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.
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