A team of aviation experts and venture capitalists are shuttling public investors behind the closed doors of Hawthorne’s booming space tech sector.

Investment platform FutureCorp, founded by former staffers at Space Exploration Technologies Corp., xAI, Palantir Technologies Inc. and Surf Air Mobility Corp., hopes to bridge public markets with the “new space economy.” Its first publicly listed vehicle, a special purpose acquisition company that’ll take a high-growth, late-stage firm public within two years, made its Wall Street debut earlier this month.

“We believe that companies should go public or have exposure to public market investors sooner rather than later,” said Sudhin Shahani, FutureCorp chairman and co-founder of Surf Air, a Hawthorne-based commuter air service and charter operator. “That’s where, in the past, a lot of great innovation has happened.”

While initial public offerings are roaring back this year after three sluggish years, a trend well-captured by SpaceX’s recent blockbuster IPO, companies today tend to stay private for longer. With an aerospace-dominated “industrial revolution” underway, FutureCorp wants to take industrial space firms’ massive value creation public, Shahani said.

“We see an opportunity where, given what an amazing job SpaceX has done in reducing launch costs, there’s a whole new wave of industrial space companies that are coming next and are doing really exciting things,” he said.

The platform priced the IPO for its first vehicle, FutureCorp Space Acquisition 1, at $200 in gross proceeds, and rang the New York Stock Exchange bell June 5 to celebrate the start of trading under the ticker FTRA. 

SPACs return after bust

SPACs fell out of favor in 2022 when the previous year’s blank-check company boom collapsed, leaving a trail of broken deals and millions of investor losses in its wake. The vehicles, which arrange reverse mergers to take companies public, are making a comeback amid rebounding IPO activity and investor attention.

So far this year, 44 SPAC mergers have been announced, worth a collective $36.9 billion, Deologic data shows. That’s up from 33 deals, worth $15 billion at the same point in 2025. 

Though FutureCorp is also exploring other vehicle types for future debuts, the industrial space sector is a good fit for SPACs, given firms’ proven government contracts, growth milestones and defensible long-term vision, Shahani said. The last cycle’s SPAC bust boiled down to an overconcentration of low-quality promoters backing unsuccessful companies, he said. 

“There suddenly was this moment of this massive flood of SPACS and not enough high-quality companies,” he said. “A lot of companies that just didn’t deserve to go public would try to be taken public by these promoters. It wasn’t the failure of the SPAC as a produce; it was a failure of the companies being chosen.”

FutureCorp Space Acquisition 1’s pick will be a late-stage firm that could, in theory, pursue a traditional IPO, but would take the SPAC route to raise more capital faster, Shahani said. 

While SPACs can be risky, and swaths of investors were burned by promoters who “sold the destination but did not deliver,” University of Southern California computer science professor and senior technology executive Mahdi Eslamimehr said FutureCorp carries promise. Appetite is strong among public and private investors wanting in on the next SpaceX before it goes public, he said.

“Everyone wants to put their hands on some space company,” Eslamimehr said.