SpaceX is shooting for the moon, in more ways than one. The company has just debuted on the stock market in the biggest initial public offering (IPO) in history, with the company raising some $75 billion and being valued at an almost ludicrous $1.77 trillion. That should give it the funds to roll out its massive Starship rocket, a vehicle crucial for SpaceX’s plans to launch thousands of data-center satellites and land humans on the moon.

“It’s a watershed moment for the space sector,” says Raphael Roettgen, founding partner of the U.S. space investment company E2MC Ventures, which has invested in SpaceX.

The successful listing will be music to the ears not just to SpaceX’s CEO Elon Musk, who is now set to become the world’s first trillionaire, but NASA, too; the space agency’s Artemis program is betting big on SpaceX and its Starship rocket for ferrying astronauts to and from the lunar surface as soon as 2028. The IPO is “a lot of cash inflow, which is good for any company,” says Pierre Lionnet, a space economist at Eurospace in France. “They will be using that money to fund a lot of things, including data centers on Earth, data centers going to orbit, and finishing up development of Starship.”

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SpaceX’s debut on the stock market came after months, even years, of buildup. Last week SpaceX announced it would be offering 555.6 million shares to investors at a price of $135 each. Prior to this, it had raised money through venture capitalists, private funding rounds, and customers—notably NASA and other government agencies, as well as the roughly 10 million people that now use the company’s Starlink Internet service.

Going public gives SpaceX access to potentially a much larger pool of money. “Once you’re public, you can keep accessing the public markets,” Roettgen says.

One of SpaceX’s reasons for going public is to raise funds to build fleets of orbital data centers. In a prospectus for investors filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on May 20, the company said that artificial intelligence was a market potentially worth $26.5 trillion. SpaceX merged with another of Musk’s companies, xAI, in February to tap into this market.

SpaceX seeks to launch as many as a million data-center satellites to move the computing needs for AI from Earth into space, where less and looser regulation could allow more rapid growth—and even greater profits. On Monday Musk offered a sneak peek of AI1, SpaceX’s first AI-dedicated satellite, a massive GPU-packed spacecraft outfitted with solar arrays, heat-dissipating radiators and laser communications systems. For building out its fleet, the company says it needs the fully reusable Starship, the largest rocket in history, to deploy such satellites as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Starship has yet to work flawlessly after more than three years of test flights, however. “The SpaceX conglomerate fully hinges on one single point of failure, which is Starship,” Lionnet says. While eventually intended to take people to Mars, in the near term Starship is essential “for those data centers in space to happen,” he adds.

NASA will also be keeping a close eye on the IPO. Earlier this week the space agency announced the four astronauts for its Artemis III mission. Targeted for the latter half of 2027, this mission will see an Orion spacecraft dock with two prospective lunar landers in Earth orbit—one the Blue Moon lander from Jeff Bezos’s company Blue Origin and the other Starship. In the Artemis IV mission planned for 2028, NASA intends to use one of these landers to return humans to the surface of the moon for the first time since 1972.

A devastating explosion of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket on May 28, however, might place additional focus on Starship, which has not fully reached orbit on any of its 12 test flights. “Starship is so important, but it’s so obviously late, and a lot of problems are yet to be solved,” Lionnet says. “It’s clearly concerning for NASA’s Artemis program.”

The IPO might give SpaceX the funds it needs to perfect Starship, ultimately benefiting Artemis, too. “Starship is a large [capital expenditure] program, and a war chest of this size means SpaceX can keep iterating at full speed without having to compromise,” says Chad Anderson, founder and CEO of the investment firm Space Capital, which has invested in SpaceX. “Starship is the bridge between the SpaceX of today and the next phase of the company that its IPO valuation assumes.”

SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.

The prospectus SpaceX used to woo investors also gives an interesting window into the company's operations, notably its launch and operational costs, which were not public before now. “For industry analysts, the public filings have been great,” says Alistair Schofield, a space strategy consultant at NebuLink in England. “By going public, SpaceX has been forced to reveal closely guarded trade secrets that once cost thousands of dollars to even estimate, entirely for free.”

That includes the amount of revenue SpaceX brings in from its launches, of which it performed 165 in 2025, most from its partially reusable Falcon 9 rocket. Lionnet says the prospectus showed that while a Falcon 9 launch might cost a customer $60 to $70 million, for SpaceX the cost was only $15 to $20 million per launch.

Few would have predicted that SpaceX would grow to become such a colossus when it reached orbit for the first time with its Falcon 1 rocket in 2008. “There were lots of skeptics,” says John Logsdon, a professor emeritus of space policy at George Washington University. Musk “has proven that perspective wrong,” he says. “He’s eventually done most of what he said he was going to do.”

Whether this IPO will have a knock-on effect of more funding for other space companies is unclear. “It may well exhaust most of the venture capital that’s willing to invest in commercial space,” Logsdon says. “I don’t think there will be a substantial spillover benefit to other companies.”

Anderson disagrees. “For the first time, every institutional investor, every index fund, every retail investor has a direct, liquid way to own a piece of the space economy—and that’s going to pull enormous amounts of new capital into the sector,” he says. “We’ve seen this happen before in other industries: when the category-defining company goes public, it legitimizes the entire category. SpaceX is a rising tide that lifts all boats.”

Either way, for SpaceX, the IPO is yet another major milestone in the company’s nearly quarter-century of history. “This IPO, in a sense, is a vote of confidence in Musk and his associates,” Logsdon says. The best may be yet to come.