SpaceX Faces Dual-Orbit Gauntlet: Starship's Live Starlink Drop and a Defense Launch Collide With Stock at Year Lows
Published on 07/16/2026 at 18:05 | Redaktion boerse-global.de
SpaceX is running two missions on Thursday, yet the stock can barely lift off its floor. The company's Starship Super Heavy is targeting a 90-minute launch window from Starbase, Texas, beginning at 6:45 p.m. ET for its thirteenth test flight, while a Falcon 9 rocket simultaneously lifts off from California carrying 21 communications satellites for the U.S. Space Development Agency. The pairing of a high-stakes developmental flight with a routine government contract underscores the breadth of SpaceX's operations — but investors are focused squarely on the balance sheet.
Shares closed Wednesday at €117.82, hovering just above a 52-week low of €115.70 set the previous day. Thursday's session saw the stock nudge up to €118.00, a gain of roughly two percent from the trough, yet the recovery remains tentative. Over the past 30 days, the equity has shed more than 32 percent of its value, extending a slide that began shortly after the IPO in June 2026. The issue price of $135 soared to a high of $174 in secondary trading, pushing the market cap to nearly $1.77 trillion. Today, the company is valued at roughly €1.675 trillion.
The sell-off is colliding with a looming supply of shares. Early investors and employees will be able to sell stock worth roughly $123 billion starting in August, adding a layer of technical pressure that the market has already begun pricing in. Annualized volatility stands at 93.65 percent, a stark measure of how jittery sentiment has become.
Inside the company, the narrative is more nuanced. The core launch business is humming: Falcon 9 rockets have set a blistering pace, and Thursday's mission for the Space Development Agency — a contract under the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture — demonstrates the steady stream of defense revenue that underpins the franchise. Starlink, meanwhile, is moving from deployment to direct revenue generation. The 20 Starlink V3 satellites aboard Starship are no mass simulators; they are production-grade units with advanced laser links designed to plug into the existing constellation and expand capacity.
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Yet the speculative valuation of the broader enterprise remains deeply contested. Morningstar pegs fair value at just $780 billion, arguing that the moonshot priced into current levels is unwarranted. Raymond James counters with a "Strong Buy" rating and sees a potential sixfold gain from here, citing what analyst Brian Gesuale calls an increasing "operational cadence." Citigroup, more measured, sets a long-term target of $900, leaning on Starlink's network effects and SpaceX's dominance in commercial launches. The gulf between these views is unusually wide, reflecting the difficulty of pricing a company that straddles rocketry, satellite telecommunications and artificial intelligence — the latter courtesy of the xAI acquisition completed in February 2026.
xAI, built on the Grok model and the Colossus data centers, generates most of its revenue from subscriptions and compute rental. Yet its market share hovers at roughly five percent, far behind ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. SpaceX overall lost nearly $5 billion last year, and Morgan Stanley's model does not project positive free cash flow until 2035.
The Starship test that unfolds this evening is therefore as much a credibility exercise as an engineering milestone. Flight 12 ended in failure in May when the Super Heavy booster was lost during descent. The FAA completed its investigation on Monday, attributing the loss to heat damage on propulsion components and improperly calibrated engine alarms. SpaceX's own analysis pointed to minor deviations in engine start timing that rotated the booster off course. The company has since modified the ignition sequence and added hardware upgrades to improve Raptor engine reliability during re-light and landing.
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Thursday's flight plan calls for the upper stage to deploy 20 Starlink V3 satellites, relight a single Raptor engine in orbit, and execute a controlled reentry with a splashdown in the Indian Ocean. The booster will attempt a targeted water landing in the Gulf of Mexico. If successful, the 55-day gap between Flights 12 and 13 — four times faster than the interval between the two prior flights — would mark a significant acceleration in the test program's pace.
That tempo is the optimists' best argument. The skeptics, however, point to the arithmetic: a $5 billion annual loss, a stock that has already halved from its peak, and a balance sheet that won't generate free cash for a decade. Between today's dual launches and the first quarterly earnings report, expected in August, SpaceX will need to prove it can turn technical progress into financial conviction. The test window is 90 minutes long; the market's patience may be shorter.
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