SpaceX is about to launch its biggest rocket ever. Then it is taking the company public.
The timing is not an accident.
Friday's launch will be the 12th Starship test flight. It debuts the new V3 vehicle that SpaceX scrubbed on Thursday.
The 408-foot rocket is designed to be fully reusable. SpaceX says it will one day carry 100 metric tons to orbit with airline-style turnaround between flights.
The flight comes days after SpaceX filed its IPO prospectus on Wednesday. So investors get one last look at the rocket before deciding what the company is worth.
SpaceX has spent more than $15 billion building Starship. A clean test flight is the kind of pitch that does not fit in an S-1, the formal IPO document filed with the SEC.
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Here is the contradiction inside the IPO.
SpaceX's rocket business lost $657 million last year on $4.1 billion in sales. Starlink, the satellite internet arm, brought in $11.4 billion in sales and $4.4 billion in operating profit.
That made Starlink 61% of total sales in 2025 and 69% in the first quarter of this year.
In short: Starlink prints the money, and Starship is what investors are being asked to believe in.
Elon Musk's new pay package is tied to that same bet. It only fully pays out if SpaceX hits a $7.5 trillion market cap and lands a million people on Mars.
SpaceX's smaller AI segment, which runs under the SpaceXAI brand and includes the xAI business, lost nearly $2.5 billion in the first quarter alone. It lost more than $6 billion across all of 2025.
That puts even more weight on Starlink to fund the rest of the company while Starship matures.
SpaceX has said Starship is the only way to grow Starlink fast enough. The current Falcon 9 rockets can only put up so many satellites at a time.
The new constellation needs Starship to fly often and reliably. Starlink's user base more than doubled to 10.3 million in the first quarter from a year earlier.
NASA is also waiting on the rocket. Its Artemis IV mission, set for early 2028, plans to use Starship as the lander that takes astronauts back to the moon.
SpaceX is targeting up to $75 billion in the IPO at a valuation around $1.75 trillion. The company plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX.
The new V3 vehicle is launching from a brand-new pad at SpaceX's Starbase, Texas facility. It is the same site Musk turned into an official company town last year.
A failed test would not kill the IPO. But it would force SpaceX to lean harder on the prospectus to make its case.
Either way, Friday's flight is the loudest line in the pitch.
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