SpaceX Stock Slips as Starship’s First Orbital Flight Is Pushed to Sept. 28

Shares of SpaceX (ticker: SPCX) fell more than 2% on Friday, trimming the stock’s weekly gain to roughly 1%, after the company confirmed a short delay to its next Starship test flight. The dip came as investors weighed the setback against a fresh round of bullish commentary from one of the company’s largest institutional backers, creating a mixed picture for a stock that has only recently become available to public market investors.

Starship’s 14th Test Flight Pushed Back Six Days

SpaceX confirmed it is pushing back the 14th test flight of its Starship vehicle to September 28, six days later than the previously targeted September 22 date. The mission is significant because it marks the program’s first fully orbital flight, a milestone SpaceX has been working toward across more than a dozen earlier suborbital and partial test flights launched from Starbase in South Texas.

According to the mission plan, Starship’s upper stage is expected to reach an altitude of roughly 275 kilometers and complete approximately six orbits of Earth over a flight lasting nearly ten hours. During that window, the vehicle is scheduled to deploy 26 Starlink V3 satellites, each capable of adding roughly a terabit per second of additional capacity to SpaceX’s satellite internet network — a meaningful upgrade over earlier Starlink satellite generations.

On the recovery side, the mission plan calls for the Super Heavy booster to attempt an offshore landing, while the Starship upper stage is set to perform a controlled splashdown in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile. Notably, SpaceX has confirmed that no attempt will be made to catch the booster with its “Mechazilla” tower arms this time around, scaling back an ambition that had circulated ahead of the flight.

Why This Flight Matters for the Bull Case

A successful orbital flight carries real weight for SpaceX’s broader investment case. The mission underpins the economics of continued Starlink satellite deployment, the company’s commercial launch business, and its longer-term ambitions around lunar and Mars missions. A clean flight would represent meaningful validation of the vehicle’s readiness for the kind of high-cadence, heavy-payload missions SpaceX has built much of its future roadmap around.

Retail Investors Pull Back

Friday’s stock movement also highlighted just how quickly sentiment can shift around a newly public company. Citing data compiled by JPMorgan, financial outlets reported that roughly $570 million in retail selling occurred over the prior three weeks, including about $250 million pulled out in the most recent week alone — described as the largest single-week retail decline the bank has tracked for the stock since it began trading publicly.

That kind of retail pullback, arriving alongside a relatively minor scheduling delay, suggests that some short-term investors may be more sensitive to near-term execution risk than to the company’s longer-term ambitions. Test flight delays are a routine part of SpaceX’s development process, but for a stock still establishing its trading patterns as a public company, even a six-day shift appears to have been enough to trigger a notable amount of selling.

It’s a pattern that isn’t unique to SpaceX. Newly listed companies in high-visibility industries — aerospace, EVs, and cutting-edge tech among them — often see outsized retail trading activity in their first months on public markets, as individual investors react quickly to headlines that longer-term institutional holders are more likely to look past. Whether that pattern settles down for SpaceX as the stock matures, or continues each time a launch date shifts, remains one of the more interesting subplots of its early trading history.

The Bull Case: Ron Baron’s Trillion-Dollar Starlink Thesis

Not everyone is reading the news cautiously. Billionaire investor Ron Baron, whose firm Baron Capital holds an SpaceX stake valued at roughly $25 billion, used a recent television interview to lay out an aggressive long-term thesis for the company’s Starlink satellite business, which he estimates already generates close to $18 billion in annual revenue.

Baron projected that Starlink alone could eventually generate as much as a trillion dollars in annual revenue within a decade, a figure that, paired with the margins he expects the business to achieve, could support a valuation in the range of $14 to $15 trillion by his estimate. Those are extraordinary numbers by any market standard, and they illustrate just how differently long-term institutional holders and shorter-term retail traders appear to be weighing the same set of facts.

Merger Speculation With Tesla Resurfaces

The report also touched on a recurring question in investor circles: whether SpaceX and Tesla might eventually combine in some form, given how closely the two companies already collaborate under Elon Musk’s leadership. Musk himself addressed the topic publicly this week, calling it a fair question given the level of collaboration between the companies, without ruling the idea in or out directly.

Baron, for his part, indicated he would support whatever direction Musk ultimately decides to take on the matter. It isn’t the first time merger speculation has surfaced — reports had suggested Musk discussed the possibility privately before SpaceX’s initial public offering earlier this year. SpaceX has not issued a formal response to the renewed round of questions.

A Newly Public Company Still Finding Its Footing

SpaceX’s shares began trading publicly earlier this year following its June IPO, making the company still relatively new to the scrutiny that comes with daily public market trading. Unlike SpaceX’s decades of private operating history, its stock now moves in real time based on headlines, delays, and investor sentiment in a way the company never had to contend with as a private business backed primarily by long-term institutional investors like Baron Capital.

That transition helps explain some of the volatility seen around relatively routine news like a six-day launch delay. Test flight schedule shifts have been a near-constant feature of the Starship program since its earliest suborbital tests, and previous delays rarely generated this level of market reaction simply because there was no publicly traded stock to react in the first place. Now, every schedule change carries a market impact that didn’t exist for SpaceX a year ago.

What to Watch Next

With the launch now targeted for September 28, attention will likely shift toward whether SpaceX can hold that date without further delays, and toward how the stock reacts in the lead-up to the flight itself. Given how sharply retail sentiment moved on a relatively small scheduling change, the actual test flight — success, partial success, or setback — could produce an even larger swing in the stock once it takes place.

For now, the gap between retail selling and institutional conviction captured in Friday’s trading may be the more interesting story than the delay itself: a reminder that newly public, high-profile companies like SpaceX can see very different reactions to the same piece of news depending on who’s doing the reacting. Readers can follow our markets and business coverage for updates as the September 28 launch date approaches, along with continuing space industry news as SpaceX’s public trading history develops further.

Whatever happens on September 28, the flight will likely serve as an early benchmark for how SpaceX stock behaves around major technical milestones going forward. Investors, analysts, and casual market watchers alike will be paying close attention — not just to whether Starship reaches orbit successfully, but to how sharply the stock moves in either direction once the outcome is known, and what that reaction reveals about how the market is pricing SpaceX’s long-term ambitions versus its near-term execution risk.