SpaceX is aiming for the Moon, in more ways than one. The company just made its public debut in the largest initial public offering (IPO) in history, with the company raising some $75 billion and being valued at an almost ridiculous $1.77 trillion. This should give it the funds to deploy its massive Starship rocket, a crucial vehicle for SpaceX’s launch plans. thousands of data center satellites and land humans on the moon.
“This is a watershed moment for the space sector,” says Raphael Roettgen, founding partner of US space investment firm E2MC Ventures, which has invested in SpaceX.
This successful listing will be music to the ears not only of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who is now on the verge of becoming the world’s first billionaire, but also of NASA; the space agency’s Artemis program is betting big on SpaceX and its Starship rocket to transport astronauts to and from the lunar surface as early as 2028. The IPO represents “a significant cash inflow, which is good for any company,” says Pierre Lionnet, a space economist at Eurospace in France. “They will use this money to fund many things, including data centers on Earth, data centers put into orbit, and finalizing the development of Starship.”
On supporting science journalism
If you enjoy this article, please consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribe. By purchasing a subscription, you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
SpaceX’s stock market debut came after months, if not years, of accumulation. Last week, SpaceX announced it would offer 555.6 million shares to investors at a price of $135 each. Before that, it raised money from venture capital firms, private funding rounds and clients including NASA and other government agencies, as well as the approximately 10 million people who now use the company’s services. Starlink Internet Service.
Going public gives SpaceX access to a potentially much larger pool of money. “Once you are listed on the stock exchange, you can continue to access the public markets,” says Roettgen.
One of the reasons SpaceX went public is to raise money to build fleets of orbital data centers. In a prospectus for investors filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on May 20, the company said that artificial intelligence represents a market with a potential value of $26.5 trillion. SpaceX merged with another Musk companyxAI, in February at exploit this market.
SpaceX is looking to launch as many as one million satellites for data centers moving AI computing needs from Earth to space, where less stringent and looser regulation could enable faster growth and even greater profits. On Monday, Musk proposed an overview of AI1SpaceX’s first satellite dedicated to AI, a massive GPU-equipped spacecraft equipped with solar panels, heat-dissipating radiators and laser communications systems. To build its fleet, the company says it needs the fully reusable Starship, the largest rocket in history, to deploy such satellites as quickly and cheaply as possible.
Starship still hasn’t worked perfectly after more than three years of test flightsHowever. “The SpaceX conglomerate is entirely dependent on a single point of failure, namely Starship,” Lionnet explains. Although ultimately intended to take people to Mars, in the short term, Starship is essential “for these data centers in space to come to fruition,” he adds.
NASA will also be closely monitoring the IPO. Earlier this week, the space agency announced the four astronauts in its Artemis III assignment. Scheduled for the second half of 2027, this mission will see an Orion spacecraft dock with two potential lunar landers in Earth orbit: one, the Blue Moon lander from Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin, and the other Starship. In the Artemis IV mission planned for 2028, NASA plans to use one of these landers to return humans to the surface of the Moon for the first time since 1972.
A devastating blast of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket on May 28, however, could put more emphasis on Starship, which has not fully reached orbit on any of its 12 test flights. “Starship is so important, but it’s obviously too late and there are still many issues that need to be resolved,” says Lionnet. “This is clearly concerning for NASA’s Artemis program.”
The IPO could give SpaceX the funds it needs to perfect Starship, also benefiting Artemis. “Starship is a big [capital expenditure] “Starship is the bridge between today’s SpaceX and the next phase of the company that its IPO valuation entails.”
SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.
The prospectus SpaceX used to woo investors also provides an interesting window into the company’s operations, including its launch and operating costs, which were not previously public. “For industry analysts, the public documents have been great,” says Alistair Schofield, space strategy consultant at NebuLink in England. “By going public, SpaceX was forced to reveal closely guarded trade secrets that once cost thousands of dollars to estimate, completely for free.”
This includes the amount of revenue SpaceX makes from its launches, of which it achieved 165 in 2025most thanks to its partially reusable Falcon 9 rocket. Lionnet says the prospectus showed that while launching a Falcon 9 could cost a customer between $60 million and $70 million, for SpaceX the cost was only $15 million to $20 million per launch.
Few would have predicted that SpaceX would become such a colossus when it first reached orbit with its Falcon 1 rocket in 2008. “There were a lot of skeptics,” says John Logsdon, professor emeritus of space policy at George Washington University. Musk “proved that perspective wrong,” he says. “He ultimately did most of what he said he was going to do.”
It is unclear whether this IPO will result in increased funding for other space companies. “This may well exhaust most of the venture capital willing to invest in commercial space,” says Logsdon. “I don’t think there will be any substantial fallout for other businesses.”
Anderson disagrees. “For the first time, every institutional investor, every index fund, every retail investor has a direct, liquid way to own a piece of the space economy, which is going to attract huge amounts of new capital into the sector,” he says. “We’ve seen this happen in other industries before: When the company that defines a category goes public, it legitimizes the entire category. SpaceX is a rising tide that lifts all boats.”
Regardless, for SpaceX, the IPO marks another major milestone in the company’s nearly quarter-century history. “This IPO, in a sense, is a vote of confidence in Musk and his associates,” Logsdon said. Perhaps the best is yet to come.