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Nine days ago, we wrote "#12: Godspeed, Artemis." Four astronauts — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen — were strapped into the Orion capsule at Kennedy Space Center about to become the first humans beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972.

We ended that article with: "We'll be here when they get back."

At 5:07 PM Pacific today, the Orion spacecraft Integrity hit the Pacific Ocean southwest of San Diego. USS John P. Murtha fished them out. They'd traveled 694,481 miles, set a new human distance record at 252,756 miles from Earth — breaking Apollo 13's 54-year record — and became the first humans beyond low Earth orbit in over half a century.

Welcome home.

Now let's check what the money did while they were gone.

The Positions

In "Godspeed," we noted that Tauntaun was already positioned in aerospace and defense before the launch. Nobody told the system about Artemis. The signals — macro data, sector momentum, geopolitical risk — pointed there independently.

Here's where those positions stood at launch, and where they are now:

XAR and ITA nearly doubled their gains while the crew was in space. URA (Uranium) wasn't in the portfolio at launch — it is now, and it's our best-performing position at +7.5%. Our top 4 positions by dollar P&L are URA, XAR, GLD, and ITA. Three of those four are directly tied to aerospace, defense, and energy infrastructure.

The system didn't know Artemis was happening. It still doesn't. It just reads the same signals the smart money does: government spending trends, defense budget certainty, geopolitical risk premiums. The moon mission is a symptom. The spending is the cause.

What the Smart Money Is Already Betting On Next

While four astronauts were floating back to Earth, the prediction markets were doing what prediction markets do — pricing in the next thing.

Our ORALE swarm tracker lit up this week with SpaceX IPO signals. The apex wallets aren't just betting on whether SpaceX goes public — they're betting on the ticker symbol:

SpaceX filed for a confidential IPO earlier this month. Expected in June. Potential valuation north of $1.75 trillion. The Tema Space Innovators ETF — ticker: NASA, you can't make this up — launched the same day as Artemis II and is up nearly 20% since. Rocket Lab, Intuitive Machines, AST SpaceMobile, and Planet Labs all rallied alongside the mission.

The Artemis II splashdown isn't the end of the space trade. It's the warm-up act.

The Bigger Picture

Here's what's interesting about today. While the astronauts were splashing down in the Pacific, we were simultaneously tracking:

• Iran ceasefire signals — yesterday's "The Insiders" showed apex wallets expecting the ceasefire to break down by April 21
• Fed rate cut positioning — 6 apex wallets on a June 2026 rate cut
• Crude oil uncertainty — our USO position is down -7.6%, the swarm is split on Hormuz
• SpaceX IPO hype — ticker betting, institutional demand building

Four completely different stories. One portfolio. Tauntaun doesn't care about narratives — it reads signals from FRED data, prediction markets, news sentiment, credit spreads, Google Trends, foreign markets, options flow, RSS feeds, and a game theory professor in Beijing. When those signals converge on aerospace and defense, it buys aerospace and defense. When they converge on gold, it buys gold. It doesn't know why. It just knows where.

Thirteen days in. Twenty positions. Down $125 (-0.13%) overall because our energy longs got hammered by ceasefire speculation. But the defense thesis is holding. The space thesis is building. And the next catalyst — SpaceX IPO in June — is already showing up in the prediction markets two months early.

The crew is home. The portfolio is positioned. And the smart money is already looking up.