NEW YORK, May 28, 2026, 05:02 (EDT)
SpaceX faced a fresh regulatory test after the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration ordered the company to investigate a Starship booster mishap, putting the rocket system tied to its Starlink expansion back under review. The FAA said the May 22 Flight 12 launch resulted in a mishap involving the Super Heavy booster, with no reports of public injury or public property damage.
The timing matters. Large U.S. mutual funds and passive index funds — funds that track benchmarks such as the S&P 500 — have started setting aside cash and preparing for possible portfolio shifts ahead of blockbuster initial public offerings, including SpaceX and OpenAI, analysts told Reuters.
SpaceX is targeting a valuation of about $1.75 trillion, and the market case now turns on whether Starlink, its satellite-internet arm, can grow from a strong business into infrastructure big enough to carry the group. A filing showed Starlink was the only profitable division in the first quarter, generating $1.19 billion in operating profit, while SpaceX posted a $1.94 billion operating loss on $4.69 billion in revenue.
That is the point Rohit Kulkarni at Roth Capital Partners raised on CNBC’s “The Exchange” last week, when he said the “biggest question” for SpaceX’s valuation is how Starlink scales. The issue is not just launch cadence. It is whether those launches can keep feeding a broadband network at a cost public investors will accept. YouTube
Friday’s Starship flight gave both sides something to work with. The vehicle deployed mock satellites and reached a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean, but the Super Heavy booster failed to make a controlled landing in the Gulf of Mexico; Mark Vena, CEO at SmartTech Research, said investors saw evidence the upgraded vehicle was “moving in the right direction.” James Bruegger, chief investment officer at Seraphim Space, said full reusability remains the key to lower launch costs. Reuters
SpaceX also added government business this week. The U.S. Space Force awarded the company a $2.29 billion fixed-price contract for the Space Data Network Backbone, a secure satellite communications network in low Earth orbit, meaning satellites fly closer to Earth to cut signal delay; Colonel Ryan Frazier called it a “strong foundation” for military users. Reuters
Starlink gives SpaceX the clearest revenue story in the filing. Satellite Today, citing the filing, reported that the connectivity segment, driven by Starlink, accounted for $11.4 billion in 2025 revenue, about 61% of company revenue, and that Starlink had 10.3 million subscribers at March 31.
But scale can thin pricing. Investor’s Business Daily reported that average revenue per user — the monthly revenue SpaceX gets from a typical customer — fell from $99 in 2023 to $66 in the first quarter of 2026 as Starlink expanded internationally and offered lower-priced plans.
The competitive read-through is already showing up in public markets. Reuters reported that SpaceX’s IPO filing pulled fresh attention into listed space names such as Rocket Lab, Planet Labs and AST SpaceMobile, as investors weighed whether a successful SpaceX listing could reset how Wall Street values the sector.
The risk is that Starship remains a work in progress just as investors are being asked to value SpaceX like one of the largest companies in the world. The AP reported that Starship launches are on hold pending the investigation, after the booster separated normally but came down hard instead of making a controlled Gulf splashdown.
SpaceX is aiming to list as early as June 12 on Nasdaq, with investor presentations targeted for June 4 and pricing as early as June 11, Reuters has reported. If that calendar holds, buyers will not just be buying a rocket company. They will be buying a Starlink scale story, tied to a rocket that still has to fly often, cheaply and under FAA sign-off.
