Volatility is often the price of ambition
For the growing number of constellations being designed around Starship, the wild ups and downs in the early days of SpaceX's historic IPO have a familiar rhythm.
While some of the industry's most ambitious startups may not own a part of SpaceX, they are heavily invested in its success, gathering around the world's most powerful rocket despite its fair share of development setbacks.
Los Angeles-based Orbital, which recently emerged from stealth with $5 million to kickstart an orbital data center network, is banking on Starship's constellation-level deployment capability to launch 100,000 proposed satellites.
With a capacity of around 150 tons to low Earth orbit, Orbital founder and CEO Euwyn Poon said it would need around 1,000 Starships for the full constellation.
The dozen Starship test flights SpaceX has conducted to date have only been suborbital, though the company said in its May filing that it expects that rocket to start delivering payloads to orbit in the second half of 2026.
"It will get really nutty when Starship is launching every hour in 3 years," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said Feb. 19 on social media.
Interpreted literally, that would imply 8,760 Starship launches annually. Such a cadence would be important for helping SpaceX meet its own plans for 1 million orbital data centers, alongside larger and more powerful Starlink broadband satellites.
However, SpaceX at one point also expected to be operating Starship commercially in early 2021.
For Poon, Orbital's lean team of six employees is part of a strategy that will help the venture stay flexible as the launch market catches up with its ambitions.
"We're pretty realistic about the industry we're operating in and have built the company to be a bit more resilient to delays like that," he said.
"We're just not scaling until we can scale with Starship. For us, the next few years are about R&D and engineering, and getting the design right and as scalable as possible."
Blue Origin's New Glenn and other heavy-lift vehicles could eventually offer alternatives, but they remain even further from proving the kind of economics that emerging megaconstellation hopefuls are counting on.
"Ultimately I think SpaceX is ahead and will lead the way," Poon said, "but physics will win, and we will figure this out as an industry."
Another emerging player betting on Starship is Starcloud, the Redmond, Washington-based orbital data center startup that recently raised $170 million for a network of 88,000 satellites.
SpaceX's valuation rocketed to nearly $3 trillion shortly after its June 12 Nasdaq debut, briefly surpassing Amazon, the internet giant deploying its own broadband constellation to take on Starlink.
However, the valuation dropped below Amazon a week later as investors digested SpaceX taking on more debt - despite just raising $75 billion in the world's largest IPO - and is now around $2.2 trillion.
Only a small amount of SpaceX stock is available for public trading, making the shares susceptible to big swings as insiders remain subject to lockups.
Mike Alves, founder and manager of the VIDA Vision Fund that invested in SpaceX before it went public, said he expects volatility to remain part of the company's stock market story in the short term, particularly because of an unusually large retail allocation that brings in buyers more likely to chase the IPO's momentum, or retreat quickly on negative headlines.
"Not to say that we are protected from it," he said, but "we understand that there's going to be volatility, whereas the retail investor, most of the time, they'll get emotional" and buy and sell at the wrong time.
"I don't plan on selling for a long time," he added.
Poon said that patience is also showing up among venture capital investors.
"It is an interesting counter to what's happening in the software AI world," he said.
While some software firms have seen users and revenue surge overnight, they can also be left more vulnerable to competition.
"If you can scale, so can the team down the street, and I think that a lot of people are now seeing the returns at SpaceX and Anduril and other deep tech companies - they realize that hardware can be a moat," he said.
Today's space investors "understand that revenue is not going to come until 2029 at scale," he added. "It's a different type of patient capital."
This article first appeared in the July 2026 issue of SpaceNews Magazine.
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