SpaceX hopes 13 is a lucky number.

Thursday evening, Elon Musk's AI and rocket company will test its huge, fully reusable Starship, the largest rocket-launch system ever built by humans. Aside from being a spectacle and technological marvel, Starship matters a great deal for SpaceX stock.

The Texas launch can be watched, starting at 6:10 p.m. Eastern time, at spacex.com and on X.

"The booster's primary test objective will be executing a successful launch, ascent, stage separation, boostback burn, and landing burn at an offshore landing point in the Gulf of America," says SpaceX.

Eventually, SpaceX plans to catch the booster with giant mechanical arms, partly to aid in rapid reusability. The company has caught a booster with arms before, but that isn't the plan for Thursday.

Starship's upper stage will try to deploy 20 Starlink V3 -- or version three -- satellites. The upper stage will also attempt an in-space relight (reignition) of a single Raptor rocket engine before a controlled re-entry and splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

The 12th test was in May, debuting the third version of Starship. The upper stage deployed dummy satellites in a Pez-dispenser-esque manner. Two of the satellites were fitted with cameras to offer space-based views of the ship.

The importance of Starship development can't be overstated. "SpaceX's outlook depends on several technologies not yet proven at commercial scale, including fully reusable Starship capable of hitting thousands of launches/year, orbital AI compute, direct-to-cell, and large-scale AI infrastructure," wrote Adam Jonas in his SpaceX stock initiation report.

Investors should not gloss over thousands of launches per year. Humanity launched about 330 times in 2025. SpaceX was responsible for more than half of those.

Jonas is looking for the first operational payloads to be delivered in the fourth quarter, but he added: "Space is hard, and future Starship and in-space anomalies should be expected." He rates shares Buy and has a $300 price target for the stock.

RBC analyst Ken Herbert rates the shares Buy and sets a $225 price target. Starship is the "flywheel" that enables SpaceX's value creation, he says. Lower costs are key to building things like AI data centers in orbit.

The rocket 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."

SpaceX's technical, engineering, and manufacturing prowess is on display on Thursday. Investors should be hoping for a positive outcome.

SpaceX stock is now below the $135 IPO price, at $132 per share. The stock fell 2% on Thursday, its fifth consecutive decline, while the S&P 500 fell 0.7%.

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

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July 16, 2026 16:40 ET (20:40 GMT)

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