NASA ETF’s two-month, $2.6 billion liftoff

Retail investors are rushing into the space investing trade ahead of the SpaceX IPO, and one ETF has cashed in on the excitement.

Tema ETFs’ Space Innovators ETF, which launched on March 30 and trades under the ticker symbol NASA, crossed $1 billion in assets in just 37 trading days, and by the end of this past trading week, had reached over $2.6 billion in assets.

That rapid rise is due in part to retail investors hunting for exposure to SpaceX before it goes public.

While SpaceX has taken an unusual approach to its offering, setting up access for retail investors through brokerage firms at a level atypical in new deals typically dominated by institutions, the NASA fund is another alternative for investors to gain access to Elon Musk‘s rocket company. It already holds privately traded SpaceX shares directly. It is one of the few investment vehicles available to retail investors that does, with SpaceX currently representing around 7.5% of the fund.

“If we’re going to invest in space … We have to offer exposure to SpaceX,” said Maurits Pot, Tema ETFs founder and CEO on CNBC’s “ETF Edge” on Wednesday.

Pot said there is no plan to sell shares once the IPO occurs. “The IPO for us is simply a remarking of the position to market price,” he said.

NASA isn’t the only ETF that has access to SpaceX, though the options are limited. Mutual fund manager and billionaire Ron Baron, a long-time Tesla and SpaceX investor, owns the rocket company through his First Principles fund (RONB). Tesla is the top holding in the RONB ETF, at over 14%, while holding close to 2% of the fund’s assets in SpaceX. The ERShares Private-Public Crossover ETF (XOVR), which offers access to late-stage private companies, also owns shares of SpaceX, which it says are worth close to $300 million based on an expected IPO value of over $1.5 trillion.

Setting a precise valuation for the SpaceX deal remains a point of contention in the market and among investors ahead of the deal’s pricing.

Mike Akins, founding partner at ETF Action, said on “ETF Edge” that the ETF structure itself is what makes this kind of access possible for the everyday investor. “Ten, twenty years ago, you talked about a space theme like this, an investor would have to go out and look up all these companies. Now there’s a ticker,” Akins said.

Todd Sohn, chief ETF strategist at Strategas, noted that several new space ETFs have launched over the past few months, including the Van Eck Space ETF (WARP), the Global X Space Tech ETF (ORBX), and Roundhill Investments’ Space & Technology ETF (MARS), which is itself a signal that retail investors are expected to pursue the theme as they have with other recent thematic trades playing off tech innovation, from AI to quantum computing. “That to me is usually a pretty good read that the industry expects space to be the next big thing,” Sohn told CNBC. “It’s a very similar idea to what AI was a few years ago and continuing on.”

Six space-themed…