SPCX
Rocket fuel, but make it financial
SpaceX had a pretty busy week — the kind where the rockets are doing the heavy lifting and the stock chart is trying to keep up. Shares were higher Thursday after the company notched a key Starship milestone, landed a chunky supplier order, and benefited from a bigger slice of the Nasdaq-100 pie.
Starship finally does the grown-up thing
The headline act was Monday’s Starship Flight 14 from Starbase, Texas. It was the rocket’s first attempt to reach orbit, and it actually got there while deploying 26 Starlink V3 satellites — a big deal for SpaceX’s dream of making Starship a rapid-fire, reusable launch machine.
Not everything was perfect, because of course it wasn’t. One of the six Raptor engines shut down during ascent, the flight ended after roughly three hours instead of the nearly 10-hour profile planned, and the mission was expended rather than recovered. Still, in rocket land, “mostly worked” can be a very bullish sentence.
The launch calendar is getting crowded
SpaceX is also trying to pull off a rare triple-launch day, with Crew-13, Transporter-18, and a Falcon Heavy launch all lined up in a 13-hour window. If that actually happens, it’s the kind of operational flex that says: we are not just a moonshot company, we are a launch machine.
The supplier check got bigger too
Then there’s Filtronic, which announced a $68.1 million follow-on order from SpaceX for Cerus E-band power amplifier units. Filtronic said the gear supports low-Earth-orbit satellite communications and that the deal strengthens its relationship with SpaceX. Translation: SpaceX is still spending like a company that expects a very busy future.
Why investors care
More launches, bigger payload capability, and a larger supply-chain footprint are all signals that SpaceX’s execution story is getting louder. Add in the Nasdaq-100 weight bump, and you’ve got a recipe for more passive buying plus more investor attention.
Big picture: rockets are inherently messy, but the market tends to reward the company that keeps surviving the fireworks and still ships the product.