SpaceX will mark its historic launch on the inventory market Friday morning with a Falcon 9 rocket launch from Cape Canaveral Area Power Station in Florida.
This would be the 650th flight of SpaceX’s workhorse launcher up to now and the 68th Falcon 9 launch thus far in 2026. SpaceX will fly the Starlink 10-54 mission, which is able to ship 29 Starlink V2 Mini Optimized satellites into low Earth orbit.
Liftoff from Area Launch Advanced 40 is scheduled for 8:37 a.m. EDT (1237 UTC), which is lower than an hour earlier than the buying and selling day on the Nasdaq Inventory Market opens. The rocket will fly on a north-easterly trajectory upon leaving the pad.
Spaceflight Now may have stay protection starting about an hour previous to liftoff.
The forty fifth Climate Squadron forecast an 80 % probability for favorable liftoff on the opening of the window, which drops barely right down to 70 % because the window progresses. Meteorologists are looking forward to interference from cumulus clouds.
SpaceX will fly the Starlink 10-54 mission utilizing the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail quantity B1080. This will probably be its twenty seventh flight up to now after launching two crewed flights to the Worldwide Area Station for Axiom Area, two cargo missions to the ISS, and the European Area Company’s Euclid observatory.
A bit greater than eight minutes after liftoff, B1080 will goal a touchdown on the drone ship, ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas’, off the coast of South Carolina. If profitable, this would be the one hundred and fifty fifth touchdown on this vessel and the 623rd booster touchdown up to now for SpaceX.
This would be the fifty fifth devoted launch of Starlink satellites thus far this 12 months and the 56th general mission that includes the spacecraft. SpaceX has greater than 10,500 Starlink satellites in orbit.
Going public
The Starlink 10-54 mission marks a turning level for SpaceX because it turns into a publicly traded firm greater than 24 years after its founding in March 2002. It’s valuation is $1.77 trillion.
In its filings previous to the preliminary public providing, SpaceX introduced that it could be promoting 555.6 million shares of its Class A typical inventory at $135 every. That may enable the corporate to boost $75 billion.
The Starlink portion of SpaceX is a key driver of its enterprise. In its monetary disclosures to the U.S. Securities and Change Fee (SEC), SpaceX mentioned its earnings from its connectivity enterprise was about $2 billion in 2024 and $4.4 billion in 2025.
The corporate is betting on the long run capabilities of its Starship-Tremendous Heavy rocket to have the ability to launch not solely its Starship V3 satellites, but in addition the AI1 satellites to assist energy the xAI facet of SpaceX.
SpaceX additionally hopes Starship may also help unlock at the moment non-existent markets, like point-to-point rocket journey on Earth, asteroid mining, and large-scale infrastructure on Mars.
The corporate accomplished its twelfth Starship check flight in Might and is working in the direction of Flight 13 on a but personal launch date. It’s unclear precisely when the primary orbital launch try of Starship will happen, however SpaceX has acknowledged its intention to start deploying Starlink V3 satellites within the again half of 2026.
“Starship is designed to allow a step-function change in our launch functionality throughout reusability, payload capability, and launch cadence, and is the important thing enabler of our long-term development technique by unlocking solely new classes of missions,” SpaceX wrote in its prospectus doc.
SpaceX mentioned it spent about $3 billion in analysis and growth on Starship in 2025 and $930 million within the first three months of 2026.
