SpaceX Stock Slips Under Its IPO Price SpaceX shares have fallen through the $135 price they debuted at,

The stock has steadily fallen from the euphoric post-IPO high, showing that markets may be sobering up to the promises CEO Elon Musk made before and after SpaceX went public.

Shares of Elon Musk’s SpaceX are scraping by at record low levels this week, struggling to find any renewed enthusiasm from wary investors.

The stock is hovering just below $136, a hair above its original IPO price of $135, and well below its opening price of $150 on the day it went public last month. Shares are down almost nine percent over the last five days alone, and are just shy of 40 percent down compared to their all-time high of $225.

The slumping value of Musk’s rocket company has been a brutal wake-up call for some particularly daring investors, who went all in on what many have started to refer to as a “meme stock.” One Reddit user, who leveraged their own Roth IRA by making major calls on SpaceX, wiped out several hundred thousand dollars from their retirement.

The user made several SPCX calls at $160 and $145, decisions that ultimately came back to haunt them.

“So my Roth IRA is down 25 percent, I went and made a few options trades in Robinhood that also went the other way,” the user lamented in the infamous Wall Street Bets subreddit.

The warning signs of a steep market correction were all there. SpaceX went public with an astronomical, multitrillion dollar valuation despite losing billions of dollars a quarter, effectively guaranteeing major volatility. Even members of the Wall Street Bets community, which has a long history of advocating for aggressive trading strategies, were shaking their heads.

“No one could have seen this coming,” one user wrote facetiously.

“Crazy that people knew the insanely bloated valuation but still went long,” another added.

“Musk companies aren’t rational, Tesla has an insanely bloated valuation and is still way too high,” one user argued. “The only winning move is not to play.”

Analysts have long warned that investing in SpaceX is a bet on Musk himself. To make sense of its enormous valuation requires buying into his lofty vision of establishing AI data centers in space and constructing a city on Mars.

As Reuters puts it, SpaceX’s listing has turned into a “confidence test.” Now that shares have plunged below its IPO price, the scales could already be falling from investors’ eyes.

“It raises the narrative that the stock is up on fluff, on speculation, on froth, and not on real fundamentals,” Miller Tabak chief market strategist Matthew Maley told Reuters.

Anybody who bought in early “hoping to ‘make a killing’ will be disappointed,” Carnegie Investment Counsel director of research Greg Halter added.

More on SpaceX shares: SpaceX Stock Plunges to All-Time Low After Competitor Makes Major Leap

The post SpaceX Investors Are Lamenting All the Money They’ve Lost appeared first on Futurism.

Anil Menon, a NASA flight surgeon, felt crushed nine years ago as his hopes and aspirations collapsed around him.

For the fourth time, he had diligently applied to become an astronaut at the US space agency, seeking to fulfill a lifelong dream. Although he made it to the final round, NASA had once again rejected his application at the end of the grueling process.

"I was so sad, and I admitted defeat," Menon said. "I just did not see a pathway forward. So I pretty much, at that point in time, gave up on being an astronaut. I thought there was a zero percent chance."

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© John Kraus/NASA

Anil Menon, a NASA flight surgeon, felt crushed nine years ago as his hopes and aspirations collapsed around him.

For the fourth time, he had diligently applied to become an astronaut at the US space agency, seeking to fulfill a lifelong dream. Although he made it to the final round, NASA had once again rejected his application at the end of the grueling process.

"I was so sad, and I admitted defeat," Menon said. "I just did not see a pathway forward. So I pretty much, at that point in time, gave up on being an astronaut. I thought there was a zero percent chance."

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© John Kraus/NASA

The next test flight of SpaceX's Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy booster could take off as soon as Thursday, and much of the hour-long mission will look a lot like the last Starship flight in May.

But there are a few key differences for this launch, set to occur during a launch window that opens at 5:45 pm CDT (22:45 UTC) on Thursday. The most notable change is the inclusion of real, functioning Starlink satellites inside Starship's cargo bay. SpaceX previously tested the ship's payload deployment mechanism using simulators mimicking the mass and dimensions of the company's next-generation Starlink Version 3 broadband satellites.

This time—Starship's 13th full-scale test flight and the second to use SpaceX's newest version of Starship—technicians have installed 20 Starlink V3 satellites into the ship's deployer, a system of pulleys and cables designed to eject a stack of satellites one at a time through an opening on the side of the spacecraft. The satellites will not be part of SpaceX's operational network, but engineers will attempt to briefly establish laser communication links between the Starlink V3s and other spacecraft flying in low-Earth orbit. If successful, these links will validate Starlink V3's interoperability with SpaceX's previous generation of Starlink satellites.

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The next test flight of SpaceX's Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy booster could take off as soon as Thursday, and much of the hour-long mission will look a lot like the last Starship flight in May.

But there are a few key differences for this launch, set to occur during a launch window that opens at 5:45 pm CDT (22:45 UTC) on Thursday. The most notable change is the inclusion of real, functioning Starlink satellites inside Starship's cargo bay. SpaceX previously tested the ship's payload deployment mechanism using simulators mimicking the mass and dimensions of the company's next-generation Starlink Version 3 broadband satellites.

This time—Starship's 13th full-scale test flight and the second to use SpaceX's newest version of Starship—technicians have installed 20 Starlink V3 satellites into the ship's deployer, a system of pulleys and cables designed to eject a stack of satellites one at a time through an opening on the side of the spacecraft. The satellites will not be part of SpaceX's operational network, but engineers will attempt to briefly establish laser communication links between the Starlink V3s and other spacecraft flying in low-Earth orbit. If successful, these links will validate Starlink V3's interoperability with SpaceX's previous generation of Starlink satellites.

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Shares of Elon Musk’s SpaceX took another beating when trading resumed on Monday, sliding to an all-time low of just under $139, well below its IPO opening price of $150.

It’s now over 38 percent down from its all-time high of $225 three weeks ago, illustrating how rapidly the hype has inverted into widespread skepticism over Musk’s vision.

Following a blockbuster Wall Street debut, the space company has struggled to maintain any degree of momentum as investors continue to ask some very hard questions, including over its major pivot to orbital data centers and its near-term profitability. Despite being valued at almost two trillion dollars, the company lost nearly $5 billion last year.

Shares have hovered below the company’s opening price for weeks now, despite plenty of bullishness among analysts.

The news comes just days after Chinese state-run media showed a Long March 10B rocket booster being caught by an offshore recovery platform, indicating the country was making major strides in catching up with SpaceX’s reusable rocket tech. Over the weekend, an experimental Japanese reusable rocket safely took off and landed, suggesting the nation may be right behind China as well.

Beyond some steepening international space launch competition, experts believe SpaceX’s transformation into an “AI play” may be closely related to its Wall Street woes, as the BBC reports.

“Everyone saw SpaceX as an AI story,” CFRA investment research analyst Keith Snyder told the broadcaster.

“With Elon Musk, any company he touches gets people excited,” he added. “But this was also the first time people felt like they were able to invest in something that was being marketed as an AI play.”

How SpaceX will cover its enormous losses and start actually making some money — not to mention, prove that orbital data centers don’t just make sense but are even feasible to begin with — remains a major point of contention.

In short, the initial enthusiasm surrounding SpaceX’s IPO is firmly behind us.

“If you bought around the first tick you’re definitely underwater,” Snyder told the BBC. “It started to look a lot like a meme stock.”

“If you’re an IPO investor, you’re ok,” Mergermarket analyst Samuel Kerr added. “If you bought in the first few days, you’re not very happy right now.”

Investors remain sharply divided on where SpaceX shares are headed next. Many analysts from major investment banks remain bullish, expecting the stock to make massive gains. Case in point, Morgan Stanley believes the company will reach a price tag of $300 — far more than double its current stock price.

Snyder has a far more muted outlook, expecting SpaceX to fall down to just $115 a share.

Meanwhile, Musk has said he thinks “SpaceX will be worth more than the rest of Earth if we accomplish our goals,” a characteristically ambitious and perhaps delusional argument that assumes a lot of things will go right for the company.

Whether investors will buy into this lofty vision remains to be seen. Given its recent stock performance, it’s far from a guarantee.

“If SpaceX can do all the things it says it will do, yes, investors are sitting on the most valuable company ever,” Kerr told the BBC. “But it’s got a lot of work to do to get there.”

More on SpaceX: Elon Musk Says His Goal Is for SpaceX to Be Worth More than the Entire Earth

The post SpaceX Stock Plunges to All-Time Low After Competitor Makes Major Leap appeared first on Futurism.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has long heavily relied on selling science fiction to investors.

He wants to pollute our planet’s orbit — already brimming with junk — with gigantic orbital data centers. Then, he wants to settle on the surface of the Moon. Ultimately, he wants to make humanity an interplanetary species by building a city on Mars with the help of an enormous fleet of Starship spacecraft, leaving a planet reeling from a climate crisis behind.

It’s the kind of lofty — and, according to his many critics, delusional — thinking that turned him into an (almost) trillionaire. And, as SpaceX continues to struggle selling investors on Musk’s lofty imagination, the mercurial CEO is already conjuring new visions to keep the hype train chugging. According to a recent tweet, he believes that “SpaceX will be worth more than the rest of Earth if we accomplish our goals.”

Musk was responding to one of his supporters questioning SpaceX’s recent AI compute deal with Anthropic, arguing that it was giving too much money to a competitor.

To Musk, it all comes down to our ability to fully harness the power of the Sun. As illustrated by the Kardashev scale — a method devised by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev that measures a civilization’s level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy it can channel — Musk believes we’re not even close to unlocking our full potential as a species.

By utilizing all that untapped solar energy, Musk thinks SpaceX could eclipse the Earth’s entire GDP of around 100 trillion dollars — if you’re willing to entertain his outrageously lofty vision, that is.

Back in January, Musk argued that “space-based industries will vastly exceed the value of all of Earth, given that you could harness roughly 100,000 times more energy than Earth and still be using less than a millionth of the Sun’s energy!”

Skeptics will differ. He also claimed that “due to autonomy, Tesla is worth more than the rest of the auto industry,” while his EV maker’s struggling Optimus robot will increase “Earth GDP by an order of magnitude.”

It’s the kind of wishful thinking his entire business empire is teetering on top of lately. For years now, tech leaders have been trying to sell us on a utopian “age of abundance,” in which manual labor is a thing of the past and everybody enjoys a high standard of living.

However, reality tells a dramatically different story. Despite Musk’s repeated promises for over a decade, in one telling example, Tesla vehicles are still far from reliably driving themselves without constant oversight.

Even investors are having trouble buying into his dreams of training AI models from space. SpaceX’s shares initially rallied following a blockbuster IPO last month, but have been in decline ever since. The muted enthusiasm highlights persistent doubts over a multitrillion dollar valuation for a company that lost a staggering $5 billion last year.

In short, his claim that SpaceX will somehow become worth more than the entire global economy should be taken with an astronomical amount of salt.

It also assumes that SpaceX is operating within a vacuum. Considering the major strides China’s space program is making as of late, that’s far from a given.

More on SpaceX: If You Thought SpaceX Stock Was Doing Badly Before, Now It’s Really Tanking

The post Elon Musk Says His Goal Is for SpaceX to Be Worth More than the Entire Earth appeared first on Futurism.

SpaceX has radically reduced the cost of reaching space thanks to its reusable rockets, a revolutionary capability that has greatly set it apart from its competitors.

But its dominance in the domain is seriously being challenged by China. Footage shared by the Chinese state-run CCTV shows a Long March 10B rocket booster being caught by an offshore recovery platform. Engineers can be heard cheering on the slowly descending rocket as it confidently sets down.

As Engadget reports, that makes China only the second country to have pulled off such a feat, following the United States — a “historic breakthrough” that could have major implications not just for SpaceX, but for the space industry as a whole.

The rocket was developed by the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), a subsidiary of the state-owned Chinese space program contractor China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC).

The rocket has a payload capacity of 16 tons to low-Earth orbit, not far off from SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9, which can carry 22 tons. However, unlike the Falcon 9, which lands autonomously with the help of four deployable landing legs, CALT’s recovery platform picks the descending rocket out of the air with “landing hooks.”

Previous attempts have resulted in descending rockets missing the launch pad. Chinese competitor LandSpace is trying an even more SpaceX-like approach using a leg system. In December, the company successfully sent its Zhuque-3 rocket into orbit, but it ended up blowing up in a fireball while trying to land.

CALT is envisioning it as a new platform to launch Starlink-like internet broadband satellites and other larger commercial satellites.

By reusing the first stage, the company is hoping to dramatically reduce launch costs, much like SpaceX.

The Elon Musk-led company first successfully landed a Falcon 9 rocket following orbital flight in December 2015. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin became the second company to have pulled off such a feat in November, with its New Glenn booster gently touching back down in November, just under a decade later.

While CALT’s latest feat is undoubtedly a major sign of progress, China has its work cut out to reach SpaceX’s unparalleled launch cadence. The rocket company came close to launching a rocket every other day in 2025, completing an astonishing 165 orbital flights — almost twice as many as China’s entire space program.

More on China’s space program: New Report Finds That China’s Space Program Is Rapidly Outstripping NASA

The post China Is Catching Up With SpaceX Fast, Landing First Reusable Rocket Booster on Offshore Platform appeared first on Futurism.

Welcome to this edition of The Intelligence Brief… This week, a new milestone has been reached in space technology, with the launch of the world’s first satellite equipped with a commercial betavoltaic nuclear power system. The satellite was carried to orbit on a a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Tuesday, and in our analysis, we’ll be looking at 1) how the next generation of compact nuclear power systems are now being tested aboard the first City Labs BOHR satellite, 2) how the satellite converts radioactive decay into electricity, and why this technology could eventually help to facilitate long-term space missions to the Moon and other locales, 3) the advantages and hurdles this novel tritium-based power system faces, and 4) what this all could mean for the future of nuclear powered spacecraft used in deep-space missions.

Quote of the Week

“This is a historic step for commercial nuclear power in space.”

— Peter Cabauy, CEO of City Labs

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RECENT NEWS from The Debrief

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• A new study says space dust that lands on Earth every year could be coming from unidentified objects.
• Get all the latest stories from The Debrief, with more breaking stories at the end of this week’s newsletter.

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The First Nuclear-Powered Satellite is Now in Orbit

Tuesday marked a new chapter in the quest for novel power systems for spacecraft, with the launch of the world’s first satellite equipped with a commercial betavoltaic nuclear power system.

The City Labs Betavoltaic Orbital High-Reliability (BOHR) satellite was carried to space on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, and in the coming weeks will begin tests to determine whether miniature nuclear batteries can reliably generate electricity in space.

Designed primarily as a proof of concept, the first BOHR satellite will rely on conventional solar panels for its primary power system. However, the first-of-its-kind spacecraft also carries the company’s proprietary “NanoTritium” betavoltaic power source, which, according to the company, uses beta particles emitted during the radioactive decay of tritium that are converted into electricity.

In a statement, Peter Cabauy, CEO of City Labs, called this week’s launch “a historic step for commercial nuclear power in space,” adding that the BOHER satellite “demonstrates that safe, compact, and regulatory-approved nuclear power systems are ready for routine commercial deployment.”

“This capability enables persistent, always-on payload operations that are not constrained by sunlight or battery life,” Cabauy added.

Harnessing the Power of Beta Radiation

The innovative satellite was carried to space earlier this week as part of the recent SpaceX Transporter-17 mission.

“On Tuesday, July 7 at 12:12 a.m. PT, Falcon 9 launched the Transporter-17 mission to low-Earth orbit from Space Launch Complex 4E (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California,” read an update that appeared at the SpaceX website announcing the successful launch that carried the City Labs BOHR satellite to space.

“Transporter-17 was a dedicated smallsat rideshare mission,” SpaceX’s update earlier this week added. “There were 81 payloads on this flight, including cubesats, microsats, hosted payloads, and orbital transfer vehicles carrying eight of those payloads to be deployed at a later time.”

Following the satellite’s successful delivery to orbit, its power systems will begin testing the feasibility of beta radiation as a primary driver to produce electricity. In the past, radioisotope thermoelectric generators have been used to propel landmark space missions, such as Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. By contrast, BOHR’s beta radiation system does not rely on heat generated by radioactive decay, which allows for a compact power source that, if all goes according to plan, could one day be deployed in future missions to support spacecraft operating in environments where sunlight is limited. Such applications include the permanently shadowed craters on the Moon and future missions into the outer solar system.

Primarily, City Labs says a tritium-based system is also more beneficial than traditional nuclear fuels like plutonium since it emits relatively low-energy radiation. This, the company says, makes it easier to shield and safer to handle during spacecraft assembly and launch.

Challenges Ahead

The technology does face significant hurdles, however. One involves the fact that tritium is presently still one of the world’s rarest—and most expensive—radioactive materials. Right now, with only around 20 kilograms produced annually throughout the world, the limited quantity and exorbitant costs (current prices reach tens of thousands of dollars per gram) make large-scale adoption anytime in the near term a significant challenge.

There are also regulatory considerations, as noted in a news article released this week by the American Nuclear Society (ANS) following the launch. “In 2019, National Security Presidential Memorandum – 20 (NSPM-20) laid out updates to the process for launching spacecraft containing nuclear systems,” the article states.

“Now the Department of Transportation, which includes the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), directs the coordination of various agencies to review the safety analysis for missions with nuclear components,” the ANS news brief added, noting that the FAA updated its launch regulations in 2020.

Despite the existence of a few hurdles and other considerations, the mission nonetheless marks an important milestone in the development of next-generation spacecraft power systems. If successful, BOHR could demonstrate that compact betavoltaic power sources are a viable complement to solar energy, opening new possibilities for long-duration missions in some of the darkest and most remote regions of the solar system.

That concludes this week’s installment of The Intelligence Brief. You can read past editions of our newsletter at our website, or if you found this installment online, don’t forget to subscribe and get future email editions from us here. Also, if you have a tip or other information you’d like to send along directly to me, you can email me at micah [@] thedebrief [dot] org, or reach me on X: @MicahHanks.

Here are the top stories we’re covering right now…

The proliferation of nuclear power in space got a little more real Tuesday with the launch of a small satellite developed by a Florida-based company specializing in nuclear micro-power technology.

It's a long way from launching a bona fide nuclear reactor, a breakthrough that could help power a permanent Moon base and efficiently drive rockets throughout the Solar System. But you have to start somewhere.

The satellite from Miami-based City Labs is named BOHR, short for Betavoltaic Orbital High-Reliability, and it launched on a SpaceX rideshare mission Tuesday alongside 80 other payloads. SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket released the BOHR satellite into an orbit between 350 and 400 miles (nearly 600 km) in altitude.

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The proliferation of nuclear power in space got a little more real Tuesday with the launch of a small satellite developed by a Florida-based company specializing in nuclear micro-power technology.

It's a long way from launching a bona fide nuclear reactor, a breakthrough that could help power a permanent Moon base and efficiently drive rockets throughout the Solar System. But you have to start somewhere.

The satellite from Miami-based City Labs is named BOHR, short for Betavoltaic Orbital High-Reliability, and it launched on a SpaceX rideshare mission Tuesday alongside 80 other payloads. SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket released the BOHR satellite into an orbit between 350 and 400 miles (nearly 600 km) in altitude.

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© City Labs

Welcome to Edition 9.01 of the Rocket Report! Back in January, I wrote about the 20 launches and landings we were most excited about in 2026. The list included things that were, at the time, officially scheduled to occur this year. I also gave my own view of the probability of each of these events actually happening before December 31. Halfway through the year, we can only count one of the events as completed, and that was NASA's Artemis II mission in April. Many are now scheduled for next year, proving again that delays are a constant in the space industry. A couple of them—such as the launch of NASA's Roman Space Telescope—do appear to be on track to happen soon.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Swift Boost Mission reaches orbit. A pioneering commercial mission to reboost the orbit of NASA's Swift astronomy satellite launched early Friday after attempts earlier in the week were thwarted by bad weather and a technical issue. The Link servicing satellite developed by Katalyst Space Technologies soared to orbit on the tip of a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket that dropped from the belly of a modified L-1011 jetliner over the remote Pacific Ocean. Mission managers called off two launch attempts Tuesday and Wednesday due to poor weather around the L-1011's staging base on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. On Thursday, "a launch vehicle issue temporarily prevented teams from deploying the rocket" after takeoff of the L-1011.

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This week Ars hosted a live discussion with two space industry experts about the aftermath of the catastrophic explosion of the New Glenn rocket in late May.

Along with Ars Technica Space Editor Eric Berger; the director of research at Quilty Space, Caleb Henry; and the host of the Main Engine Cut Off podcast, Anthony Colangelo, spoke about various topics. Chief among them was the implications of this failure for NASA's attempt to land humans on the Moon for the Artemis IV mission. Blue Origin and SpaceX are both building landers to support this goal and the rockets to deliver them to the Moon.

During the conversation, Berger reported that the current Blue Origin "architecture" for a human mission would require four launches of new variant of the New Glenn rocket, known as 9x4, because it has nine first stage engines, and four upper stage engines. This is a more powerful version than the "7x2" variant that exploded a little more than a month ago. Blue Origin has not set a target date for the 9x4 rocket's debut, but some sources have indicated the company is targeting late 2027 or early 2028.

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© Blue Origin

The lovefest from Musk’s conservative fans completely overlooks the unscrupulous tactics behind his immense wealth

For 12 glorious days in June, Elon Musk experienced something nobody else in the history of humankind has ever experienced: trillionaire status.

Did all those zeros make Musk happy? Did the army of children he has sired love him more? Did he find inner peace? We’ll never know because Musk was dragged back to being a boring old billionaire last Wednesday, after shares in Tesla and SpaceX plunged amid a broader tech sell-off.

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© Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP

© Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP

© Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP