Viasat Inc. (NASDAQ: VSAT)

• Deutsche Bank – Buy – $97 (raised from $48)
• Raymond James – Outperform – $93 (raised from $74)
• B. Riley Securities – Buy – $106 (raised from $94)
• Needham – Buy – $90 (raised from $58)
• TipRanks Consensus (9 analysts) – Strong Buy – Avg. target $95.29

SpaceX went public today.

Ticker SPCX. $135 per share. $1.77 trillion valuation. $75 billion raised. Those numbers are not typos. That is now the largest IPO in recorded market history, and it happened this morning on the Nasdaq. SpaceX pulled in $18.7 billion in revenue last year and still posted a net operating loss of $4.2 billion. The market priced it at roughly 94x revenue anyway. Nobody in institutional equity is pretending that math is conventional. What they are doing instead is asking what comes next, meaning which publicly traded, revenue-generating space infrastructure names now look interesting by comparison.

That question keeps landing on Viasat.

Here is where I want to be careful, because Viasat is not SpaceX and it is not trying to be. It does not have Starlink’s subscriber flywheel or Starship’s long-term optionality. What it has is something different and arguably more legible right now: a completed global satellite constellation, $4.64 billion in fiscal year 2026 revenue (a record, up from $4.52 billion the prior year), five consecutive quarters of positive free cash flow, contracted airline and maritime customers across six continents, and a defense segment that just hit record contract awards. It is a real operating business. That distinction matters more than it sounds when institutional capital is trying to find liquid exposure to space infrastructure that does not require betting on a 10-year growth curve.

The aviation side of the business is worth understanding in some detail. Viasat ended FY2026 with 6,550 commercial and business aviation aircraft in service. American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, and KLM all launched full free Wi-Fi programs powered by Viasat hardware and capacity. The 1,000th aircraft entered service on the SwiftBroadband-Safety certified safety communications platform. Revenue per aircraft grew year-over-year. STARLUX in Asia Pacific added to the commercial airline base. This is not a pipeline. These are active, contracted, flying customers.

Slight tangent, but it matters: orbital slot regulations are genuinely hard to replicate. A new entrant cannot simply decide to compete in geostationary broadband. The spectrum positions Viasat holds through Inmarsat are regulated, internationally coordinated, and in some cases irreplaceable. Raymond James has estimated the spectrum portfolio alone at approximately $16 billion in value, excluding portions leased to AST SpaceMobile and Ligado. That is nearly double the company’s current market cap. Whether the market ever reflects that in the stock price is a real question, but it changes how you think about downside.

On the maritime side, NexusWave ended the fiscal year with 1,350 vessels in service and 1,500 more in backlog. NexusWave is Viasat’s bonded multi-orbit connectivity service, combining GEO Ka-band, LEO, LTE, and L-band into a single managed solution. The VS60 terminal hit 250 Mbps in sea trials. Evergreen Marine, Taiwan’s largest container line, and EXMAR Gas Carriers have both committed to full fleetwide rollouts. The pitch to fleet operators is straightforward: one provider, lower total cost, better performance than running multiple separate connectivity contracts.

The constellation itself is almost complete. ViaSat-3 Flight 2 launched in November 2025 covering the Americas. Flight 3 launched April 2026 covering Asia-Pacific and is expected to enter commercial service in August or September 2026. Each satellite carries more bandwidth capacity than Viasat’s entire prior fleet combined, with more than 1,000 steerable spot beams per bird. The capacity ceiling that has limited revenue growth for the past two years gets removed when these satellites go live. Management guided FY2027 free cash flow at approximately $180 million, supported by a $4.07 billion contract backlog, up 15% year over year.

What’s interesting is the defense segment does not get talked about enough in the VSAT conversation. Q4 FY2026 defense revenue grew 12% year over year. Record contract awards of $580 million in information security and cyber defense. On June 11, Viasat won a prime contract from the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command to build and launch satellites for a proliferated fleet. The company also landed part of a combined $437.7 million U.S. Air Force delivery contract alongside Intelsat General Communications. That is a segment that is accelerating, not holding steady.

The balance sheet is the honest complication here. Net debt stood at $4.84 billion as of March 31, 2026, down from $5.59 billion a year earlier. The company retired $442.6 million in senior notes and paid off the remaining $300 million Inmarsat term loan ahead of maturity. Adjusted EBITDA hit a record $1.55 billion. The net loss narrowed to $34.1 million. Liquidity at year end was $2.9 billion. The direction is right. The pace is the part worth watching.

Nine analysts. Strong Buy consensus. Average target $95.29. The stock is still absorbing last week’s earnings miss and elevated capital expenditure guidance of $950 million to $1 billion for FY2027. Those are not small headwinds. But the infrastructure is getting built, the customers are contracted, and the capacity that justifies the next leg of revenue growth is about to come online.

SpaceX set a benchmark today for what space infrastructure can be worth. The market will spend the next several months figuring out how to apply that to everything else in the sector. Viasat is one of the few names where that conversation has something real to work with. Where it goes from here depends on execution, and execution is the one thing nobody can model in advance.

For informational purposes only.