Momentus Space

Momentus Space is one of the most painful case studies of the 2021 space-SPAC era. The company was founded by Russian-born engineer Mikhail Kokorich in 2017 to build a space-based last-mile delivery service — Tape-to-Tape orbital transfer vehicles capable of taking small satellites from generic launch insertion orbits to their precise operational orbits. The 2021 SPAC merger with Stable Road Acquisition was a textbook example of what went wrong with that era: the CFIUS (US national-security review) flagged Kokorich's Russian citizenship as a concern, the founder was forced to divest his shares and leave the company, the SPAC deal closed at a fraction of the originally promised valuation, and the post-merger company has burned through capital ever since.

As of May 2026 the stock trades around $5.45 after multiple reverse splits — the cumulative pre-split decline from the 2021 peak exceeds 99%. Market cap is $33.7 million. Trailing revenue is only $4 million but grew 898% year-over-year on a tiny base. Operating margin is -270%. Cash burn is severe and short interest stands at 18.6% — the second-highest among US small-cap aerospace names.

The 2026-2027 question is binary: does Momentus generate enough Vigoride orbital-service-vehicle revenue to keep the lights on, or does it become another delisted space-SPAC casualty alongside Astra and Virgin Orbit?

Institutional smart-money interest in MNTS is essentially nil. The original SPAC sponsor and pre-merger investors mostly exited during 2022-2023. Index funds hold trivial positions and no quality long-only manager has a thesis here. The 18.6% short interest is the dominant ownership signal — borrow is expensive but available, and several specialist space-short funds have flagged MNTS as a likely zero in the absence of a defense-contract win.

Insider activity has been mixed and small in dollar terms. Newer board members have bought modest open-market lots, but no transaction has been large enough to signal genuine high-conviction commitment. The pattern is consistent with insiders viewing the equity as cheap relative to a binary-success scenario but lacking personal-capital conviction to take meaningful positions.

The 13F season shows essentially zero new buyers and a continued bleed of small-cap aerospace specialist funds reducing exposure.

Standard valuation metrics fail completely for MNTS. The trailing P/S of 8.4 looks expensive only because revenue is so tiny — at any reasonable revenue scale this metric would be different. The honest valuation framework is binary: probability-weighted scenario analysis. Scenario A (defense-contract win or strategic acquisition, ~15% probability): equity worth $15-25 per share. Scenario B (continued grind with no big win but survival, ~25% probability): equity worth $3-6 per share. Scenario C (capital exhaustion, delisting, eventual liquidation, ~60% probability): equity worth $0. Weighted average lands around $4-6 — consistent with the current $5.45 spot price, but the variance is enormous. No Wall Street analyst publishes price targets; the recommendation field reads none. The market is effectively pricing MNTS as a binary-option on a defense contract.

1. 2026 ongoing: Vigoride mission deployment frequency and customer-payload announcements — proxies for whether the business model is gaining traction
2. Likely Q3-Q4 2026: Potential US Space Development Agency or USSF contract awards — most consequential single-event upside lever
3. Late 2026: Next refinancing window — outcome will determine whether equity holders survive or face delisting risk

Momentus is not an investment thesis — it is a binary defense-contract option with attached equity ticker symbols. The right way to look at MNTS today: a 60% probability of total loss and a 15% probability of a 3-5x outcome on a single defense-contract scenario. I would only consider it as a maximum 0.25% portfolio tail position for someone with explicit space-sector conviction. Cheap optically is not the same as cheap on a risk-adjusted basis. Anyone holding more than 0.5% of net worth in MNTS is taking concentrated single-event risk that they probably do not fully understand.