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Futurism

SpaceX Stock Has Officially Fallen All the Way Down to the Low $170s SpaceX Stock Had Quite a Bad Night Wall Street Terrified That SpaceX Investors Will Dump Their Stocks SpaceX Stock Now in Rapid Decline SpaceX Stock Has Now Started to Fall Scientists Propose That Entire Universes Can Form Inside Collapsing Stars NASA Loads Moon Rocket onto Giant Trump-Branded Train Eighty Residents Sue SpaceX, Saying Elon Musk’s Constant Rocket Launches Are Literally Destroying Their Homes SpaceX’s IPO Shows That We Aren’t Even Close to Peak AI Bubble The More Data We See About SpaceX’s IPO, the More We’re Wincing Scientists Discover Fearsome Wind That Destroys Entire Galaxies NASA’s Next Moon Mission Is a Rube Goldberg Machine of Corporate Failure Points Scientists Release Results After Scanning 3I/ATLAS for Alien Signals The Math on SpaceX’s IPO Is Virtually Impossible Astronomers Say Star Self-Destructed So Catastrophically That It Left Behind No Trace of Its Existence Catholic Church Boots Exorcist After He Said UFOs Are Demons NASA’s James Webb Discovers That 3I/ATLAS Let One Rip as It Passed Through Solar System Scientists Find Chunk of Lost Planet in Desert It’s Possible That SpaceX Could Collapse Spectacularly ISS Astronauts Ordered to Enter Evacuation Mode SpaceX Is Massively Overvalued Ahead of Its IPO, Analysts Find Paper Claims the “Asteroid” Japan’s Probe Is Approaching Is Actually a Derelict Spacecraft Trump Shovels $4 Billion Directly to Elon Musk, Who Spent a Fortune Getting Him Elected Scientists Say They’ve Cracked Mystery Behind a Dozen Strange Signals From Deep Space Scientists Spot What Appears to Be a Ring-Shaped “Planet Factory” Deep Out in Space Scientists Say They’ve Found Fungi That Turn Dead Martian Soil Into Fertile Cropland The Blue Moon Is Fake. You Are Being Deceived Jeff Bezos’ Rocket Explodes Into Mushroom Cloud, Dealing Massive Blow to NASA’s Moon Plans Elon Musk Furious at Starlink Being Used for American Suicide Drones NASA Releases Sweeping Plans for Moon Base
If Starship Explodes Again, It Could Derail SpaceX’s Enti...
Frank Landymore · 2026-05-19 · via Futurism

Illustration shows Elon Musk wearing a black cap, resting his chin on his clasped hands. The image has an orange overlay and a blue circular grid pattern in the background.

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Win McNamee / Getty Images

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SpaceX has enjoyed a lot of leeway when its Starship rocket has failed or exploded because of the sheer ambition of its vision — and because CEO Elon Musk has framed “breaking things” as an opportunity to quickly make progress, an approach that’s worked well for the space company in the past.

But at some point the world’s largest rocket needs to deliver, and that point is fast approaching, a new Bloomberg piece argues. SpaceX is seeking a $1.75 trillion IPO, the largest in history, and investors around the world will be watching like a hawk to see how its flagship product performs when it embarks on its twelfth test flight this week.

The pressure would always be on with an IPO of such proportions, but Musk has more or less staked SpaceX’s entire future on Starship’s success. After folding his AI company xAI into SpaceX, he revealed a new vision for deploying one million orbital AI data centers, which he considers a stepping stone towards building a “sentient sun.” SpaceX has also “shifted focus” — in Musk’s words — to establishing a “self-building city” on the Moon. To carry all those satellites into orbit and build infrastructure on the Moon, he needs a huge rocket like Starship that can haul at least 100 metric tons of cargo at a time. A version of Starship is also supposed to serve as the lander that will bring astronauts down to the lunar surface for the first time in over half a century on NASA’s Artemis 4 mission, currently slated for early 2028.

So far, though, Starship prototypes have only launched with a 35-ton payload, which is barely more than its Falcon 9 rocket, Bloomberg noted. And that’s much lower than the 95 metric tons hefted by NASA’s Space Launch System, the rocket that recently put four Artemis 2 astronauts on a journey around the Moon.

And for launches at anything approaching Musk’s promised scale to be cost effective, Starship needs to be fully reusable. No rocket in history has ever been fully reused, but Musk said last August that he was “cautiously optimistic” that Starship “will achieve full reusability” this year.

Putting a dent in Starship’s economic feasibility in the long run, even if the rocket is completed, is its need to refuel in space. To get Starship to the Moon, it could require over a dozen refueling flights, the costs of which add up significantly. If it’s much higher, “it may ultimately not be a very good architecture for going to the Moon relative to another company’s architecture that perhaps may have less launches,” Alex MacDonald, senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former chief economist for NASA, told Bloomberg.

That’s why it’s all the more important that Starship puts on a good show on Wednesday, when it’s slated to launch. Like previous tests, it will involve sending its upper stage into a suborbital trajectory where it will deploy twenty dummy satellites before making a splashdown in the Indian Ocean, while a heavily-revamped Super Heavy booster will land in the Gulf of Mexico. Whatever happens, it’ll leave a fresh impression in investors’ minds. According to Reuters, SpaceX is aiming to release a prospectus officially outlining the IPO on Wednesday — the same day of the Starship launch.

More on SpaceX: Explosion Reported on Site as SpaceX Prepares Starship for Another Launch