SpaceX confirmed on Monday that it is targeting Thursday, July 23, for another launch attempt of Starship Flight 13, the company's 13th overall test of the massive rocket and its second in the Version 3 configuration. The announcement came via a social media post from the company, which Elon Musk retweeted with a brief clarification after initially misstating the date as Friday. "Next launch attempt hopefully Thursday," Musk wrote in a follow-up, correcting what he described as a self-evident typo.
The rescheduled launch follows a dramatic abort on July 16, when a 90-minute launch window opened at 6:45 p.m. ET from Starbase, Texas, and the automated countdown was halted within minutes after several Raptor 3 engines failed to ignite at the moment of spark. Musk confirmed two of the Raptor 3 engines were removed and replaced in the days following the abort, and engineers have cleared the vehicle for what the company characterized as a confident return-to-flight attempt. Flight 13's primary mission objectives include successful stage separation, a boostback burn, and a controlled offshore landing of the Super Heavy booster in the Gulf of Mexico, as well as the first-ever deployment of Starlink V3 satellites from the Starship upper stage.
SPCX shares have been under sustained pressure since the July 16 abort, recording a sixth consecutive session of losses as of Monday. The stock had briefly dipped below its $135 IPO price — set in the company's June 12 debut on the Nasdaq that raised approximately $85.7 billion in total, the largest IPO on record — and closed around $131 in the days following the scrubbed launch. Analysts at Wedbush and other firms covering the stock maintain a constructive long-term view, with an average price target of approximately $244.50 implying nearly 100% upside from current levels.
Beyond the scrubbed launch, investors are navigating a more structural near-term overhang. The first batch of insider holdings, representing as much as 20% of shares, faces lock-up expiration ahead of SpaceX's first public quarterly earnings report scheduled for early August. Analysts and market observers note that short-term capital sensitive to the dilution risk from that expiration may be choosing to exit positions in the mid-to-late July window rather than hold through the lock-up date, adding a technical selling layer to the news-driven pressure from the launch abort.
The AI compute business that SpaceX has been building around its Colossus data center complex provides a separate fundamental tailwind. SpaceX has entered commercial compute rental agreements with Anthropic, Google, and Reflection AI, with Reflection's deal alone valued at approximately $150 million per month starting July 1 and potentially totaling $6.3 billion through 2029. Fortune reported this weekend that Anthropic and Google are each renting GPU capacity at Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 respectively, with combined annual contract value potentially exceeding $26 billion — more than SpaceX's total revenue in its most recent full fiscal year. Wedbush Securities noted that these rental agreements, combined with the scale of the Colossus complex, may signal a future buildout of an additional data center, positioning SpaceX alongside traditional cloud providers in the race to sell scarce GPU capacity to AI developers.
A successful Flight 13 on Thursday would provide a near-term catalyst to stabilize SPCX shares and demonstrate the Raptor 3 engine reliability needed for the Artemis moon mission program and commercial Starlink expansion, both of which are tied to Starship operational status.