SpaceX stock is dangerously close to breaking its $135 IPO price. Shares, after a great start, have had a tough go over the past few days. Elon Musk's rocket and AI company needs some good news to turn things around.

That could come as soon as Thursday. SpaceX is set to test its huge, fully-reusable Starship for the thirteenth time.

Starship promises to dramatically lower the cost of reaching space while dramatically increasing SpaceX's capacity to put things into orbit. A partially reusable SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket puts roughly 25,000 kilograms into space for around $1,500 per kilogram. The fully-reusable Starship is designed to put some 150,000 kilograms into space at one-tenth the per-kilogram cost.

Lower costs will enable new applications, such as orbital AI data centers. But Starship isn't operational yet. SpaceX is still working out the kinks. The thirteenth test will help SpaceX refine the third generation of its rocket. Starship's upper stage will also try to deploy 20 Starlink V3 -- or version three -- satellites. The upper stage will also attempt an in-space relight of a single Raptor rocket engine before a controlled re-entry and splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

The twelfth test was in May. It was pushed back one day from its original schedule. The 90-minute launch window for test number 13 opens at 6:45 p.m. Eastern time.

SpaceX stock was up 0.9% in premarket trading on Wednesday at $137.31, while S&P 500 futures were up 0.1%.

That's just a couple of dollars above SpaceX's $135 IPO price. Shares traded as high as $225.64 on June 16, shortly after the June 11 IPO pricing, before closing at $201.80. Through Tuesday trading, they are down 33%. That's bear market territory, although the term is better applied to indexes than individual stocks.

Investors don't really care about the term. They just want the stock to stop falling. A few things have weighed on shares, including valuation concerns and worries that more stock becoming available to trade could push shares lower as early investors look to take profits. There hasn't been enough good news to counter those issues.

Starship success could give shares and investor sentiment a boost. The rocket is the "flywheel" that enables SpaceX's value creation, says RBC analyst Ken Herbert.

Starship is built at Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas. "You go through that plant, it's like walking into the future...The level of automation, the scale. It's like multiple Costcos, and it's full," says Herbert. "It's mind-blowing the amount of activity and the amount of tooling. It looks incredibly modern."

Herbert is a veteran aerospace analyst and has watched Boeing build commercial jets in huge facilities across America. Still, he used words like "mind-blowing," "holy moly," and "floored" to describe SpaceX operations.

Eventually, SpaceX hopes to be launching hundreds of Starships thousands of times per year. That's the scope of the company's ambition and why Herbert and others on Wall Street rate SpaceX shares Buy.

Herbert's price target is $225 per share. The average analyst price target is about $242.

SpaceX can't reach those ambitions until Starship is fully operational, which makes any Starship test, including Thursday's, must-watch for investors.

Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com

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July 15, 2026 08:09 ET (12:09 GMT)

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