AST SpaceMobile (ASTS -7.13%) stock posted big gains in Friday's trading. The company's share price ended the day up 12.5% and had been up as much as 13.9% earlier in the daily session. The S&P 500 index closed out the day up roughly 0.2%, and the Nasdaq Composite index ended the day up 0.8%.
AST SpaceMobile stock gained ground today as investors reacted to President-elect Trump's selection of Jared Isaacman to head NASA. The pick has investors feeling even more bullish about the already red-hot space industry.
Trump's NASA pick pushes space stocks higher
On Thursday, president-elect Trump nominated Jared Isaacman to lead NASA under his incoming administration. Isaacman has accepted Trump's nomination and said that he foresees a "thriving space economy" and hopes to make major progress on spacefaring capabilities during his anticipated tenure at NASA.
Isaacman is a tech billionaire and the CEO of Shift4 Payments and has flown on two private space flights. He is also an associate of Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. The pick is being broadly interpreted as a sign that the Trump administration will be supportive of space commercialization efforts and that NASA will expand on its already strengthening relationships with private-sector service providers.
Is Musk's influence in the new Trump administration a risk for AST SpaceMobile?
Elon Musk's SpaceX company has already been becoming an increasingly central partner and service provider for NASA, and the tech executive is poised to have even greater influence under the incoming Trump administration. As a provider of satellite-based telecommunications services through its Starlink platform, SpaceX is a competitor of AST SpaceMobile. However, Musk's influence and the appointment of Jared Isaacman as head of NASA could actually wind up being a net benefit for AST.
There's room for more than one winner in the space-based telecom category, and increased space-commercialization efforts are likely to benefit early leaders in the category. While it's far too early to bake in major performance improvements due to the incoming presidential administration, new NASA leadership, and other politically adjacent factors, the overall operating backdrop appears to be shifting in ways that have the potential to be bullish catalysts for AST stock.
