SpaceX Starship abort triggers $100 billion share slide; next launch attempt Monday

Abort sequence

The 13th test flight of SpaceX's Starship was scrubbed on Thursday after four of the Super Heavy booster's 33 Raptor engines failed to ignite. The automated safety system triggered an abort roughly one second before liftoff from Starbase, Texas, shutting down the engines that had already started. It was the first time a fully stacked Starship had lit its engines and then aborted, according to Shana Diez, SpaceX's director of Starship engineering.

While similar to a wet dress rehearsal, this was the first time a fully stacked Starship lit its engines and then aborted.

Elon Musk wrote on X that the abort was triggered because "some of the engines didn't start." On Friday, SpaceX hoisted the Starship upper stage off the booster and announced plans to replace two engines "to be confident of a good flight," Musk said.

Market reaction

The abort sent newly public SpaceX shares down 6% to $124.30, erasing roughly $100 billion in market value. The stock had already been sliding from a post-IPO high of $225.64 and fell below the $135 IPO price on Wednesday. The scrub accelerated the decline, marking the first time shares traded below the listing price since the company went public in June.

Chad Anderson, CEO of Space Capital and a SpaceX investor since 2017, dismissed the day-to-day price action as noise.

If this is how the market reacts to a precautionary abort, I can't wait to see how it responds to a successful flight. Zoom out and none of this changes the thesis: we're in the early innings of a multi-decade infrastructure cycle, and Starship is the centerpiece.

Musk's personal fortune also dipped below $1 trillion, with Forbes estimating it at around $838 billion.

Next steps

SpaceX is targeting the next launch attempt for early next week. The company's website states Starship could fly "as early as Monday, July 20." The two engines will be replaced before then, and the launch team will conduct further checks. The abort demonstrated that the automatic safety system functioned as designed, preventing a liftoff with insufficient thrust that could have endangered the mission.

Mission profile

The Starship system, standing about 124 meters tall, consists of the Super Heavy booster and the Starship upper stage, both designed for full reusability. The V3 version debuted on flight 12 in May, which experienced anomalies including an incorrect booster return manoeuvre. Thursday's mission was to carry 20 next-generation Starlink satellites on a roughly one-hour suborbital trajectory over the Gulf of Mexico and into the Indian Ocean. Neither stage was to be recovered; both would have ended with controlled splashdowns. The satellites were intended to communicate with existing Starlink spacecraft and photograph the heat shield before re-entering the atmosphere.

NASA and lunar ambitions

Starship is central to NASA's plans to return astronauts to the Moon. The agency has contracted both SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop lunar landers. Under the current schedule, the Artemis III crew will practice docking with the landers in Earth orbit, and the Artemis IV mission, no earlier than 2028, aims to land two astronauts near the lunar south pole. The Starship test programme remains a critical path for those timelines.