SpaceX Starship Is Orbital: Here's What It Means for Investors

It's official now: Space Exploration Technologies (NASDAQ: SPCX) has an orbital-class Starship launch system -- and it'll almost certainly be ready to take over when the Falcon 9 retires.

For months, SpaceX has been signaling plans to retire the Falcon 9 reusable rocket. This rocket is the workhorse of its space fleet, carrying more than 99% of SpaceX payloads to orbit. Along with Falcon 9 will go the Dragon spacecraft that SpaceX uses to carry astronauts to the International Space Station. Replacing both of these pieces of space hardware will be the Super Heavy booster and the Starship spacecraft, which SpaceX collectively (and confusingly) refers to simply as "Starship."

SpaceX's plan got its latest green light on Monday, Sept. 28, when the company launched Starship Flight 14 at 8:48 a.m. ET. Seven minutes later, Super Heavy made a successful water landing. Eighteen minutes and 20 seconds later, SpaceX mission control gave the go-ahead for the Starship to relight one engine and accelerate the spacecraft to orbital speed.

What did Starship do?

In SpaceX's first non-demonstration revenue-generating Starship launch, Flight 14 deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites for SpaceX's Starlink constellation. It was originally scheduled to orbit Earth six times over 10 hours before splashing down just west of Chile in the Pacific Ocean. SpaceX cut the flight short after completing one orbit, landing the spacecraft in the Pacific just three hours and eight minutes after launch.

Watch Starship Flight 14 https://t.co/uQKQvgbrch

-- SpaceX (@SpaceX) Sept. 28, 2026

What can Starship do?

As the largest rocketship on Earth, Starship stands 407 feet tall and is 29.5 feet in diameter, permitting it to carry enormous payloads to orbit in a single launch.

Rated payload to Low Earth Orbit exceeds 100 metric tons. Indeed, one team of companies building a replacement for the International Space Station (Starlab) has confirmed it has hired SpaceX to launch its entire space station to orbit in a single Starship.

Granted, that's probably a one-off. More commonly, SpaceX plans to use Starship to accelerate deployment of its Starlink satellite internet system, to begin deployments of artificial intelligence data centers in space, and, eventually, to send astronauts to the moon and colonists to Mars.

Its 100-ton payload to Low Earth Orbit will also enable Starship to carry many more satellites into orbit for SpaceX's launch customers -- about four times more payload per launch than the Falcon 9 could handle.

How much does Starship cost?

That is the $64 million question -- or, more precisely, the $74 million question. That's the current advertised price for a Falcon 9 launch. I've previously estimated the internal cost of a partially reusable Falcon 9 launch at about $12 million, implying the company may be earning as much as an 84% gross profit margin on its launches. (That's the difference between what it costs SpaceX to launch, versus the price it charges its customers.)

A fully reusable Starship will significantly change these economics. CEO Elon Musk has publicly mentioned a $10 million cost per launch for Starship. Furthermore, we know at least one early launch customer is paying $90 million for a Starship mission. That boosts the gross margin to 89% to start with.

What will the Starship launch price be?

That may be only the starting point. $90 million is already a low price relative to what launch providers such as Arianespace and United Launch Alliance charge -- and Starship can carry three to four times the payload of those other companies' rockets. Assuming comparable per-kilogram launch costs, SpaceX should theoretically have room to charge $300 million to $400 million per Starship launch before worrying about price competition. That implies gross profit margins as high as 98%.

What revenue might Starship produce?

This is the really big, blue-sky question for investors. Although he's nearly as famous for his exaggerations as for his rockets, Elon Musk has publicly predicted that within three years, SpaceX Starships will launch once per hour around the world:

It will get really nutty when Starship is launching every hour in 3 years

-- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Feb. 19, 2026

Multiply 24 hours per day times 365 days per year times even just $90 million per launch, and Starship revenue could theoretically reach $788.4 trillion (that's $788,400,000,000) annually.

Admittedly, that's more than six times the present-day global gross domestic product, and an entirely unrealistic figure. However, it's safe to say that whatever Starship delivers in terms of annual revenue, it's probably going to be a really big number.

Rich Smith has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.