SpaceX Deploys First V3 Starlink Satellites but Loses Another Super Heavy Booster, Extending Post-IPO Stock Slide

SpaceX Deployed Its First V3 Starlink Satellites on Friday. They Burned Up 20 Minutes Later.

For roughly 20 minutes on Friday, SpaceX's newest Starlink satellites communicated with ground stations from space, proving that the company's third-generation satellite design functions in orbit. Then they burned up in the atmosphere, because the rocket that carried them there still cannot reach Earth orbit 1.

That gap between functional technology and orbital reality is the defining condition of Starship, SpaceX's next-generation rocket. And it just became a financial problem.

The 13th Starship test flight, launched Friday, delivered genuine progress on one end of the rocket and familiar failure on the other. The upper stage, which SpaceX calls "the Ship," deployed the first V3 Starlink satellites without losing any engines, survived atmospheric reentry, and performed a simulated landing in the Indian Ocean roughly one hour after liftoff. For the first time, the Ship stayed intact after tipping into the water instead of breaking apart, letting SpaceX use a drone to closely inspect its heat-shield tiles 1.

The Super Heavy booster failed for the second consecutive V3 flight. It could not properly fire all the engines needed for its simulated landing burn and exploded after a faster-than-expected impact with the water in the Gulf of Mexico 1.

This was the first Starship launch since SpaceX went public in June, in what TechCrunch calls the largest IPO in history 1. SpaceX's new shareholders have been along for every explosion since.

Shares have fallen from a post-IPO peak above $200 to $115 at Friday's close. After the booster failure, they dropped another 2 percent in after-hours trading before paring some of those losses 1.

The slide tracks a pattern. A previous attempt at this same flight aborted immediately after ignition due to engine failures, prompting SpaceX to replace six engines before Friday's launch. Two consecutive Super Heavy boosters have now failed on the V3 configuration. And the rocket still cannot deliver its cargo to orbit 1.

TechCrunch frames SpaceX's development philosophy as a "fly, fail, fix approach" 1. That methodology is not incidental to how the company builds. It is how the company builds. The difference is that "fail" now moves a stock price in after-hours trading.

The financial stakes extend beyond sentiment. Starlink is, per TechCrunch, the only profitable part of SpaceX's business, and deploying more capable V3 satellites improves the economics of the company's space internet network. SpaceX has said that launching 60 V3 satellites on Starship represents a potential twenty-fold increase in downlink capacity compared to those deployed by a single Falcon 9 1.

But the source notes it is not clear whether SpaceX can capture those gains if Starship expends the Super Heavy booster rather than reusing it. SpaceX's IPO filing warned that without a fully reusable Starship, Starlink's buildout would proceed more slowly and at greater expense 1.

Friday's flight compressed all of this into a single mission. A satellite deployment that doubled as a dead end, because the rocket cannot hold orbit. An upper-stage recovery that was technically flawless and commercially irrelevant, because the booster that lifts the upper stage exploded on impact. A stock price that fell further because the company that once answered only to its founders now answers to a market that has never priced an exploding-rocket development cycle.

SpaceX will keep flying. Its own methodology depends on iteration, and Friday's upper-stage performance was its best yet. But every booster that hits the water is now two things at once: data for the engineers building the next prototype, and evidence for shareholders still calibrating what they own. The fly-fail-fix loop works. Whether the market can stomach it at $115 a share is a separate engineering problem entirely.