It has been a bumpy month for SpaceX and now it just turned into an even bumpier day

Thursday evening SpaceX's Starship sat fully loaded with propellant in its Texas Orbital Launch Site when engines were started then it all went silent. The flight computer aborted the launch when it determined, at T-zero, that a number of the Super Heavy booster Raptor engines had not ignited.

Just minutes later on X, Elon Musk confirmed the news: some of the engines failed to light at all. The rocket would stand down while crews began to drain its propellant. Two Raptors will be removed and replaced, with a next shot likely early next week.

This is routine for the rocket itself. The system performed as designed with former automatic aborts which kept the vehicle whole. But it was a lousy time for a stock that has spent weeks working its way down.

SPCX ended at $131.11, off another 3.1%, further below the $135 level it opened on June 12. That's nearly 42% lower than the roughly $225 high it reached a couple of days after its record $86 billion IPO, in an offering that momentarily made Musk the world's first trillionaire.

It did not limit the scrub to SpaceX.

AST SpaceMobile plummeted 17%, Alphabet slid 4.4% and the renewed rout from high-growth tech pulled S&P 500 and Nasdaq futures down while VIX rose almost 7%. Even Bitcoin lost around 1.3% as money moved into the safety zone. When a company worth $1.73 trillion falls, it moves the indexes it sits inside.

Some of what is going on here is mechanical.

Just 4% of SpaceX equity trades, so the price moves up and down quickly in potential wide ranges on low volume. The rushed inclusion last week into the Nasdaq-100, courtesy of a rule change that shortened the time before new listings can be included in passive index funds, brought in passive indexing capital and then immediately forced the stock lower once more. And there's a lockup expiration event due which will enable insiders to sell for the first time, creating supply in a stock that is already having trouble finding buyers.

However, lurking behind the mechanics is an actual question regarding the story that investors purchased back in June. The year saw SpaceX lose $4.9 billion in 2025 and another $4.28 billion in Q1 of 2026, but a growing part of that is being devoted to AI ambitions instead of the launch business that put it on the map out there. The bull case revolves around Starship, which SpaceX must get to fly on a regular and reliable basis in order to launch its larger Starlink V3 satellites (and do so for less). One scrub doesn't endanger that. A slow launch cadence would.

Which is why analysts are looking beyond any single flight.

But both progress and setbacks will come, so JPMorgan's Seth Seifman advised its investors to focus not on the outcome of any one test but rather how fast SpaceX can return rocket components to action. The Wall Street targets still range from Morgan Stanley's $300 down to Morningstar's $63, illustrating just how unresolved the valuation argument continues to be.

For now the 20 Starlink V3 satellites remain on the ground as engineers replace both engines. The stock will probably be traded on that cadence question for months. Now a little note on SpaceX: not every single launch has to be perfect. It wants that distance between attempts to remain small as well, and right now the market is watching the clock more closely than it is the rocket.

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