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Key Points
- SpaceX is planning to build a $100 billion spaceport on the Louisiana coast as it works to increase its launch cadence and accelerate revenue growth.
- While SpaceX has touted 10,000 annual flights within five years, the company is on track for fewer than 200 flights this year, while Starship development continues to face delays.
- CEO Elon Musk says SpaceX can reach $1 trillion in sales by 2030, but those projections appear wildly unrealistic based on the company’s current trajectory.
SpaceX (SPCX) announced on Tuesday that it plans to open a $100 billion spaceport on the Louisiana coast. It’s a huge investment from a company that has offered up ambitious plans, such as going to Mars.
The new facility will be larger than the company’s three existing launch sites, and will include five launch pads, a mission-control unit, offices, a propellant factory, and power plants. SpaceX plans to begin construction in 2027, with the first launch scheduled three years from now.
The Louisiana launch site and SpaceX’s other sites would allow the company to increase its launch cadence, targeting 10,000 flights annually within five years across its various ships.
Such a goal remains ambitious. SpaceX just completed its 100th launch of Falcon 9 in 2026 on August 25. The workhorse rocket flew 165 missions during 2025. Those rockets have been carrying the company’s Starlink satellites, which provide global telecommunications services.
SpaceX also says thousands of those projected flights each year would involve its Starship rocket, which features reusable components that can drastically cut launch costs, “making rocket launches as routine as airplane travel.” Starship is still in its testing phase, however, and it hasn’t reached the high altitude that’s needed to launch some satellites.
Starship is key to SpaceX’s plans for orbital artificial intelligence (“AI”) data centers, putting these facilities in space. Recently, however, the company has pushed back timelines for upcoming Starship launches.
Despite these concerns, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently announced on social-media platform X that “SpaceX, in partnership with Nvidia, has designed a space-optimized Vera Rubin NVL72 system for launch to orbit in Q4 next year, with significant scale in 2028.”
That’s a notable speed-up of the timeline for these satellites, which had been scheduled to launch in 2028.
It’s a ton of moving parts for SpaceX before it can really get orbital AI moving, though investors looking to bet on Musk may want to keep an eye on the “Bank of Elon” hidden inside the firm.
Rockets may get a lot of SpaceX’s headlines, but the company highlights AI as its biggest future value driver.
Musk Touts $1 Trillion in Revenue in 2031 or Sooner
While the rocket business and new Louisiana spaceport may be stepping stones to deploying AI, the AI business is the whole ball game at SpaceX. That’s exactly what SpaceX’s prospectus tells you, with more than 90% of what it considers the “largest actionable total addressable market in human history” of $28.5 trillion expected from its proposed AI businesses.
Management pegs the rocket business at just 1.2% of the company’s total opportunity set. That means SpaceX’s valuation lives and dies on AI, and it is the only way for SpaceX to achieve the $1 trillion in revenue Musk has projected.
He has even sped up the timeline for this milestone in the latest earnings call:
It’s probably also worth mentioning that our internal projections for reaching $1 trillion in revenue, not [annual recurring revenue], but revenue, have moved up from 2031 to 2030. Prior to the [initial public offering (“IPO”)], the financial projections we had were reaching $1 trillion in revenue in 2031. We now expect that to be in 2030. There’s a non-zero chance of that being in 2029.
That’s just not going to happen, and it’s another example of Musk making a promise – here a “projection” rather than a promise – that simply cannot be fulfilled. Such a milestone would see SpaceX vastly surpass the 2026 sales of giants such as Amazon (AMZN) and Walmart (WMT). In effect, that means multiplying SpaceX’s annual sales by more than 20 times in four years.
Don’t count on it, despite Musk’s promises of launching rockets at scale in 2028 (which itself is likely another “overpromise, underdeliver” statement).
SpaceX’s IPO prospectus tells you exactly why it’s not going to happen on this timeline:
[M]any of our initiatives described above under “Our Growth Strategies,” including those to develop orbital AI compute at scale, manufacture AI chips at scale, establish a lunar economy, transport humans and cargo to the Moon and Mars, and develop human augmentation systems, involve significant technical complexity, unproven technologies or technologies that do not exist, and such initiatives may not achieve commercial viability….As a result, the timeline for certain of our initiatives involving unproven or new innovations, including our goal of deploying 100 gigawatts of annual compute power to orbit, the establishment of a lunar economy and interplanetary industrialization, and the launch cadence required to achieve these goals may be difficult or impossible to determine.
The realization of these plans is so far out that Musk and the company couldn’t even give a credible timeline three months ago – when it came time to put things in a written legal document that must offer a much more sober analysis of the issue or suffer potentially serious penalties.
So, Musk says one thing when it comes time to make legal statements but plays a different tune when he’s making projections during conference calls or on X.
SpaceX Stock Still Faces Huge Share ‘Overhang’
SpaceX stock has rebounded well from its recent low, as investors sold the stock mercilessly amid waves of lockup expirations from the company’s IPO. Just weeks after the stock debuted, it declined by more than half from its all-time high of $225 per share.
With worries about this “share overhang” having abated – though they are not eliminated – SpaceX stock has gotten its head above the $135 IPO price.
The lockups prevent SpaceX insiders from selling their shares, but SpaceX has already cleared two of those lockup expirations, and a few more remain in the coming months:
- August 6, 2026: Two days after SpaceX’s second-quarter earnings were reported, about 20% of eligible shares were available to be sold.
- August 21, 2026: About 7% of shares became eligible for trading.
- September 10, 2026: About 7% of shares will become eligible for trading.
- September 25, 2026: About 7% of shares will become eligible for trading.
- October 10, 2026: About 7% of shares will become eligible for trading.
- October 25, 2026: About 7% of shares will become eligible for trading.
With just 5% or so of the total shares outstanding issued in the IPO, that first expiration unlocked nearly four times as many shares for sale. Now, about 28% of shares are due to be unlocked for sale over the next two months.
For now, the stock has found its footing, with a relatively lower percentage of shares newly available for trading through October (28% soon-to-be available shares versus about 32% now). The negative expectations from the share overhang should subside even further.
That’s why I believe the stock has further upside during the next few months and could climb back to $165 again, as I outlined. The stock was trading at that level just weeks ago.
This catalyst looks like the next best opportunity for short-term traders to make money on the stock. Long-term fundamental investors still see a stock that’s massively overvalued, run by a CEO with a history of broken promises. So, the stock will stay up only as long as the market wants to believe Musk’s hype in the face of a different reality.
Regards,
James Royal, PhD
Editor’s Note: Elon Musk revived the electric car, pioneered reusable rockets, and beamed down internet to the four corners of the Earth. But his new initiative – “XPANSE” – could be bolder… more transformative… and far more lucrative than all of these innovations combined. And, like Tesla and SpaceX, it could make early investors incredibly wealthy. Click here for the details…
