In mid-July, Starship Flight 13 is expected to leave Starbase carrying no paying passengers, no lunar geologists and, unless the paperwork has become unusually adventurous, no orbital data centre. It will nevertheless carry something almost as delicate: the expectations embedded in SpaceX’s newly public share price.
This is a novelty. Flight 12 launched on May 22; SpaceX entered the stock market on June 12. Flight 13 is therefore the first Starship test to be watched not only by engineers, enthusiasts and people who enjoy enormous clouds, but also by shareholders who have discovered that “rapid unscheduled disassembly” looks less charming in a brokerage account.
Elon Musk has supplied the appropriate scale of understatement: “You don’t seem to understand that SpaceX will be worth more than the rest of Earth if we accomplish our goals.” Earth, regrettably, has not filed accounts, has no ticker symbol and appears to have a rather illiquid property portfolio. The comparison is difficult to audit. Still, it contains a serious idea beneath its planetary swagger. If SpaceX becomes the transport, communications and computing infrastructure of a civilisation extending beyond Earth, comparing it with today’s launch companies would be like valuing a railway by its dining-car receipts.
That is the dream. The market has already issued a small request for documentation. SPCX went public at $135, later traded above $225, and closed on July 10 at $145.30. Its first month transformed SpaceX from an inaccessible object of investor longing into an accessible object of investor anxiety. Flight 13 matters not because one test can prove the interplanetary thesis, but because the share price is a collection of probabilities, and rocket flights can rearrange them abruptly.
The most immediate commercial link is Starlink. SpaceX says one Starship V3 should carry up to 60 next-generation Starlink V3 satellites. Each is designed for one terabit per second of downlink capacity, and a single Starship load could deploy roughly twenty times the downlink capacity of a Falcon 9 launch. SpaceX’s connectivity segment, primarily driven by Starlink, already produced $11.4 billion in 2025 revenue and $4.4 billion in operating income. A credible path from experimental Starship to routine payload deployment therefore affects an existing profitable business, not merely a distant Martian brochure.
This is the strongest reason a successful Flight 13 could help the shares. It would not create revenue on launch day. It would reduce the perceived risk surrounding future revenue, margins and capital requirements. Markets are not supposed to applaud fire; they are supposed to discount cash flows. In practice they do both, especially when the fire comes from 33 Raptor engines and the commentary remains almost suspiciously calm.
Then there are the orbital data centres. SpaceX’s filings imagine AI compute satellite constellations, potentially numbering in the millions, beginning deployment as early as 2028. Starship is the load-bearing assumption: orbital computing needs immense mass to orbit, frequent launches and costs low enough that putting radiators, solar arrays, processors and replacement hardware above the atmosphere does not resemble mailing a grand piano by registered post.
Flight 13 can make that story slightly less fictional, but only slightly. A clean ascent, useful payload operations, an in-space engine relight and controlled returns would demonstrate parts of the transport system. They would not solve radiation damage, thermal management, maintenance, debris risk, data movement or hardware replacement. Analysts cited by Reuters expect SpaceX’s terrestrial AI infrastructure to matter financially much sooner, while orbital compute remains a project for the next decade. The rocket may be essential, but an essential ingredient is not a finished cake.
The Moon provides a nearer and more disciplined test. NASA selected Starship as a human landing system, but the architecture requires capabilities far beyond a single demonstration, particularly cryogenic propellant transfer. SpaceX itself warns that in-orbit refuelling is essential to its lunar and Martian ambitions and has not yet been attempted. Flight 13 can improve confidence in the development tempo; it cannot leap over the remaining programme.
Mars is more remote still. In conventional valuation, a self-sustaining city on Mars is an option with a very long expiry date, an unclear exercise price and several clauses written in radiation. It may eventually be the most important part of SpaceX. It is unlikely to explain next quarter’s earnings.
What, then, would a genuinely valuable success look like? Not merely survival. Starship has already shown that spectacular progress and spectacular destruction can occupy the same webcast. The important signal would be repeatability: the new V3 vehicle behaving predictably, engines relighting, payload systems working, re-entry data matching models, and the next flight appearing without an archaeological interval.
A failure would not invalidate Starship; this is a test programme designed to find failure modes. But public markets are less patient than engineering teams and worse at reading footnotes. Because much of SpaceX’s valuation rests on businesses that require Starship to become routine, another major setback could hurt more than earlier explosions did while the company was private. Success may produce a modest upward revision. Failure may remind investors how much future they have already purchased.
Flight 13 will not determine whether SpaceX becomes worth more than Earth. It may determine whether the road to that peculiar accounting event looks one flight shorter or one investigation longer.
The rest of Earth can relax for now. It still has oceans, farmland, several respectable cathedrals and a commanding lead in breathable air. SpaceX has a rocket, a constellation, an AI empire and an unusually ambitious spreadsheet. On launch day, the market will ask the oldest question in finance: how much of tomorrow survived today?
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