Space stock ETFs are suddenly hot. Only 1 owns SpaceX before the IPO.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.The space race is heating up ahead of SpaceX’s initial public offering. And no, we’re not talking about competition for Elon Musk’s company from Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, the United Launch Alliance joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, or Rocket Labs.Fund companies are gearing up to promote their space-themed exchange-traded funds.

But only one of them actually has pre-IPO access to SpaceX.That, according to data from Moringstar, would be the Tema Space Innovators ETF, which just launched (sorry) at the end of March. The actively managed fund, which trades under the ticker symbol of NASA, has exposure to SpaceX through a special purpose vehicle (SPV), a pool that purchases privately held shares.The fund’s SpaceX exposure is its largest holding, accounting for 11.1% of its assets.

NASA also owns Rocket Lab, Planet Labs and Firefly Aerospace, which went public last August, as top holdings. The fund is up more than 25% from where it finished its first day of trading on March 31.

So investors are clearly buying into the excitement surrounding SpaceX’s IPO, as well as the space economy in general.“You can’t have a space ETF without SpaceX. It’s like having a semiconductor ETF without Nvidia,” said Yuri Khodjamirian, chief investment officer of Tema ETFs in an interview with Barron’s.

“We thought it was worth getting a private stake before the IPO.”SpaceX is a pre-IPO holding in three other ETFs, according to Morningstar: the ERShares Private-Public Crossover ETF, Ron Baron’s Baron First Principles ETF, and the KraneShares Artificial Intelligence and Technology ETF. But none of them are pure play space funds like NASA.But other space-themed funds, despite their current lack of SpaceX