SpaceX is gearing up for the 13th test flight of its Starship rocket, potentially as soon as Thursday, and the timing couldn’t be more significant. Another Wall Street bank, Evercore ISI, has just initiated coverage with an outperform rating, betting the recent sell-off in SpaceX shares is overdone.
Flight 13 marks the second launch of Starship’s Version 3, a bigger and more powerful design that made its debut less than two months ago. The stakes are high. On the last launch, back in May, the Super Heavy booster suffered heat damage during separation after being pushed into an unexpected position. Then, during its return, some engines failed to reignite, and the booster was lost. SpaceX has been launching and refining the vehicle since 2023, and Starship remains central to the company’s ambitions for heavy-lift launch, satellite deployment, and eventual travel to the moon and Mars.
The flight comes as SpaceX shares have struggled since the company went public on June 12. But Evercore ISI analyst Kutgun Maral is convinced the sell-off is overdone. He called SpaceX “an extraordinary company on a real path to reshaping the future of humanity,” and one whose parts reinforce one another. In his note, Maral described SpaceX as “a single, vertically integrated machine that turned reusable, low-cost launch into a near-monopoly on access to orbit, used that edge to build Starlink into a scaled, cash generative connectivity franchise, and is now pointing the same flywheel at AI infrastructure.”
Like other analysts, Maral highlights SpaceX’s big opportunities in launch, the Starlink broadband network, satellite-to-phone mobile service, terrestrial computing, and eventually, orbital data centers. He calls all five connected businesses. Evercore’s model projects revenue and EBITDA compounding at 106% and 157%, respectively, through 2028, with operating margins widening from 35% to 69% over the same stretch. Maral said he thinks “growth can accelerate rather than fade as the decade wears on.”
But Maral is not without caution. He caveats his enthusiasm with the warning that “there is a great deal left to prove out.” And Thursday’s Starship launch is one big part of the thesis. Maral notes Starship has yet to prove it can scale, with its first operational payload targeted for the second half of this year. Starlink’s broadband and mobile offerings need to gain traction, the viability of orbital computing will not be tested until 2029 or later, and SpaceX’s Grok and Cursor AI products have to win a genuine foothold against entrenched enterprise rivals.
