Pure-play space was routed ahead of SpaceX's Starship test while defense and germanium materials held; Rocket Lab fell 9% below its Iridium-collar line.

As in drone, the space board's only real green was Umicore's ADR, up 3.0% to $5.69 — here mapped to the space-solar-power chokepoint, since Umicore's germanium substrates sit under space-grade multi-junction solar cells. Northrop Grumman (up 1.6% to $542.24), CACI (up 1.3%) and Teledyne (up 0.6%) held, but a slate led by the primes and a materials ADR means the same thing it meant in drone: no pure-play space name rose Friday.

Rocket Lab was the laggard, down 8.7% to $63.91, and it fell with the whole launch-and-observation complex rather than on any release. Space names sold off broadly into SpaceX's thirteenth Starship flight that evening, and RKLB closed under $67.50 — the lower edge of the collar governing what it pays for Iridium — below which the share count owed to Iridium holders stops moving. The launch chokepoint's marquee small-cap is now roughly 37% off its June levels on sentiment, not fundamentals.

Earth observation and in-space infrastructure took the brunt. Planet Labs fell 8.5% to $20.47, Redwire 6.4% to $8.69, Satellogic 5.8%, Intuitive Machines 5.8% to $12.92, BlackSky 5.3%, Gilat 5.7% and AST SpaceMobile 5.0% to $56.20. Even the SpaceX-proxy vehicles softened, with the Destiny Tech100 down 3.4%. The pattern is a clean growth-to-defense rotation: government-backed cash flows held, while capital-hungry constellation and lander stories did not.

Earnings define the next two weeks: Firefly reports Q2 on August 4, BlackSky and Rocket Lab on August 6 — Rocket Lab's first full quarter owning Mynaric and the CONDOR optical-terminal line, a direct read on the laser-comms chokepoint — and AST SpaceMobile on August 10. Nearer term, watch launch cadence itself: after Friday's Starship test, the sector's beta is set by whether reusable heavy-lift keeps its schedule, the upstream bottleneck every downstream constellation prices off.