Redwire, which builds solar arrays, star trackers, spacecraft structures and in-space manufacturing hardware — and, since buying Edge Autonomy, drones and reconnaissance payloads — reported record revenue of $117.1m for its June quarter, up almost 90% year on year. Gross margin came in at a record 27.8%. A year earlier the same line read -30.9%, a quarter in which cost of revenue exceeded revenue outright. Contracted backlog reached a record $542.1m, and over the trailing twelve months the company booked $1.52 of new orders for every dollar of revenue, against $0.87 a year before. The shares fell 21.6% in the thirty days to September 11.

A record quarter can sit beside a de-rating because of the way these companies are paid. Almost all of this work is fixed-price development: the builder quotes a total, and when it revises its estimate of what the job will finally cost, the whole revision lands on margin at once, catching up every prior quarter in the current one. Reported gross margin is therefore an estimating statement before it is a pricing one. Redwire's quarterly gross margin has printed 14.7%, -30.9%, 16.3%, 9.6%, 26.6% and 27.8% — a swing of nearly 60 percentage points inside eight quarters on a broadly similar revenue base. That mechanism governs all three of the spacecraft builders below.

What Redwire now is

The other thing the quarter disclosed is that Redwire is no longer mainly a space company. Defense Tech revenue was $61.9m against $55.2m for the Space segment, and management said the drone and defense-electronics half would keep growing faster. Chief executive Peter Cannito's team attributed the record margin to that mix, to a shift from development work toward production, and to estimate revisions that were net-neutral in the quarter; the guide from here is low-to-mid 20s. Total debt was cut 75% to $48.9m and liquidity ended at $607.8m. Adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization were still negative $3.2m. "We are reaffirming our full year 2026 revenue forecast in the range of $450 million to $500 million," chief financial officer Chris Edmunds told investors on the August 6 call.

What shareholders own less of is the claim on all that. Diluted shares stood at 220.5m against 89.6m a year earlier, and on June 9 the company replaced a $350m at-the-market equity program with one for up to $500m. Redwire's market value is higher than in May while its share price is barely changed: issuance closed the gap.

The same mechanism, biting

Intuitive Machines, the Houston lunar-lander builder that has since become a satellite prime, showed both directions at once. June-quarter revenue more than quadrupled to $206.2m and gross profit swung to $35.9m from a loss of $11.8m. But gross margin fell from 39.0% in March to 17.4%, and the company booked a $14.7m estimate-at-completion adjustment on its IM-4 mission for payload accommodation. Backlog is a record $1.8bn, bookings through the August 13 call were $1.2bn, and the mix has moved away from NASA lunar delivery: 50% of those bookings were commercial, 30% national security. "This quarter demonstrates that Intuitive Machines is no longer dependent on a single market, customer or mission cadence for growth," chief financial officer Peter McGrath said that day. The recurring piece — a Near Space Network communications contract with a $4.82bn ceiling — has booked nothing yet; the first relay satellite flies on IM-3 in early 2027. The mood is visible in the fact that the stock fell around 9% in early September on a new spacecraft order.

The one that broke

York Space Systems, which mass-produces standardized satellite buses and listed in January at $34 a share, is the exception that makes the group legible. On August 13 it cut 2026 revenue guidance to $375m–$405m from a $570m midpoint. "We've observed a meaningful shift in how the U.S. government is acquiring spacecraft systems, moving away from a rapid succession of larger RFPs to an IDIQ approach that is slow to start, but often faster to accelerate task orders later," chief executive Dirk Wallinger said — indefinite-delivery vehicles, which award a place in a queue rather than a job. Roughly 30% of York's 2026 new business went with it. Backlog still grew 9% to $592m and the win rate held at 88%, so this is award timing rather than lost demand — and the budget churn around the Space Development Agency's next data-transport tranche is the same story from the buyer's side. Redwire sits on the identical hinge: it is one of 15 vendors on a $981m Space Systems Command vehicle that pays nothing until task orders issue.

The verdict

None of the three earns money, and their gross margins run from 17% to 28%, so what they cost is best read against the gross profit they generate. Redwire trades at 29.6 times the past year's gross profit and 26.6 times the forward figure, against 58 times in early May. Intuitive Machines is at 17.1 times trailing and 9.1 times forward, against 437 times in May. York, at 2.85 times trailing sales with almost no discount to forward sales, no longer has growth for that gap to price.

Only York's order book deteriorated. The other two declines are mostly sector-wide: Rocket Lab fell 45% over the same three months, Planet Labs 52%, AST SpaceMobile 39%, and pre-profit space names have been sold together as a theme, against a backdrop of climbing Treasury yields pressuring small caps. Layered on that is real dilution — Intuitive Machines has sold $291m of stock at an average of $26.81 against $14.35 today. The businesses explain why nobody will pay ahead for these order books; they do not explain the compression itself.

Under fixed price, a builder finds out what a contract earned only when it has nearly finished building it. Redwire's record margin and Intuitive Machines' halved one came out of the same accounting rule in the same quarter, and the next set of estimate revisions arrives with the September numbers.