SpaceX is heading toward another crucial Starship test flight just as Wall Street is getting louder about the company’s long-term upside. The launch, paired with a fresh bullish call from Evercore ISI, puts the spotlight on how much is riding on SpaceX’s giant rocket, its satellite business, and the broader plan to turn all of it into a much bigger machine.
Flight 13 of Starship is set to lift off no earlier than Thursday from Starbase in Texas, with a launch window around 6:45 p.m. EDT. This will be the second outing for Starship Version 3, a larger and more capable design that only showed up less than two months ago. The pressure is real because the last flight in May ended with the Super Heavy booster taking heat damage during separation, slipping into an unexpected position, and then failing to relight enough engines for a safe return.
That matters because Starship is not just another rocket. SpaceX has spent years refining it as the backbone for heavy-lift missions, satellite deployment, and the kind of deep-space ambitions that sound futuristic until you realize they are already baked into the company’s roadmap.
The company has been pushing this vehicle hard since 2023, and every launch is another step in figuring out what works, what breaks, and what needs to change. With a rocket this big, there is no faking progress. Either the hardware holds together, or the engineering team gets another blunt lesson in what the atmosphere can do to overconfident metal.
At the same time, the stock story has been rough. SpaceX shares have been under pressure since going public on June 12, dropping nearly 7% in the last five days and falling more than 38% from their peak of $225.64. That kind of slide usually gets investors nervous, but Evercore ISI thinks the market may have gone too far in the wrong direction.
The firm kicked off coverage on Tuesday with an Outperform rating and a $230 price target, which would imply about 65% upside from the last close of $139.14. That is a bold call, but it fits the bigger argument that SpaceX is not a one-trick rocket shop. It is a stack of connected businesses, and each one feeds the next.
Analyst Kutgun Maral called SpaceX “an extraordinary company on a real path to reshaping the future of humanity,” and said its pieces reinforce one another. “[SpaceX is] a single, vertically integrated machine that turned reusable, low-cost launch into a near-monopoly on access to orbit, used that edge to build Starlink into a scaled, cash generative connectivity franchise, and is now pointing the same flywheel at AI infrastructure,” he wrote.
That is the heart of the bullish case. Launch is the foundation, Starlink is the cash engine, and the newer bets are designed to widen the moat even further. Maral sees opportunity in launch, the Starlink broadband network, satellite-to-phone mobile service, terrestrial computing, and eventually orbital data centers, treating them like pieces of the same strategy instead of isolated experiments.
Evercore’s model is aggressive in a way that tells you how seriously it is taking the story. It projects revenue and EBITDA growing at 106% and 157%, respectively, through 2028, while operating margins expand from 35% to 69% over that same stretch. Maral said he believes “growth can accelerate rather than fade as the decade wears on.”
Still, the optimism comes with a clear warning label. Maral said there is “a great deal left to prove out,” and that is not a minor footnote. Starship has yet to prove it can scale smoothly, Starlink’s broadband and mobile products still need broader traction, and orbital computing remains a future bet that will not be tested until 2029 or later.
Then there is the AI angle, which sounds huge but still has to fight for relevance in a crowded field. SpaceX’s Grok and Cursor AI products need to earn real ground against established enterprise rivals, and that is never easy. For now, Thursday’s launch is one of the clearest pressure points in the whole story, because it will say a lot about whether SpaceX is still pushing the edge or just burning fuel chasing it.
