(SeaPRwire) – By: Oliver Hawthorne
Wall Street bought the SpaceX story hook, line, and sinker last month. The blockbuster public offering briefly pushed Elon Musk to trillionaire status. It priced the company at a trillion dollars on Starship’s promise. That promise included mass Starlink deployment, NASA lunar contracts, and low-cost space access. Now a pad abort seconds before liftoff has sent shares below IPO price. The anxiety is not about one scrubbed test flight. It stems from the gap between marketed reliability and real rocket engineering. Investors bought stakes in a finished, revenue-generating operational machine. What they hold is equity in a still-experimental test vehicle. Even expected, routine test setbacks now trigger sharp selloffs. I spoke with three public market tech traders after the news broke. All three expressed surprise at the speed of the pullback. That is the core tension hanging over every SpaceX update.
The 13th Starship test flight was scheduled for Thursday out of Texas’ Starbase site. Live streams showed smoke and vapor billowing from the booster as Raptor engines ignited. The vehicle never lifted off. An automatic abort triggered as engines failed to reach proper startup. SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot walked through the abort sequence during the live broadcast. He noted the hold activated as Raptor engines began their ignition sequence. Musk later shared updates on his X account. He traced the abort to a subset of Raptor engines that failed to start. He estimated the next launch attempt could come in a few days. The flight was meant to carry 20 next-generation Version 3 Starlink satellites to orbit. This scrub comes on the heels of May’s test flight. That flight saw the Super Heavy V3 booster explode during a simulated Gulf of Mexico landing. The upper Starship stage broke apart after splashing down in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX still declared that earlier mission a success. The company set its IPO price at $135 for last month’s record $75 billion offering. Early post-debut trading briefly made Musk the world’s first trillionaire. Trading on Friday opened with SpaceX shares at $131.11, below that IPO mark. Shares had already slid to $132.28 on Wednesday before the scrub. The pre-scrub slide tracked growing investor doubt about profit targets. Those doubts center on whether cash flow can justify the trillion-dollar price tag. SpaceX is currently locked in competition with Blue Origin. The two firms are vying to build lunar landers for NASA’s Artemis program. Artemis aims to return astronauts to the moon’s south pole in coming years. Earlier in the same week as the scrub, Russia notched a successful launch. A Soyuz-2.1a lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. It carried three crew members to the International Space Station. The roster included Russian cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina. NASA astronaut Anil Menon rounded out the crew.
Public markets do not reward iterative test failure the way private backers do. For 20 years, SpaceX raised private capital to fund rapid, explosion-prone development. Private investors celebrated every scrub, every explosion, as a useful data point. They bought into the long game of Mars and low-cost orbit access. Public investors care about quarterly numbers, contract deadlines, and predictable launch cadence. The Version 3 Starlink satellite deployment is no trivial test target. Those satellites are core to hitting 2025 and 2026 Starlink revenue targets. Every delayed launch pushes those revenue targets further out of reach. The NASA Artemis contract carries even higher stakes. NASA cannot award a crewed lunar lander contract to a vehicle with routine pad aborts. Blue Origin will lean hard on every Starship setback in its own bid pitches. The contrast with Russia’s workhorse Soyuz launch is unflattering. That decades-old rocket design delivers consistent, predictable crewed flights with little fanfare. SpaceX sold public investors a vision of a fully operational, next-generation launch system. Right now, it is charging mature-company prices for experimental test hardware. SpaceX will need six months of flawless, on-schedule launches. Only then will its trillion-dollar valuation start to align with reality.
Author bio: Oliver Hawthorne, Principal Correspondent for a global technology review, covering commercial space, capital markets, and deep tech for over a decade.