SpaceX's Starship Reaches Orbit for the First Time as Texas Court Clears the Way for Expansion
Published on 10/06/2026 at 22:10 | Editorial boerse-global.de
SpaceX has paired a long-sought technical breakthrough in orbit with a legal victory on the ground, pushing its shares to EUR 153.30 — a level 24 percent above the stock's 50-day moving average of EUR 123.24.
The centerpiece of that advance came on September 28, when the company's Starship system completed its 14th test flight and reached Earth orbit for the first time, releasing 26 Starlink satellites once there. An engine failure during the ascent phase forced SpaceX to cut the mission short and steer the vehicle toward a splashdown in the Pacific north of Hawaii, but the successful payload deployment still stands as a milestone for the reusable heavy-lift program.
That the flight ended in a controlled ocean landing rather than a loss of the vehicle speaks to how far the operational playbook has matured. The test showed both the growing readiness of the rocket on which SpaceX's future space plans rest and the ability of its teams to manage unplanned system faults without losing control of the mission.
A Court Ruling Removes a Planning Hurdle in South Texas
Legal certainty arrived alongside the technical progress. A dispute over a land swap between the US government and SpaceX in southern Texas has been resolved in the company's favor, clearing away uncertainty that had hung over the build-out of the site. With the ruling in hand, SpaceX gains the planning security needed to expand the logistics infrastructure around its test and production facilities and to keep operational delays at the coast at bay.
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Three Rocket Types, Three Days
Meanwhile, the launch cadence has stayed dense across institutional and commercial customers. On October 1, a Crew-13 mission lifted off for NASA toward the International Space Station, carrying four astronauts who reached their destination after an eight-hour flight — a new US speed record, according to the AP news agency. The launch had been pushed back three weeks while engineers repaired a leak in the Dragon capsule's fuel system.
The same day, the rideshare mission Transporter-18 carried 130 payloads to orbit, among them a prototype satellite from Google for artificial intelligence applications, referred to in some reports as Project Suncatcher. A Falcon Heavy followed on Friday with a classified payload for the National Reconnaissance Office, the NROL-97 mission. According to media reports, all three of the company's currently active rocket types flew within a three-day window.
The next flight is already on the calendar: on October 8, SpaceX is set to retry a launch for the Space Development Agency's satellite network after an earlier countdown was called off before liftoff.
Starship's Next Bottleneck Is Regulatory
Scaling up the heavy-lift system over the long term depends less on flight hardware than on paperwork. The company's plans envisage as many as 76 launches and 152 landings per year at key space centers, but commercial launches and landings there require a modified operator license first. Market observers view that step as decisive for the future scaling of orbital logistics and for opening new capacity.
Public comments as part of the FAA process can be submitted until October 14, 2026. With Starship Flight 14 now in the books, attention turns to Flight 15 and the push toward full operational readiness.
Investors are watching how quickly the next generation of launch vehicles can be moved into regular service, with the interplay between regulatory progress and scheduled missions shaping how the company is currently perceived. In the markets, that busy tempo has produced a steady backdrop: the stock last changed hands at EUR 154.02, a gain of 1.0 percent.
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