By Paul R. La Monica

Defense companies hope President Donald Trump's Golden Dome missile defense plan will lead to massive piles of cash for them. Several defense stocks have popped on expectations they will get a piece of the $151 billion SHIELD program.

Now another start-up, York Space Systems, is looking to profit from Wall Street's fascination with the Golden Dome. York went public Thursday.

York priced its initial public offering at $34 a share, the high end of its projected price range. The company also boosted the size of the stock sale, from 16 million shares to 18.5 million. The stock opened at $38 Thursday afternoon and was trading at about $35.50, a gain of 4%, as of midday.

York raised $629 million from the deal, which values the company at $4.3 billion. The stock is trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol YSS.

There is considerable hype about the Golden Dome. Shares of Redwire, for example, surged nearly 30% earlier this week on the news that it was added to the growing pool of eligible vendors for the SHIELD program. York was named as a potential contract awardee in mid-December.

But being on the list of possible Golden Dome beneficiaries doesn't guarantee that a company is going to win any contracts from Uncle Sam. There are currently more than 2,000 applicants for funding, with other much larger private companies that are also thought to be 2026 IPO candidates, such as Anduril and Elon Musk's SpaceX, also looking to get a piece of the SHIELD pot of gold in addition to public companies.

As York says in its latest IPO filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, "our future growth is largely dependent on our ability to continue to capitalize on increased government spending and private investment in the space economy, including programs such as Golden Dome."

York is going public at a time when there is an immense amount of enthusiasm surrounding space companies. The Procure Space exchange-traded fund, which trades under the ticker symbol of UFO and owns Planet Labs, Rocket Lab, and EchoStar as top holdings, is up more than 20% this year alone and has nearly doubled over the past 12 months.

But the record for recent space IPOs is mixed. Karman, which went public nearly a year ago, has soared more than 400% from its IPO price. Two other space-related firms that made its debut in 2025 have not done nearly as well though. Voyager Technologies is only up 13% since its IPO in June while Firefly Aerospace, which went public in August, has tumbled more than 35% from its offering price.

York does have decent fundamentals though. The company, unsurprisingly, is losing money...which is common for most space start-ups. But net losses through the first nine months of 2025 narrowed to $56 million, compared with $73.6 million in the same period a year earlier. Revenue, meanwhile, soared almost 60% to $280.9 million.

So York could benefit from the overall health of the IPO market following a strong rebound in 2025. Two other companies are set to make their Wall Street debuts as well on Thursday. Online life insurer Ethos Technologies priced its IPO at $19, the middle of its proposed range, but fell almost 13% Thursday afternoon. Brazilian fintech PicPay also priced its offering at $19 a share, the high point of its range, and was up about 2% in midday trading.

Write to Paul R. La Monica at paul.lamonica@barrons.com

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January 29, 2026 12:47 ET (17:47 GMT)

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