NextFin News - SpaceX’s planned IPO is being sold on three new businesses beyond launches and satellite broadband: orbital data centers, fully reusable rockets and a U.S. chip foundry. On June 10, TechCrunch reported that the company’s bankers were pitching SpaceX at nearly $1.8 trillion, while separate valuation exercises from Morningstar and New York University finance professor Aswath Damodaran came in much lower, at about $825 billion and $1.2 trillion.
The dispute is bigger than a debate over discount rates. It comes down to whether Elon Musk can turn SpaceX from a dominant launch and connectivity company into a builder of hardware and infrastructure for an AI-driven economy. According to TechCrunch, Morningstar’s analyst treated the gap between a fair value of $63 a share and an IPO price of $135 as a $72 call option on orbital data centers. Damodaran, long skeptical of richly priced growth stories and corporate moonshots, is not denying SpaceX’s strengths. His point is that investors are being asked to pay now for outcomes that are still highly uncertain.
The company’s established appeal is straightforward. SpaceX has two mature businesses generating cash: a launch position that looks close to monopoly power in a market where competitors remain well behind, and Starlink, which has turned satellite internet into a scaled subscription business. Morningstar and Damodaran both see those operations as the company’s most valuable assets.
The harder question is how much value belongs to the layer Musk is now promoting. If investors treat these projects as carrying a very large option value, the bankers’ near-$1.8 trillion figure can be defended. If they are mostly theoretical upside, the distance to Morningstar’s $825 billion estimate becomes harder to explain.
Orbital data centers are the most ambitious of the three proposals. The idea depends on a fully reusable rocket, something no company has yet built and operated at the scale SpaceX would need. It also requires a launch cadence high enough to make space infrastructure economically credible, not just technically impressive. This is not an incremental extension of Starlink. It would be a different business, asking investors to believe SpaceX can move from launching payloads to hosting compute-heavy workloads in orbit while matching the reliability of a cloud provider and the economics of a space company.
That is why the concept is hard to value. Orbital data centers are not a near-term extension of current revenue. They would bring a sharp increase in capital intensity, engineering risk and regulatory complexity. Musk has spent years showing that SpaceX can shorten development cycles in aerospace. He has not shown that it can do the same in orbital computing infrastructure. Morningstar’s framework, as described by TechCrunch, effectively separates the proven cash business from the speculative upside. A $72-per-share call option has value, but it is still an option.
The second moonshot says as much about the pitch as the first. SpaceX plans to use Starship for Starlink launches starting in 2027, not this year. That delay matters because it pushes the largest efficiency gains further into the future. A fully reusable heavy-lift system could remake the economics of launching satellites, replenishing constellations and sending hardware to orbit at much lower marginal cost. But investors still have to get across an execution gap that includes vehicle reliability, production cadence and launch-site readiness. Until Starship becomes routine, it is better seen as a capability still being built than as a current source of earnings.
SpaceX has followed this pattern before. Falcon 9 proved reusable first stages could work. Starlink proved a satellite network could become a global consumer and enterprise business. Starship is meant to amplify both. Each step, though, comes with more complexity. Bigger rockets are harder to recover, manufacture and certify. The shift from 2026 to a 2027 Starship-Starlink launch plan is not, by itself, a red flag. It does show how much work remains before the program can support a public-market valuation.
The third bet is less dramatic and may be easier to overlook: a chip foundry in the United States. It may also be one of the hardest parts of the entire case. A foundry is not a side effort. It requires process control, tooling, supply-chain depth and years of learning. Even established semiconductor companies approach the business carefully.
For SpaceX, a chip fab would be more than diversification. It would be an attempt to control more of the AI stack, from satellites to compute to the silicon underneath it. Vertical integration can produce durable economics if it succeeds. It can also become a costly drain if utilization, yields or demand fall short.
This is where the valuation split is most revealing. Damodaran, according to TechCrunch, valued SpaceX at $1.2 trillion. Morningstar put it at about $825 billion. Both are enormous by historical IPO standards, and both suggest that SpaceX merits a premium for scale, technical advantage and growth options. But they still differ sharply from the bankers’ near-$1.8 trillion pitch, which asks public investors to pay not just for current strength in launch and satellite broadband, but for the probability-weighted success of three capital-heavy projects that have not yet been de-risked.
That distinction matters more in public markets than in late-stage private financing. Private investors often pay for the breadth of a story. Public investors usually want visible milestones, steadier margins and a clearer route from spending to cash flow. SpaceX has evidence in its favor. It has already taken a technically unusual company and made it commercially important. But the farther it moves from rockets and broadband into AI infrastructure, the more the valuation depends on assumptions that current revenue cannot verify.
There is also a practical reason the premium case has traction now. SpaceX is one of the few companies that can make projects like these sound plausible. Its brand, launch history and Musk’s record of pushing through difficult engineering timelines give it credibility that most industrial companies do not have. That credibility is real, but it is not certainty. As the TechCrunch report makes clear, Musk may be right that SpaceX is among the only companies positioned to pursue these projects soon. That also speaks to how hard they are.
The three headline numbers — about $825 billion, $1.2 trillion and nearly $1.8 trillion — capture the issue. SpaceX is no longer simply a space company, but it is not yet a mature AI infrastructure company. It sits between a proven launch-and-broadband business and a set of projects that could either reshape the company or remain expensive experiments. For now, the cleanest facts are still the valuation gap and the 2027 timeline for Starship-based Starlink launches.
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