Elon Musk's SpaceX Flies 20 Starlink V3 Satellites Tonight. The Stock Sits 49% Below Its High.
Key Points
Starship Flight 13 has a 90-minute launch window opening at 6:45 p.m. ET Friday, carrying the first 20 Starlink V3 satellites.
Each V3 satellite delivers about 10 times the downlink capacity of the current generation.
SpaceX shares trade about 1% above their all-time low as of this writing.
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At 6:45 p.m. ET tonight, SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) gets a third try at its most consequential launch as a public company. Starship Flight 13 has a 90-minute window to lift off from the company's Starbase site in Texas, carrying the first 20 next-generation Starlink V3 satellites.
"Some of the engines didn't start, triggering an automatic launch abort," CEO Elon Musk wrote on X after the first attempt on July 16. SpaceX swapped out engines, and then weather postponed the second try on Thursday.
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The stock could use the win. Shares sit at about $112 as of this writing, roughly 1% above their all-time low of $110.85 and well below the $135 price from June's initial public offering (IPO).
Image source: The White House.
What tonight actually decides is the timeline of Starlink's next capacity leap. Each V3 satellite is designed to deliver about 1 terabit per second of downlink capacity, roughly 10 times what the current generation of satellites provides. A full Starship load of about 60 of them would add roughly 60 terabits per second to the network, about 20 times what a Falcon 9 launch delivers today. That capacity is what lets a satellite network sell faster service to more subscribers without congestion. It's the foundation of the company's plan to turn Starlink into a gigabit-speed internet provider.
The satellites can only ride on Starship, though, and Starship has kept them grounded for eight days now. The 20 satellites aboard are a deployment test: They will extend their solar arrays and antennas and attempt to connect with the larger Starlink constellation. Until that demonstration works, the V3 capacity ramp stays theoretical.
A successful flight tonight won't settle the argument over the stock, which still carries a market value near $1.5 trillion against a business that loses money. The next major financial update arrives Aug. 4, when SpaceX is scheduled to report its first quarterly results as a public company. But a clean deployment would show the next generation of the company's biggest product working in space before those numbers land. After six weeks of nearly uninterrupted decline, that would count as the first hard piece of good news this stock has had.
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Daniel Sparks and his clients do not have positions in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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