Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ:SPCX) Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen says Starship will generate revenue for the first time later this month, as Elon Musk’s space company moves the giant rocket beyond demonstration flights.
Flight 14 will carry production Starlink V3 satellites and could become Starship’s first orbital mission.
Starship Moves Into Production
"We’ve got another flight coming up later this month for Flight 14, which for the CFO is very exciting because it’s going to be a revenue-generating flight," Johnsen said Thursday at Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia and Technology Conference.
"I love the demonstration flights, and now I’m excited that we’re moving into production cadence and flying production V3 Starlink satellites to orbit on our next flight," he added.
Flight 13 deployed 20 functional V3 demonstration satellites in July on a suborbital trajectory, rather than placing them into an operational orbit.
SpaceX says its V3 satellites could allow each Starship launch to add roughly 20 times the capacity of a Falcon 9 Starlink launch.
Johnsen’s comments came during the same appearance in which he revealed another compute hosting deal worth about $1.11 billion per month starting Dec. 1, strengthening his confidence in SpaceX reaching $100 billion in annual recurring revenue by year-end.
Traders Back September Launch
Polymarket traders give Flight 14 an 82% chance of launching by Sept. 30 and an 80% chance of Starship completing a controlled ocean splashdown. Traders are far less confident SpaceX will pull off a tower catch, putting just a 7% chance on the launch tower’s "chopsticks" catching Super Heavy.
Johnsen said crews towed Flight 13’s second stage back to shore after splashdown, giving SpaceX engineers a chance to inspect how the heat shield held up before Flight 14. He added that SpaceX hopes to get a shot at bringing back both the first and second stages later this year.
Pivotal Research analyst Jeffrey Wlodarczak recently initiated coverage of SpaceX with a Buy rating and $220 price target. He said a successful investment case at the company’s roughly $2 trillion enterprise value "rests almost entirely" on solving Starship reusability.
SPCX shares are trading around $148 this morning.
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