SHANGHAI, June 13 -- A wave of Chinese private space companies is moving simultaneously toward public listings on Shanghai's STAR market and the Hong Kong stock exchange, in the immediate slipstream of Elon Musk's record-breaking SpaceX flotation. LandSpace, the Beijing-headquartered launch group whose Shanghai application was accepted in late December for a 7.5 billion yuan offering, is the furthest along. Behind it stand Galactic Energy, Space Pioneer, i-Space, CAS Space and several smaller specialists, all of which have either filed for IPO tutoring with mainland regulators or, in two cases, opened parallel files with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

The catalyst was political as much as financial. Beijing widened the STAR market's listi...