SpaceX Stock Rises After 13th Starship Test -- Flight 14 Will Be Wild -- Barrons.com

By Al Root

SpaceX stock rose a little in early trading after the company completed a successful Starship test flight on Friday evening.

Starship is SpaceX's huge, fully reusable launch system designed to dramatically lower costs to reach space. Lower costs can help enable new applications, such as data centers in space. SpaceX wants to build a constellation of AI computing satellites beginning in 2028.

Shares of Elon Musk's rocket and AI company were up 0.1% at $115.18 in premarket trading while SP 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average futures were up 1% and 1.1%, respectively.

Friday was the 13th test of Starship. All of the test objectives appeared to be met. The rocket's upper stage deployed 20 Starlink V3, or version three, satellites, relit an engine in the vacuum of space, and splashed down gently in the Indian Ocean.

Starlink is SpaceX's space-based broadband product with more than 10 million subscribers.

The 14th test should be in a few weeks. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on X that SpaceX is likely to try to catch the upper stage with the company's huge, mechanical "chopsticks" on the launch tower.

SpaceX has caught Starship's booster rocket once before -- an incredible feat. SpaceX wants to bring the rockets back to the tower and catch them partly to make it faster to launch them again.

Eventually, SpaceX hopes to be launching a fleet of Starship rockets thousands of times. Today, the company launches its Falcon 9 rocket hundreds of times a year.

The test was good news for SpaceX. It needed some good news. Coming into Monday trading, SpaceX stock had dropped for three consecutive weeks, losing about 38% over that span. The stock is below its $135 IPO price and more than 40% below its record closing high of $201.80, reached a few days after SpaceX's record-setting IPO.

A few things have weighed on SpaceX stock. For starters, there is valuation. Despite recent declines, SpaceX is still worth about $1.5 trillion and trades for about 40 times estimated 2026 sales -- a far richer multiple than other trillion-dollar stocks. What's more, investors are worried that profit-taking by early investors could push down shares. There is a lot of SpaceX stock that will become available to trade in the coming months.

Whether test 13 will be enough to overcome those factors and give shares a substantial boost is hard to say. Investors will have to wait and find out.

Up next for the company is a Wall Street test. SpaceX reports quarterly earnings on Aug. 4.

Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com

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July 27, 2026 07:16 ET (11:16 GMT)