--- id: "spaceship" kind: "glossary-term" title: "Spaceship" language: "en" category: "Industry roles and organizations" updated: "2026-10-19T12:33:47Z" canonical: "https://tldlog.com/glossary/spaceship/" translations: es: "https://tldlog.com/es/glosario/spaceship/" de: "https://tldlog.com/de/glossar/spaceship/" fr: "https://tldlog.com/fr/glossaire/spaceship/" it: "https://tldlog.com/it/glossario/spaceship/" pt-BR: "https://tldlog.com/pt/glossario/spaceship/" ru: "https://tldlog.com/ru/glossariy/spaceship/" zh-Hans: "https://tldlog.com/zh/cihui/spaceship/" --- # Spaceship Spaceship, Inc. is an American domain registrar accredited by ICANN, with IANA registrar ID 3862. It sells domain registrations to the public. In a 2024 filing, Namecheap described "the Namecheap family (Namecheap and Spaceship)". On 15 October 2026 Namecheap's founder, Richard Kirkendall, announced that Spaceship would sell domains at cost from then on, renewals included. Spaceship is a company that registers domain names for its customers. As of October 2026, ICANN, the organization that coordinates domain names, accredits it as a registrar, and IANA lists it as Spaceship, Inc. with registrar ID 3862. In a filing of 13 September 2024, Namecheap, another registrar, described Spaceship as part of the "Namecheap family". ## What Spaceship is As of October 2026, IANA's registry of registrar IDs lists Spaceship, Inc. under ID 3862 with the status "Accredited". As of October 2026, ICANN's list of accredited registrars shows the same name and number, gives the United States of America as its country and `www.spaceship.com` as its website. IANA's registry entry for ID 3862 is dated 27 August 2020. IANA does not say what that date stands for, so it should not be read as the accreditation date. As of October 2026, the company's own domain, spaceship.com, is registered through its own accreditation, with ID 3862. ## Its role in the domain system Spaceship is a registrar, not a registry. A registry runs a top-level domain such as .com; a registrar takes registrations from customers and records them with the registry. Accredited registrars are bound to ICANN by the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA). As of October 2026, IANA lists an RDAP service for Spaceship at rdap.spaceship.com. Its terms notice refers to Spaceship as an "ICANN-accredited registrar". ## What the records show over time ICANN publishes monthly reports from the .com registry operator, Verisign, with the number of .com domains each registrar sponsors, three months after the end of the month they cover. They show activity in .com only, not when Spaceship was accredited or launched. Spaceship first appears in the report for April 2021, with 2 .com domains. In the reports checked, it sponsored 160 at the end of December 2022 and 256 at the end of March 2023, then rose quickly: 2,333 in April 2023 and 14,574 in May 2023. At the end of June it sponsored: - 2023: 26,574 .com domains - 2024: 330,264 - 2025: 986,174 - 2026: 2,029,905 As of October 2026, June 2026 is the latest month ICANN has published. ## Relationship to Namecheap On 13 September 2024, Namecheap filed a request for an Independent Review Process (IRP) against ICANN. In it, Namecheap wrote of "the Namecheap family (Namecheap and Spaceship)" and gave that family "over 20 million domains under management", counting generic and country-code domains together. This is Namecheap's own description, made as a party to a dispute. The filing does not say whether Spaceship is a subsidiary, a parent or a sister company, and Spaceship was not a party to the review. As of October 2026, IANA and ICANN list the two as separate registrars: Namecheap, Inc. has IANA ID 1068 and its own RDAP service. Neither record states an ownership link. ## What it offers As an accredited registrar, Spaceship registers domain names for its customers. As of October 2026, its public API documentation also covers renewals, transfers, nameservers and DNS records. It names three other services. SellerHub lists domains for sale, with a checkout link through which a buyer can purchase a listed domain. SafePay handles escrow transactions. Hyperlift hosts applications. The list of top-level domains it offers is not described here, because no primary record covering it could be checked. ## How to check the registrar of record The registrar of record is the accredited company that holds a registration at the registry. It may differ from the brand a customer bought from, for example when a reseller sold the name. For a .com name such as example.com: 1. An RDAP lookup at the registry (for .com, Verisign's public lookup service) returns the record. 2. Its registrar section gives the registrar's name and IANA registrar ID. 3. The ID can be matched against IANA's registry of registrar IDs. As of October 2026, the record for spaceship.com shows ID 3862 and the name Spaceship, Inc. ID 1068 would point to Namecheap, Inc. instead. ## How it differs from related companies - Namecheap, Inc. is a separate accredited registrar with its own ID and RDAP service, although Namecheap describes both as one "family". - Verisign operates the .com registry; Spaceship is one of the registrars that sponsor .com names. ## Sources - [Registrar IDs (IANA registry)](https://www.iana.org/assignments/registrar-ids/registrar-ids.xhtml) - [Registrar IDs, XML version (IANA registry)](https://www.iana.org/assignments/registrar-ids/registrar-ids.xml) - [List of Accredited Registrars (ICANN)](https://www.icann.org/en/contracted-parties/accredited-registrars/list-of-accredited-registrars) - [RDAP record of spaceship.com (Verisign, .com registry)](https://rdap.verisign.com/com/v1/domain/spaceship.com) - [RDAP record of spaceship.com (Spaceship's own RDAP service)](https://rdap.spaceship.com/domain/spaceship.com) - [Monthly Registry Reports (ICANN)](https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/registry-reports) - [Request for Independent Review Process, Namecheap v. ICANN (second IRP)](https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/irp-namecheap-claimant-request-redacted-13sep24-en.pdf) - [Spaceship public API documentation](https://docs.spaceship.dev/) ## related terms - [registrar](https://tldlog.com/glossary/registrar/) - [retail registrar](https://tldlog.com/glossary/retail-registrar/) - [Namecheap](https://tldlog.com/glossary/namecheap/) - [DUM](https://tldlog.com/glossary/domains-under-management/) - [RAA](https://tldlog.com/glossary/raa/) - [at-cost pricing](https://tldlog.com/glossary/at-cost-pricing/)