versus the first and doubling it from 2025 to 2027, with about 70% going to castings. It has booked $15bn of estimated lifetime-value wins so far this year, led by IndiGo’s selection of its avionics and power systems for 810 Airbus A320neo-family aircraft. On capital, the board authorised the $3.5bn buyback, and S&P Dow Jones Indices is removing HONA from the S&P 100 before the open on 21 September, as we reported on 8 September.

The Street is split rather than hostile. Morgan Stanley’s Kristine Liwag upgraded HONA on 19 August with a $205 target, a day the stock rose 6.0%. J.P. Morgan’s Seth Seifman holds a $235 target on a Hold rating, Jefferies’ Sheila Kahyaoglu $175, and Melius’ Scott Mikus now $190. For SpaceX, the demand-side conviction is not in doubt; the cap table is. Saudi Arabia’s PIF alone held $26.3bn of SPCX at the 30 June close, as we detailed last week. Elon Musk, Chief Executive Officer at SpaceX, left no room for hedging on the call: “To be clear, the $100 billion ARR in December is not a question mark. That’s what we’d achieve if we basically did nothing.”

The numbers side by side

Having tracked SPCX on these pages since its June debut, the one ratio we keep returning to is price against the run-rate it is promising. At $148.15, SpaceX’s 13.57bn shares (7.70bn Class A and 5.49bn Class B on the 10-Q cover, plus 391m issued for Cursor) are worth $2.01tn. Adding $39.4bn of debt and finance leases and subtracting $100.0bn of cash and marketable securities at 30 June gives an enterprise value near $1.95tn. That is 62 times annualised Q2 revenue and 19.5 times the $100bn December run-rate. Honeywell Aerospace, at $164.08 and 316.95m shares, is worth $52.0bn; with $15.85bn of long-term debt and $1.06bn of cash, its enterprise value is about $66.8bn, or 3.7 times trailing twelve-month sales of $17.9bn.

Two pieces of arithmetic reframe the table. First, HONA’s own 2030 targets, set out at its 3 June investor day as 6-8% organic sales growth a year, adjusted EBIT above $6.5bn and free cash flow above $4bn, per TheFly, put today’s enterprise value at 10.3 times 2030 EBIT and today’s market value at a 7.7% yield on 2030 free cash flow. Currier said in August the company is “committed to delivering on the 2030 targets laid out at Investor Day in June.” The market is pricing heavy doubt about that commitment.

Second, SpaceX’s $100bn December target implies $8.33bn of revenue in a single month. Q2 averaged $2.60bn a month. The disclosed step-ups (Anthropic moving to its full $1.25bn monthly fee after a reduced-fee ramp, the $6.7bn cloud contracts from October and Cursor) help, but SpaceX has not itemised the rest. Musk’s claim that $100bn arrives “if we basically did nothing” can be tested in one place: the Q4 report, which will show December revenue.

Structural tension: share supply, leverage and index rules

SpaceX’s lock-up calendar is the biggest structural difference between the two stocks. Under the prospectus schedule, up to 319.0m shares were released on 9 September and up to 59.1m affiliate shares on 10 September. Next come up to 328.4m shares each on 24 September, 9 October and 24 October, up to 1.3bn shares two trading days after Q3 results, and a final 180-day tranche on 8 December of up to 328.4m or 797.6m, depending on whether “Additional Release Shares” were freed at the Q3 release. An extended lock-up then releases about 1.4bn more in stages through 12 June 2027, the day Musk’s 6.4bn shares also come out of lock-up. Transferable is not the same as sold, and Musk has given no indication he intends to sell. Still, up to roughly $596bn of stock at Monday’s price is scheduled to become sellable in nine months.

Leverage cuts the other way. SpaceX ended June with $39.4bn of debt and finance leases, including $13.3bn owed to related parties, on which it paid $327m of related-party interest in Q2, per the release. That is modest against $100bn of cash, but the cash is being spent at a rate of $28.5bn of capex in six months. HONA’s balance sheet was built for the spin: it raised $15.8bn of long-term debt in the first half and made $15.1bn of net transfers to its former parent, leaving a $5.6bn equity deficit. On our rough EBITDA estimate (guided EBIT plus annualised depreciation and amortisation, about $4.9bn), net debt of $14.8bn is about 3.0 times. That caps how fast the $3.5bn buyback can run.

Index rules add a flow question to both stocks. SpaceX’s filed first-half net loss of $4.8bn keeps it outside S&P 500 eligibility, which requires positive GAAP earnings over the trailing four quarters and the latest quarter under the S&P US indices methodology. HONA faces the opposite flow on 21 September as S&P 100 trackers sell. Government exposure also matters. SpaceX won more than $6bn of multi-year Starshield contracts in Q2, and HONA’s defence and space sales were hurt by “the wind-down of a restricted government program.” Rocket Lab offers a smaller-cap comparison on launch economics, set out in our RKLB stock prediction.

The sector-level warning came from Melius on Monday, which said “several years of robust” aftermarket growth may be ending, moderating to the “high-single-digit percentage range” next year, per Yahoo Finance. For HONA, where the aftermarket is 45% of sales, that is the single most important variable in 2027.

The call: 12-month targets for SPCX and HONA

These are our scenario levels to September 2027, set against the 14 September closes. They are analysis, not a recommendation.

Probability-weighted, SPCX comes to $162.75, a 9.9% expected return, and HONA to $187.50, or 14.3%. HONA’s downside in the bear case is half as deep as SPCX’s (-18% against -36%), and its upside-to-downside ratio is 2.1 against 1.7. On a risk-adjusted basis, and on a probability-weighted basis, Honeywell Aerospace offers the higher 12-month return. SpaceX has the higher ceiling: if the $100bn run-rate arrives on time and the unlock supply is absorbed, +62% beats anything we can construct for HONA. Both of our base cases sit below the analyst averages, because we discount SPCX for supply and HONA for execution.

We have also cut our own HONA bull case, from $250 on 7 August to $225, because the premise changed when management lowered 2026 guidance. What would change the verdict: evidence at SpaceX’s Q3 report that AI revenue is stepping up fast enough to make $8.33bn in December visible, or a second HONA guidance cut, which would move our HONA base case toward $150. For a long-horizon comparison of SpaceX against a non-equity asset, see our SpaceX or BTC analysis.

FAQ

Is SpaceX or Honeywell Aerospace the better stock for higher returns?

On our 12-month scenarios, Honeywell Aerospace has the higher probability-weighted return, +14.3% against +9.9% for SpaceX, with a shallower bear case (-18% against -36%). SpaceX has the bigger upside, +62% in our bull case against +37% for HONA, but it depends on hitting a $100bn December run-rate while up to 4bn shares unlock.

Why did Honeywell Aerospace stock fall after the spin-off?

HONA’s first quarterly report on 5 August cut 2026 organic growth guidance to 4-5% from 7-9% and pro forma adjusted EBIT to $4.35-4.45bn from $4.65-4.75bn, citing supply-chain limits. The stock fell 23.2% the next day and is 25.5% below its first regular-way close of $220.19.

When do more SpaceX shares unlock?

The prospectus schedules up to 328.4m shares on each of 24 September, 9 October and 24 October, up to 1.3bn after Q3 results and a final 180-day tranche on 8 December. Extended lock-ups release about 1.4bn more through June 2027, when Elon Musk’s 6.4bn shares also leave lock-up.

Is the $297.50 Honeywell Aerospace high real?

It was a when-issued trade on 16 June 2026 on only 7,321 shares, before regular-way trading. HONA began regular-way trading on 29 June after Honeywell distributed one share per two HON shares. The first regular-way close, $220.19, is the fairer reference for measuring HONA’s performance as a standalone stock.

How much of Honeywell Aerospace is actually a space business?

Less than the “space stocks” label implies. Defence and space together were $1,817m, or 40% of Q2 sales, and the company does not split out space alone. The larger driver is the commercial aftermarket, $2,026m or 45% of the quarter, which is why a slowdown in aftermarket growth matters more to HONA than any launch schedule.

Is SpaceX profitable?

Not on a GAAP basis. SpaceX lost $541m in Q2 2026 and $4.8bn in the first half, although adjusted EBITDA was $3.5bn in the quarter. Capex of $28.5bn in the half left free cash flow at -$25.0bn, funded by $100bn of cash and marketable securities at 30 June.

Disclaimer: This article is analysis for informational purposes and is not investment advice. Scenario levels and probabilities are FinanceFeeds estimates, not forecasts of certainty. Share prices are volatile and capital is at risk.