2 Aerospace Stocks to Buy and Hold for the Next 20 Years

The article is constructive on Rocket Lab and Joby Aviation, highlighting expected revenue growth through 2028: Rocket Lab from $602 million to $1.53 billion and Joby from $53 million to $458 million. Rocket Lab is preparing to launch its Neutron rocket later this year, while Joby is still pre-commercial but is backed by Toyota, Delta, and Uber and has a large projected eVTOL market tailwind. The piece is mostly a long-term bullish stock pitch rather than a near-term catalyst.

Analysis

The market is implicitly treating both names as long-duration optionality, but the more interesting setup is in the second-order beneficiaries and bottlenecks. If orbital launch cadence and eVTOL commercialization both inflect, the winners are likely to be the less glamorous picks-and-shovels: avionics, composite materials, battery suppliers, ground infrastructure, and regulatory/compliance software. That matters because the margin capture in these industries typically sits upstream and tends to arrive 12-24 months before the headline OEM revenue ramps.

RKLB’s upside is less about launch count and more about whether it can become mission-critical infrastructure for small-sat deployment and in-space services before larger players compress pricing. The risk is not demand destruction but execution dilution: every program delay or propulsion issue extends cash burn while the valuation remains anchored to future revenue that can slip one or two years without warning. If Neutron slips, the stock likely de-rates faster than fundamentals because the market is paying for a near-term credibility bridge, not just a distant TAM.

JOBY is a classic commercialization-timing trade: the equity can work well before unit economics are obvious, but only if route-level utilization and certification milestones arrive in sequence. The consensus is likely underappreciating how thin the moat may be if large aerospace incumbents or helicopter operators pivot quickly once the regulatory path is proven; the real edge is not airframe design alone, but network access, fleet operations, and airport/heliport integration. That creates a setup where the first meaningful revenue inflection can be strong, but the durable winner may be the platform with distribution, not the best aircraft.

Relative to the article’s optimism, the cleaner risk/reward may be in a barbell: own the higher-conviction enabler names while using RKLB and JOBY as smaller asymmetry trades around catalyst windows. Over the next 3-12 months, the key question is not whether these markets exist, but whether milestones come fast enough to avoid repeated equity raises or narrative fatigue. If execution stays on schedule, both can rerate; if not, the downside is a multi-quarter compression in multiples before fundamentals catch up.

Key Decisions for Investors

• Long RKLB into catalyst windows only, sized as a 1-2% portfolio position; target a 12-18 month horizon with asymmetric upside if Neutron and backlog conversion de-risk, but cut quickly on any launch-delay or guidance reset.
• Long JOBY as a smaller, staged position ahead of commercialization milestones; prefer adding on weakness rather than strength, since the stock is vulnerable to timeline slippage and repeated capital-raise risk over the next 6-12 months.
• Pair trade: long aerospace/urban-mobility enablers and infrastructure names versus short high-multiple OEM exposure if it becomes available; the thesis is that the first durable monetization accrues to suppliers and network operators, not pure-play platforms.
• Use call spreads rather than stock in RKLB/JOBY if expressing upside over the next 3-9 months; this caps downside from execution risk while preserving convexity around certification and launch milestones.
• Monitor for secondary beneficiaries in BKSY/DAL/UBER only as distribution and routing proxies; if commercial adoption accelerates, these names may monetize earlier than the OEMs, offering lower-risk exposure to the same adoption curve.