Seraphim New Space UCITS ETF: SPCE ETF: Own the New Space Era

Many funds with "space" in the name are really aerospace-and-defence portfolios. They lean on large, established defence contractors, and often include companies with only loose ties to space, so investors end up with only a fraction of their money in the businesses actually driving the New Space boom. SPCE is a genuine pure-play. To be included, a company must earn a substantial share of its revenue or strategy from space, measured rather than assumed, across launch and access, connectivity, Earth observation, enabling technologies and the emerging in-space economy.

For an investor who wants direct exposure to the space economy rather than a repackaged industrials fund, that focus is exactly what sets SPCE apart. Unusually for an ETF, the design also allows a small slice, around 10%, in private space companies, and the index holds Seraphim's own trust, SSIT, which adds further indirect exposure to privately held names.

The space economy is predicted to be $1.8 trillion by 2035, according to the World Economic Forum. Three forces are driving it there. Reusable rockets and cheaper components have driven launch costs down sharply, letting companies deploy fleets of small satellites and turn space into everyday digital infrastructure for connectivity, imagery and navigation. AI and cheap computing are making the vast data those satellites produce far more valuable, opening up new commercial markets. And a global rearmament cycle, such as Europe's push for strategic autonomy, NATO spending targets and the US "Golden Dome", is funnelling further money into the industry.

Because so many space businesses are dual-use, SPCE's holdings can draw on all three engines at once. The result is one of the defining industrial booms of the coming decades.

SPCE is issued and managed by HANetf, Europe's first independent white-label UCITS ETF platform, which provides the fund's structure, listing and market-making. What it tracks is the work of Seraphim, a leading name in space investing. Seraphim launched the world's first space venture fund in 2016 and the first listed space fund, SSIT, in 2021, and has backed more than 150 companies across 33 countries, producing ten billion-dollar "unicorns" and six stock-market listings.

Seraphim invests across the full lifecycle, from accelerator and venture through to public markets, and that vantage point shapes the index. Rather than following a standard market index, the fund is built on the Seraphim New Space Index, constructed using Seraphim's own scoring system. Companies are screened to confirm they are genuine space businesses, then ranked on space revenue, technology leadership, business quality and growth. Holdings are weighted by conviction rather than size, and the index is designed to add promising new names soon after they list.

• Capturing new IPOs: With the space IPO window reopening after SpaceX, proving the fund's ability to add fresh listings will be a strong early sign.
  
  

• Fund scale and liquidity: Growing assets under management would tighten spreads, lower costs and signal the fund is establishing itself with investors.

• The defence spending cycle: European rearmament, NATO targets and sovereign space programmes turning into contracts for the fund's constituents.
  
  

• Big tech in orbit: Compute, cloud and AI infrastructure moving into space, a theme Seraphim expects to define the sector's next phase.

• The march toward $1.8 trillion: Broad, structural growth in the space economy lifting the sector as a whole through the next decade.
  
  

• More of private space going public: As Seraphim-tracked names list, the investable New Space universe deepens and the index has more to choose from.

A pure-play New Space basket is, by design, narrow, and many of its holdings are young companies still scaling toward profitability. Their valuations often rest on future potential rather than today's earnings, which makes for sharp moves in both directions, and the whole basket can swing on shifts in market sentiment. Capital is fully at risk, and returns may be volatile from one period to the next. Because the fund is also priced in US dollars, sterling investors take on currency risk on top of the underlying share-price movements.

Much of the space sector's revenue is tied to government and defence contracts, which makes the fund sensitive to political and policy shifts. A change in defence budgets, tighter export controls, disputes over spectrum, or a single high-profile launch failure can move the whole sector quickly. These are pressures the companies themselves cannot fully control, and because SPCE leans toward businesses with heavy government exposure, they feed directly through to the fund. Changing priorities between administrations, at home and abroad, can add a further layer of uncertainty.

SPCE is a new vehicle tracking a proprietary index that has yet to be tested in live markets, and it arrives without a track record of its own. Like any new ETF, it starts small, and until it grows its shares may trade with wider spreads, meaning slightly higher costs to buy and sell. Space is also an increasingly crowded corner of the ETF market, and funds that fail to attract enough assets are sometimes closed by their provider; that would not cost investors their capital, since holdings are returned at their market value, but it could force an exit at an inconvenient time. For UK and European investors, one point in SPCE's favour is that it offers pure-play New Space exposure in a regulated, London-listed fund, where much of the established competition is US-listed and less easily accessed.