SPCX Since the IPO: What Two Months of Trading Tell Us, and the H2 2026 Outlook

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Update (September 28, 2026): Flight 14 flew on September 28. SpaceX reports that Starship reached orbit for the first time, deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites and splashed down in the Pacific after about 3 hours in orbit, and that the Super Heavy booster splashed down in the Gulf. No catch of either stage was planned or made. The Flight 14 scenarios below were written before the flight and are left as written. See our Flight 14 report.

Update (September 24, 2026): Since this was written, SpaceX published its plan for Starship Flight 14. It was the first planned orbital flight of Starship (all 13 flights to that date, including Flight 13, were suborbital), then targeted for no earlier than September 28, 2026, pending FAA approval, and it was to deploy 26 Starlink V3 satellites. No ship catch was among its published objectives, and its booster was to land offshore. The late-August target mentioned below was never a SpaceX date. See our Flight 14 preview and the Starship tracker.

Two months ago, on June 12, 2026, SpaceX priced the largest initial public offering in history: $135 per share, roughly $75 billion raised, at a valuation of about $1.78 trillion. In our pre-IPO analysis in March, we asked whether a trillion-dollar-plus valuation was defensible. The market has now spent two months answering: loudly, and in both directions.

Today SPCX trades at $140, a market capitalization of $1.84 trillion (SpaceNexus market data, synced August 15). That single number hides one of the most dramatic trading stories of the year: a euphoric debut, a spike, a grinding six-week retracement that briefly took the stock below its IPO price, and a sharp August recovery. Using the daily price history from our Space Stocks tracker, here is what actually happened, and a scenario framework, with stated assumptions, for the rest of 2026.

The Real Trajectory: Pop, Spike, Slide, Rebound

The headline arc ("debuted near $2.1 trillion, now $1.84 trillion") makes it sound like a gentle drift. The daily chart tells a rougher story, in four phases:

Phase 1: The pop (June 12)

Priced at $135, SPCX closed its first session at $160.95, up 19% on the day, for a debut-day market cap of roughly $2.1 trillion, instantly one of the most valuable companies on Earth, eclipsing Saudi Aramco's 2019 debut as the largest listing ever.

Phase 2: The spike (mid-to-late June)

In the frenzied first weeks of trading, shares ran far above the debut close, touching an intraday high of $225.64, which, at the current share count, would have implied nearly $3 trillion of market value. That level lasted moments, not weeks, and stands as the stock's post-IPO high-water mark.

Phase 3: The slide (July)

Then came the retracement. From a July 6 close of $160.42, SPCX fell in almost a straight line for the rest of the month: $145 by July 10, $124 by July 17, and a July 31 close of $108.37. The closing low came on August 5 at $108.27, with an intraday low of $104.83. Peak to trough, that is a decline of more than 50% from the June spike, about 33% below the first-day close, and, notably, about 20% below the $135 IPO price itself. Everyone who bought the debut was, briefly, underwater.

One honest observation from the data: Starship Flight 13's successful suborbital test on July 24 did not stop the slide. SPCX closed at $115.07 that day and kept falling for another week. Whatever was driving the July selling (profit-taking from the spike, valuation discipline, early-holder positioning ahead of future share supply), it was bigger than one good flight.

Phase 4: The rebound (August)

The turn came in early August, and it was violent. From the August 5 closing low of $108.27, the stock jumped to $133.11 on August 7, a 16% single-day move, and ran to a rebound high of $146.15 on August 12, a 35% recovery in five sessions. It has since settled to $141.29 (August 13) and $140.00 (August 14). We won't pretend our data can cleanly attribute daily moves to specific headlines; what the tape shows is that aggressive buyers showed up near $108 and absorbed the selling.

*Implied at the current share count (~13.2 billion shares). Source: SpaceNexus Space Stocks market data, August 15, 2026.

Net of all the drama: SPCX is up about 4% from its IPO price, down about 13% from its first-day close, and down about 38% from its speculative June high. For a two-month-old mega-cap listing, that is neither triumph nor disaster: it is a market groping toward a fair price for something it has never had to price before.

What Drove It: The Fundamental Backdrop

Price action aside, the underlying news flow during SPCX's first two months has been mostly constructive.

Starship's best test flight yet, and Flight 14 is the next catalyst

Flight 13 on July 24 was the program's cleanest ship flight yet, though still a suborbital test: Starship released its first 20 real Starlink V3 satellites on a suborbital path (they reentered by design) and made a soft splashdown, coming to rest intact in the Indian Ocean, while the booster made a hard splashdown in the Gulf. Flight 14, then reported for as early as late August, was the next catalyst; after Flight 13, Elon Musk said SpaceX would try to catch the ship with the tower on the next flight, the gating step toward full, rapid reusability of both stages (SpaceX's later Flight 14 plan does not include a ship catch; see the update above). Follow the campaign live on our Starship tracker. For SPCX, Starship cadence is the single most watchable operational metric: it drives Starlink V3 deployment economics, Artemis obligations, and the long-duration Mars narrative that underpins the valuation's outer years.

Starlink economics carry the valuation

Starlink remains the revenue engine of the business. Our platform does not yet carry audited public-company segment financials for SPCX, so the honest framing is that the figures investors lean on are still estimates: our March pre-IPO analysis cited roughly $15-16 billion in estimated total annual revenue, with Starlink contributing $10B+ annualized across 4.5 million-plus subscribers and growing at an estimated 40-50% a year. Whether those growth estimates hold, and how they translate into disclosed, audited numbers in SpaceX's early quarterly reports as a public company, is the fundamental question of H2. Subscriber growth, ARPU, and churn disclosures will matter more to SPCX's price than any single launch.

The defense relationship deepened, with a twist

On August 13, the Space Force awarded $60 million to five companies (Amazon Leo, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Rocket Lab, and York Space) to prototype and test connections to the SpaceX-built data network backbone (SpaceNews, via our news feed). Read that carefully: the dollars are trivial for a $1.8 trillion company, and they went to other vendors. The signal is double-edged. On one hand, SpaceX's network is literally the backbone the Pentagon is building around: a remarkable position of infrastructure entrenchment. On the other, the Space Force is deliberately cultivating a multi-vendor ecosystem on top of it, a reminder that procurement diversification is policy and that no incumbent's share of military space spending is guaranteed to grow unchecked.

Artemis obligations are on the clock

Under NASA's February 2026 restructure, Artemis III is now a crewed Earth-orbit docking test with Starship HLS and Blue Moon pathfinders, which NASA targets for mid-2027, with the first crewed lunar landing moving to Artemis IV in 2028. SpaceX's HLS contracts covered the landings then planned for Artemis III and IV, but NASA now says lander readiness will decide whether Starship or Blue Origin's Blue Moon flies the Artemis IV crew. H2 2026 progress on HLS hardware, propellant-transfer testing, and the demo timeline feeds directly into how the market handicaps SpaceX's highest-profile government program.

Valuation Context: What $1.84 Trillion Assumes

Here is where honesty matters most. On our March revenue estimates (roughly $15-16B), SPCX at $1.84 trillion trades at something like 110-120x trailing revenue, and we stress that this is an estimate-on-estimate calculation, not an audited multiple. Even assuming aggressive growth toward $20B+ of forward revenue, the multiple remains far above any large-cap comparable: hyperscale tech platforms trade at single-digit-to-low-teens revenue multiples; high-growth defense-tech at 15-25x.

The bull rejoinder is that a revenue multiple is the wrong lens: SPCX is priced as a platform monopoly on space access plus a compounding subscription business, where Starlink's subscriber curve, Starship's cost curve, and optionality on entirely new markets (in-space infrastructure, lunar logistics, Mars) justify paying for a decade of growth up front. That was exactly the sum-of-the-parts case in our March analysis, which found $1.0-1.75 trillion "defensible, depending on growth assumptions." The market's two-month verdict (overshoot to ~$3T implied, undershoot to ~$1.43T, settle near $1.84T) is essentially the tape agreeing that the defensible range is wide.

For scale: SPCX's $1.84 trillion is roughly 36 times the market cap of Rocket Lab (~$51B), the second-most-valuable pure-play space company. Our side-by-side SPCX vs. RKLB comparison breaks down how differently the market prices the two business models. And for how SpaceX's listing reshaped the whole sector's capital structure, see our new Top 50 Space Companies for H2 2026.

The H2 2026 Outlook: Scenarios, Not Predictions

Nobody, including us, knows where SPCX trades in December. What we can do is lay out scenarios tied to observable catalysts, with the assumptions stated plainly. Four things dominate the second half:

• Starship Flight 14 (then reported as NET late August; flew September 28): the first Starship to reach orbit, SpaceX reports.
• Starlink disclosures: subscriber, revenue, and margin numbers in SpaceX's early public reporting.
• Artemis milestones: HLS demo progress against the NET-late-2027 Artemis III timeline.
• Lockup expiry: standard U.S. IPO lockups run 180 days, which for a June 12 listing would put expiry around mid-December 2026. We have not verified SPCX's specific lockup terms, so treat this as "if standard", but if it applies, a large tranche of insider and employee shares becomes sellable just before year-end, a supply event markets typically price in ahead of time.

Bull scenario

Assumptions: Flight 14 catches the ship (or comes close enough to confirm the architecture), Starlink disclosures validate 40%+ growth, Artemis timeline holds. A clean tower catch would be the most visually undeniable technology milestone since the first booster catch, and confirmed Starlink momentum would let growth investors underwrite the multiple. In this world, a return toward the debut-day close ($160s, ~$2.1T) is the natural magnet, with the June highs only reachable on genuine euphoria. Even here, expect chop into December if the standard lockup applies.

Base scenario

Assumptions: Flight 14 is partially successful (booster catch, useful ship data, no upper-stage catch), Starlink numbers are good but not startling, no Artemis slip announced. The stock likely keeps doing what it has done since late July: carving out a range, roughly the $120s to $150s, while the valuation grows into itself and early holders' supply is absorbed. Two months of trading have arguably already found this equilibrium zone; the base case is simply more of it, with the lockup date capping year-end enthusiasm.

Bear scenario

Assumptions: Flight 14 suffers a visible failure, and/or Starlink disclosures show deceleration, and/or Artemis III slips publicly. The August low near $108 (and the $104.83 intraday print) is the level the market has already shown it will test when sentiment sours. A hardware failure plus a December supply event would be the toughest combination: mega-IPO history (Facebook, Aramco) is full of listings that spent a year or more below their debut before growing into the price. The July tape proved SPCX is not immune to that pattern: it has already traded below its IPO price once.

How to Follow It

A final word on process. The most common mistake with a stock like this is narrative-fitting: deciding SPCX is "obviously" the next mega-cap compounder or "obviously" the next Aramco, then reading every headline as confirmation. The first two months argue for humility: the same company, with the same fundamentals, has been priced anywhere from $1.4 trillion to nearly $3 trillion since June. Watch the four catalysts above, check the assumptions in whichever scenario you favor, and let the disclosed numbers, not the debut euphoria or the July gloom, update your view.

We track SPCX daily (price, market cap, and 30-day chart) on Space Stocks, alongside every public space name. The SpaceX company profile carries the full corporate picture, and the Starship tracker has Flight 14's full record. However H2 resolves, the deeper point from our March analysis has already come true: space now has a public benchmark, priced in real time, and the entire industry's cost of capital moves with it.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. All figures are drawn from SpaceNexus market data as of August 15, 2026, or are clearly labeled estimates; revenue figures for SPCX are estimates from our prior coverage, not audited disclosures. Consult a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions.