Not even the most polarised blue-chip stock on Wall Street comes close to the gulf separating SpaceX analysts today. At one end, Raymond James slaps an $800 price target and a “Strong Buy” rating, arguing the company sits on a $30 trillion addressable market. At the other, CFRA slaps a “Sell” with a target of $115 — a gap of nearly seven times that leaves the market struggling for a consensus. In between sits a cluster of bulge-bracket houses: Morgan Stanley at $300, JPMorgan at $225, Goldman Sachs at $205.
The shares themselves have been heading in only one direction. On 10 July, SpaceX closed at $145.30, a fresh all-time low since its initial public offering in June. That puts the stock a hair above its $135 IPO price and about 36% below the $226 peak it touched shortly after the listing. The decline came despite the company’s recent inclusion in the Nasdaq-100, a milestone that ordinarily provides a floor for a new stock.
What makes the current price action especially jarring is that it coincides with the most ambitious Starship test yet. Flight 13 is tentatively scheduled for 16 July at 17:45 local time from Starbase, Texas, with a 90-minute launch window. For the first time, SpaceX plans to deploy operational payload: 20 fully functional Starlink V3 satellites, six of which carry cameras to monitor the heat shield during re-entry. The satellites will make brief contact with a ground station in South Africa and other Starlink units before re-entering the atmosphere — a short but crucial demonstration of deployment capability.
The previous flight in May — Flight 12 — ended with a booster malfunction. During stage separation, slight timing discrepancies among the Raptor engines caused the Super Heavy to yaw about 90 degrees off course. Five engines failed to ignite for the landing burn, the burn cut off prematurely, and the booster did not achieve a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. SpaceX has since revised the ignition sequence for greater tolerance against timing drift, added hardware changes to improve re-ignition reliability, and adapted the engine’s alarm and abort systems to real flight conditions.
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying SpaceX?
The Federal Aviation Administration has yet to close its investigation into the Flight 12 anomaly, so the 16 July date remains provisional. If the launch proceeds, it will also serve as a heat-shield test: several tiles have been intentionally left off the spacecraft to simulate missing protection, providing reference imagery for post-flight analysis.
Beyond the technical hurdles, SpaceX faces a more terrestrial challenge. The stock’s free float is tiny — roughly 4.1% of total shares are publicly traded — and the first major lock-up expiration is set for early August, just after second-quarter earnings. Approximately 911.5 million shares, or 6.8% of the capital, could become eligible for sale at that point, with up to 10.2% eventually freed when compared with the current float. Morgan Stanley expects the floating supply to rise significantly over the rest of 2026, a prospect that is already weighing on sentiment. Investor George Noble has publicly warned that the stock is “built to separate small investors from their money,” forecasting a wave of insider selling.
Meanwhile, SpaceX is making aggressive moves outside its core rocket business. In mid-June, it agreed to acquire the code-editor developer Anysphere (Cursor) for $60 billion in stock, a deal expected to close in the third quarter. It has also leased its Colossus 1 computing cluster — equipped with 220,000 Nvidia GPUs — to Anthropic for about $1.25 billion per month through 2029. CEO Elon Musk acknowledged that Anthropic currently leads in AI model capability, just days after SpaceX released Grok 4.5, a model trained jointly with Cursor. On the launch side, the company’s CFO has stated that each Starship mission offers twenty times the capacity of a Falcon 9 flight, and some brokers project 1,500 to 5,000 Starship launches per year by 2031.
For SpaceX, Flight 13 is more than a technical milestone — it is a referendum on whether the company can turn its infrastructure ambitions into reality. A successful deployment of Starlink V3 satellites and a clean booster return would validate both the corrected stage separation and the broader Starship economics that underpin the more bullish analyst forecasts. Failure would reinforce the skepticism that has already pushed the stock to a record low. With the analyst community staring at a $685 billion valuation gap, the outcome of a single test flight in the Texas desert has never mattered more to the market’s view of the company.
Ad
SpaceX Stock: Buy or Sell?! New SpaceX Analysis from July 13 delivers the answer:
The latest SpaceX figures speak for themselves: Urgent action needed for SpaceX investors. Is it worth buying or should you sell? Find out what to do now in the current free analysis from July 13.
SpaceX: Buy or sell? Read more here...
