Musk's SpaceX Targets Thursday Starship Flight as Stock Slips Well Below Its $135 IPO Price

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is targeting Thursday, July 23, for the 13th test flight of its Starship rocket after a dramatic last-second pad abort, as shares of the newly public company (Nasdaq: SPCX) trade below their $135 initial public offering (IPO) price.

Key Takeaways

• SpaceX set July 23 for Starship’s 13th test flight after 4 of 33 engines failed to ignite one second before liftoff.
• SPCX is currently trading at $123, well below its $135 IPO price since the June debut that raised $75B.
• NASA’s Artemis IV moon landing, scheduled for no earlier than 2028, depends on Starship proving itself as a lander.

One Second From Liftoff

The company confirmed the new target in a statement on Sunday, following the July 16 scrub at its Starbase facility in Texas. The 407-foot rocket came within roughly one second of liftoff when four of its 33 main booster engines failed to ignite, triggering an automatic abort that shut down the remaining 29 engines and kept the vehicle anchored to the pad (the first last-second abort of a full-scale Starship).

Musk explained the fix in a post on X, saying two engines will be replaced “to be confident of a good flight.”

The mission profile remains unchanged, i.e. a roughly one-hour, space-skimming journey halfway around the world, carrying 20 of SpaceX’s newest Starlink satellites, which will attempt to communicate with orbiting Starlinks while cameras photograph the heat shield. Neither the booster nor the spacecraft is intended for recovery.

A Rough Stretch on the Nasdaq

The stakes extend beyond engineering as the abort sent SpaceX shares lower on July 16, with the stock closing at $123.1, its first finish below the $135 IPO price since the company’s record June 12 debut, which raised roughly $75 billion at a valuation above $1.75 trillion. The stock is currently trading around $123.

Bitcoin.com News reported that the close capped a near 50% collapse from the stock’s peak, after shares had surged above $160 before pulling back on dilution concerns tied to a $60 billion all-stock acquisition of artificial intelligence (AI) coding startup Cursor.

The drawdown has been costly for its founder as just 24-hours earlier, a single-day slide erased $150 billion from Musk’s net worth (even though entities like Ark Invest bought the dip). The stock’s swings matter to crypto investors too, given the company’s 18,712 bitcoin treasury landed on Wall Street’s radar with the IPO, making SPCX one of the largest publicly traded bitcoin holders. The company joined the Nasdaq-100 just weeks after listing.

The Artemis Clock Is Ticking

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is watching for different reasons since the agency relies on Starship as the lunar lander that will return astronauts to the moon, and SpaceX and Blue Origin must have their landers operational by next year so Artemis III crews can practice docking procedures. The actual moon landing mission, Artemis IV, is scheduled for no earlier than 2028.

Every delay tightens that timeline and even though Starship has flown a dozen times, the program still must demonstrate orbital refueling and an uncrewed lunar touchdown before astronauts climb aboard.

Thursday’s window now carries double weight given that a clean flight would steady both the program’s Artemis schedule and a stock searching for its footing below the IPO price.