SpaceX Stock Rises 5.89% on Starship Flight 14 Plans

SpaceX (SPCX) stock rose 5.89% to $151.94 on Wednesday morning following the company's announcement of Starship Flight 14 scheduled for September 22, marking its first orbital attempt. The market cap surpassed $2 trillion from Tuesday's close of $143.49 as investors interpret this flight as a transition of Starship from experimental to revenue-generating satellite missions.

The 75-minute launch window opens after 8 a.m. CT at Starbase in South Texas, pending regulatory approval. Starship will ascend to approximately 275 kilometers, orbit Earth six times for about 10 hours before landing in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile, with the Super Heavy booster falling into the Gulf of Mexico—neither stage being recovered.

The payload consists of 26 Starlink V3 satellites, marking the first operational deployment by Starship. Three of these carry cameras to photograph heat shields; previous flights and a July weather-delayed attempt remained suborbital.

Smaller competitors like Germany's Isar Aerospace succeeded in orbital insertion during their second flight this month. Ark Invest's Cathie Wood shared research estimating Starlink generates $19 million annually at 1 terabit per second, with fully loaded Starship capable of carrying 61 Tbps. Her comments came as investors focus on SpaceX's three business segments: Space, Starlink, and AI Compute.

Analyst Adam Spatakos of Motley Fool suggested the AI segment could drive shares to $3 trillion. Anthropic pays approximately $125 million monthly for Colossus capacity, while Google will add about $920 million monthly starting this fall. Of 34 analysts surveyed by TipRanks, 26 recommend buying with an average target of $232.07 (range: $75-$800).