Market News: U.S. Stocks Open Higher as SpaceX Goes Public — Virgin Galactic Crashes 14% While Rocket Lab Gains

US equity markets opened higher on Friday June 12 as SpaceX began trading on Nasdaq, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average rising 0.59% and the S&P 500 up 0.2%, while the Nasdaq Composite was nearly flat.Space sector: a tale of two reactionsSpaceX's historic public debut produced sharply divergent reactions among related space stocks. Rocket Lab rose 1.5% on the day — a modest positive move that suggests some sympathy buying or sector rotation toward smaller space companies as attention focused on the largest IPO in history.Virgin Galactic, by contrast, fell sharply by 14% — a dramatic decline that may reflect investor rotation away from the loss-making suborbital tourism company toward SpaceX as the dominant and now publicly tradable space economy investment, or simply profit-taking from investors who had been holding Virgin Galactic as a proxy for space sector exposure ahead of SpaceX's listing and are now exiting in favor of the larger, more diversified company.AI infrastructure: mixed signals continueMajor technology stocks opened relatively stable. Sharon AI fell 3.9% despite — or perhaps because of — signing a six-year computing power cooperation agreement with Nvidia. Long-term infrastructure commitments of this nature often produce near-term selling as markets digest the capital commitments and revenue recognition timelines involved, even when the underlying partnership is viewed as strategically positive.Semiconductor sector: CPO stocks extend declines, memory under pressureCo-packaged optics (CPO) concept stocks continued their recent decline. AAOI fell 2.02%, Marvell Technology dropped 4.03%, and Lumentum fell 2.95%. The continued weakness in CPO names follows the broader semiconductor sector volatility that began with Broadcom's disappointing AI chip demand forecast earlier in the week — a development that triggered the Nasdaq 100's roughly 5% single-day decline and contributed to South Korea's KOSPI suffering its largest drop since March.Memory stocks also faced pressure, with Micron Technology down 3.36% — extending the semiconductor sector's difficult week.Storage stocks buck the trendIn contrast to the broader semiconductor weakness, storage-focused stocks gained ground. Sandisk rose 1.81% and Seagate Technology climbed 3.34% — suggesting that within the technology hardware complex, investors are differentiating between AI-exposed semiconductor names facing demand uncertainty and storage providers that may benefit from the broader data infrastructure buildout regardless of near-term AI capex fluctuations.The bigger pictureFriday's mixed opening — modest gains in broad indices, a historic IPO debut, sharp divergence within the space sector, and continued semiconductor sector volatility — reflects a market still digesting multiple simultaneous narratives: the SpaceX listing's capital absorption effects, the lingering impact of Broadcom's AI demand warning, and the potential US-Iran peace deal developments that boosted futures ahead of the open. With Bitcoin trading near $63,000 and crypto markets watching closely for signs of capital rotation following the SpaceX IPO, today's equity market action across these varied sectors will be an important signal for whether risk appetite is broadening or remaining narrowly concentrated in specific themes.