Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas said that a single Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ:SPCX) Starship launch will be equivalent to a month’s worth of Falcon 9 rocket launches.
The ‘Biggest Test’ For Starship’s Reusable Capabilities
On Sunday, influencer and Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) investor Sawyer Merritt shared a note by Jonas via a post on the social media platform X. In the note, Jonas said that the upcoming Starship Flight Test 15 was “shaping up as SpaceX’s biggest test towards Starship reusability since the IPO.”
The analyst then said that the upcoming weeks would help “profoundly evolve investor expectations” about SpaceX’s role in “converting energy into intelligence” through robots.
Jonas said that SpaceX would reduce “launch costs by a further order of magnitude” with Starship and “significantly” increase mass to orbit, which could “create new economies and new demand for materials, devices and services on earth that currently do not exist.”
He also pointed to Starship being able to put a lot more payload to orbit following Starlink V3 satellites deployed in orbit during the Flight Test 14. “Going forward, each Starship launch of Starlink is equivalent to min 1 month worth of Falcon 9 launches,” Jonas said, referring to Starlink capacity.
“Each Starlink V3 has 10x the downlink capacity of the v2 mini sats currently launching on Falcon 9 every ~3 days. This means Flight 15 would equate to 1-2+ months of F9 launches,” the analyst said.
Jonas had earlier issued a $300 price target for SpaceX, saying that the company’s stock looks “unusually cheap” when factoring in the multiple interlinked businesses under SpaceX. TV Host Jim Cramer also backed SpaceX last week, saying that the commercial spaceflight company’s compute renting agreements were particularly profitable.
On the other hand, CEO Elon Musk, last week, said that an “earthquake” was about to hit the U.S. telecom industry as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) greenlit SpaceX’s acquisition of the 800 MHz frequency band for the Starlink Mobile cellular service.
Elon Musk Touts Six-Week Timeline
Musk shed light on the launch timeline of the Starship Flight Test 15 during the X Takeover event hosted by the Tesla Owners Silicon Valley. Musk, during his appearance, said that the engine glitch during the Flight Test 14 was not a big issue and that it was “pretty easy to remedy.”
Musk also said that the heat shield on the rocket was “extremely robust” and that the next “big milestone” was being able to catch the rocket, which he had said SpaceX would attempt to do in the days preceding the Flight Test 14.
“We don’t know the exact launch date, but probably about four weeks or so, four to six weeks,” Musk said as he expanded on the exact date of the Starship Flight Test 15.
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