SpaceX launched the Starship V3 rocket from its Texas facility on Friday evening, roughly twenty-four hours after a first attempt was scrubbed due to a launch-tower malfunction. The BBC reports that the uncrewed vehicle — standing 124 metres tall, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built — deployed twenty dummy satellites after reaching orbit, then splashed down in the Indian Ocean about an hour after launch, where it exploded as planned. Both stages suffered engine failures during the flight, but SpaceX declared the mission largely successful. Elon Musk posted that the team had “scored a goal for humanity.” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, who has close ties to Musk, congratulated the team and noted the flight brought humanity “one step closer to the Moon.” It was Starship’s twelfth flight. The launch comes days after SpaceX revealed plans for what would be the largest initial public offering in Wall Street history — potentially beginning as early as next month, at a company valuation of $1.25 trillion.
The received wisdom
The liberal techno-sceptical take on this story is fairly predictable: Musk is using his government contracts, his access to federal spectrum and orbital slots, and his political proximity to the Trump administration to construct a near-monopoly in orbital launch, satellite internet, and now artificial intelligence, while enriching himself and a small class of early investors. The timing of Starship V3 — days before the IPO announcement, generating maximum positive press — is not coincidence. NASA has become a promotional vehicle for SpaceX’s private ambitions. When Isaacman says “one step closer to the Moon,” what he means is “one step closer to Musk’s Artemis contract.” The concentration of critical space infrastructure in a single private company controlled by one man who also holds a government advisory role, runs the world’s largest social media platform, and manages a defence contractor is, on any reasonable regulatory view, a governance problem.
A different read
The sceptical read contains real substance, and I don’t want to wave it away. But it misses several things, and the sum of what it misses matters.
First, the engineering is genuinely extraordinary. Starship V3 completed the most ambitious test profile in the vehicle’s history — orbital deployment, controlled reentry, and a precision splashdown — with engine failures on both stages, which is to say with degraded performance, and still hit most of its objectives. The vehicle is iteratively improving at a pace that no other launch provider, public or private, has matched in the post-Apollo era. The comparison class for this achievement is not a Boeing PowerPoint presentation about SLS’s capabilities; it is a functioning rocket that demonstrated on Friday that even partial hardware failure does not preclude mission success. That resilience is what makes Starship genuinely different from its predecessors. The NASA moon programme has been plagued for years by the dysfunctions of cost-plus contracting and congressional pork; if SpaceX’s model, whatever its ethical complications, produces hardware that actually reaches the lunar surface, the pragmatic conservative instinct is to notice what works.
Second, the monopoly critique, while legitimate, overstates the degree to which the alternative is a healthy competitive market rather than a strategic vacuum. The United Launch Alliance, SpaceX’s main US competitor, is a Boeing-Lockheed joint venture whose launch costs were so high that the US Air Force spent years trying to diversify away from it. Europe’s Ariane 6 has been repeatedly delayed. China’s Long March programme is a competitor, but one whose access to US government payloads is structurally limited. The realistic counterfactual to Musk’s SpaceX dominance is not three nimble private competitors keeping each other honest; it is continued dependence on legacy defence contractors with worse performance, higher costs, and equally opaque political relationships.
Third, the IPO itself deserves examination beyond the headline valuation. SpaceX going public will subject it to quarterly earnings scrutiny, activist shareholders, and disclosure requirements that a private company avoids. This is not an unambiguous good — public markets can shorten time horizons and punish exactly the kind of iterative, failure-tolerant engineering culture that produced Starship — but it is also not straightforwardly a power-consolidation move. Musk’s personal wealth will be amplified, certainly, but so will the number of shareholders with an interest in the company’s long-term performance. The governance questions that apply to a private Musk empire apply differently to a publicly traded one.
The legitimate concern that remains is the personnel overlap between SpaceX’s commercial interests and federal decision-making. Isaacman’s cheerleading is symbolically awkward at minimum; structural safeguards around NASA’s contractual independence from its administrator’s relationships deserve attention. But this is a regulatory design problem, not evidence that the mission itself is fraudulent.
What to watch
The IPO timeline is the first critical signal. If SpaceX files S-1 documents in June as expected, the financial details will be public for the first time — including the revenue breakdown between Starlink, launch services, and government contracts. Watch whether NASA formally certifies Starship for crewed lunar missions on the basis of Friday’s test, and on what timeline. Follow competing providers: Blue Origin’s New Glenn and Europe’s Vulcan both need to establish credible track records if the market is to develop genuine competition. And watch the political dimension: SpaceX’s Starlink contracts in Ukraine and Taiwan mean any deterioration in US-Russia or US-China relations directly affects the company’s risk profile. A rocket company entangled in two active conflict zones is a novel kind of geopolitical actor.
— J