WASHINGTON, June 11 (Reuters) - Even before going public, Elon Musk's SpaceX has become a household name in America - more widely recognized than legacy Apollo-era companies and even prominent 2028 presidential hopefuls, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.

For the last decade, SpaceX rockets have regularly returned to ocean platforms or giant mechanical arms on the launchpad in controlled landings that resemble science fiction. The company has also disrupted the satellite internet market.

Some 84% of Americans are familiar with the company, according to the six-day Reuters/Ipsos poll that closed on Monday. Just 13% say they have never heard of SpaceX.

That's on par with Boeing, a 110-year-old company whose planes transport hundreds of millions of passengers annually that 14% of respondents said they had never heard of -- and far more than B-2 stealth bomber maker Northrop Grumman, unknown to half the poll respondents.

It also trumped well-known public figures, including Republican Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who one in five respondents had not heard of, and Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom, unknown to one in four respondents. Both are seen as strong contenders for the White House in 2028.

SPACE PROGRAM

America's storied space program has come to rely heavily on SpaceX, the only U.S. entity capable of sending astronauts to the International Space Station. It's also building a key astronaut moon lander for NASA, launching most of the Pentagon's satellites to space, and wooing the U.S. military and intelligence agencies with its vast satellite networks Starlink and Starshield.

SpaceX hopes to cash in on its fame in its stock offering, reportedly reserving up to 30% of the initial stock sales for retail investors - far more than the usual 5% to 10%. The new shares are expected to be priced on Thursday, with the offering potentially valuing the company at well over $1 trillion even though it has recently been losing money. 

Some 29% of poll respondents said they would likely buy stock in SpaceX if it were available to them. That doesn't mean a third of the country will rush out to buy the shares. The Federal Reserve estimates only a fifth of households own any individual stocks directly, and many of those holdings are employer-stock related.

SpaceX is also somewhat polarizing for Americans who associate the company with its CEO, Musk, a billionaire who played a major role in the early months of Republican President Donald Trump's second term. Some 74% of Republicans in the Reuters/Ipsos poll said they had a favorable view of SpaceX, compared to 32% of Democrats and 49% of Americans overall. Musk's own favorability rating, at 34%, was a touch below Trump's own rating.

U.S. space agency NASA had an 80% favorability rating, although respondents were more divided about crewed space exploration, with 38% saying the costs of NASA sending people to space outweigh the benefits and 58% saying the effort is worth it.

Some also have reservations about the commercialization of space, with 33% of poll respondents saying they oppose the goal of several private companies to mine resources on the moon. Another 24% support the idea, which is among SpaceX's long-term business plans, and 41% said they neither supported nor opposed it.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online and gathered responses from 4,531 U.S. adults nationwide. Its results had a margin of error of 2 percentage points in either direction.