SpaceX pulled off its smoothest Starship test flight to date on Friday, yet the stock still closed in the red — a stark reminder that technical milestones alone aren’t moving the needle for investors right now.
Shares ended the session at €101.18, down 2.6%, just hours after the company’s 13th integrated test flight of the Starship and Super Heavy booster system. The disconnect between operational progress and market reaction has become a defining feature of SpaceX’s early public trading life, with the stock now sitting barely 3.7% above its 52-week low of €97.54 set on July 23.
The flight itself delivered genuine advances. All 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster ignited cleanly at liftoff — a marked improvement over the previous attempt a week earlier, when several engines failed to fire and forced a last-second abort. The upper Starship stage completed its full burn, deployed 20 next-generation Starlink V3 satellites, and executed what SpaceX’s Dan Huot described as the softest water landing the program has seen, touching down in the Indian Ocean after roughly an hour.
The booster’s return, however, fell short. As it attempted to relight 13 engines for a controlled landing over the Gulf of Mexico, many failed to ignite, and the vehicle came in faster than planned. SpaceX still dubbed the mission “Lucky Number 13,” a nod to both the flight count and the 13 booster engines that did fire during the descent attempt.
For the satellite business, the flight marked a first: the newly deployed Starlink V3 units communicated via laser links with older models already in orbit. Six of the satellites carried cameras to photograph Starship’s heat shield during reentry. SpaceX now operates more than 10,000 active Starlinks, the world’s largest satellite constellation, though the 20 test units from this flight burned up in the atmosphere as planned after about 20 minutes.
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NASA watched closely. The agency needs Starship ready as a lunar lander for the Artemis III mission, currently penciled in for 2028. Administrator Jared Isaacman called the flight a game-changer for the moon return effort. But a Government Accountability Office report has already flagged that SpaceX is more than a year behind schedule on the lander program, with unresolved risks around in-orbit transfer of cryogenic fuel.
The stock’s slide has been relentless. Over the past 30 days, shares have lost 25.7%, and the seven-day decline stands at 6.6%. From a June record of €194.46, the stock has nearly halved. The RSI of 33.9 points to oversold territory, while annualized volatility of 67% underscores just how choppy trading has become.
Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas, who maintains a $300 price target, argues that at $100, the market is effectively assigning zero value to SpaceX’s AI business — despite the company’s roughly $1.25 trillion valuation following its merger with xAI in February. He points to data-center contracts with Google and Anthropic worth a combined $26 billion annually. Yet he also acknowledges that xAI posted a $6.4 billion loss on $3.2 billion in revenue in 2025, and burned $7.7 billion in capital spending in the first quarter of 2026 alone. Wall Street Zen downgraded the stock from Hold to Sell on Friday, though the broader analyst consensus remains a Moderate Buy with an average target of $230.50.
Two events now dominate the near-term outlook for investors. On August 4, SpaceX will report its first quarterly earnings since going public. The following day, the lock-up period expires on roughly 911.5 million insider shares — a potential flood of supply that could pressure the stock further. Both events land almost simultaneously, and together they are likely to keep volatility elevated.
Meanwhile, SpaceX is doubling down on Starship. The company has reportedly stopped accepting new Falcon 9 rideshare bookings for launches after 2028, freeing up capacity and capital to focus entirely on the mega-rocket. That bet now rests on whether SpaceX can string together multiple clean flights — and finally solve the booster landing problem that has dogged the program — before the Artemis timeline forces harder questions from both NASA and the market.
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