Successful recovery of the Starship upper stage: SpaceX (SPCX.US) debuts "chopsticks catching the spacecraft," analyst says it is the most critical step underpinning a trillion-dollar valuation.

SpaceX (SPCX.US) successfully caught the Starship upper stage in mid-air with the launch tower's robotic arms for the first time, marking the first time in global spaceflight history that a spacecraft returning from orbit has been recovered by being "caught" by a tower structure, bringing Musk's company a big step closer to the goal of "rapid reuse." Analysts believe this is precisely the key link underpinning its narrative of a multi-trillion-dollar valuation. On Sunday, November 15, Beijing time, after completing 14 orbits around the Earth, the Starship upper stage re-entered the atmosphere and was steadily caught by the giant "Mechazilla" robotic arms on the launch tower at the Starbase facility in Texas. Live-stream footage showed that more than 5 million people watched the recovery. For investors, the significance of this success lies in cost. Bernstein analysts wrote in a note to clients before the launch that full reusability is "the key to achieving high launch frequency and lower cost to orbit, and these two points are the core of the orbital data center network plan," and said that demonstrating Starship's reusability is the "most important step" for SpaceX to support a "multi-trillion-dollar valuation." Citi analysts noted in a Thursday report that the industry has long regarded a 100% reusable rocket as the "holy grail" of rocket technology. Morgan Stanley previously published a research report emphasizing that the market underestimates the potential impact of rapid Starship reuse. If both the booster and the spacecraft are successfully captured, it would not only be a substantial positive for the stock price, but also have greater positive significance for the business itself, greatly reducing uncertainty over the potential market size of each core business segment. However, SpaceX only completed half of its goal this time. As planned, the company originally intended to recover both the first-stage booster "Super Heavy" and the upper-stage spacecraft at the same time, but the booster's engines shut down early during descent, autonomously aborting the recovery attempt. It was then directed toward the surface of the Gulf of Mexico and exploded and broke apart before touching the water. SpaceX said engineers are investigating the cause. Booster missed, but spacecraft recovery succeeded This was Starship's 15th test flight and its most aggressive yet: the company attempted to recover both stages of the rocket at the same time for the first time. Previously, SpaceX had successfully caught the Super Heavy booster three times, but Friday's attempt was interrupted during the descent phase when the engines shut down early, and the booster ultimately splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico and exploded. As Wallstreetcn mentioned, on the afternoon of November 13 U.S. local time, Starship completed its 15th integrated flight test launch. However, after stage separation, the V3 version Super Heavy booster Booster 22 failed to return to the launch site as planned, ultimately splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico and exploding, missing the opportunity to be captured by the launch tower's robotic arms. SpaceX had previously successfully recovered boosters multiple times. During the fifth integrated flight test in October 2024, Booster 12 completed the first launch tower robotic-arm capture, and booster recovery has since gradually become a routine part of testing. But past success does not mean every new generation of booster will pass smoothly. The upper-stage spacecraft continued into orbit as planned. During flight, Starship released 26 of the latest Starlink V3 satellites, then re-entered the atmosphere, traveling at more than 26,000 kilometers per hour, with the vehicle body, enveloped in plasma, reaching temperatures as high as 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit. According to media reports, this is the first time since NASA's space shuttle completed its final flight in 2011 that a spacecraft has returned from orbit and been recovered; because the space shuttle was not strictly speaking a rocket, this return of Starship is another "first" for SpaceX. Musk himself also posted a video on X inspecting the spacecraft after recovery. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman congratulated on X: It's almost like magic, making more people believe in this every day. NASA's "Artemis" lunar landing program relies on Starship technology to send astronauts and cargo from lunar orbit to the lunar surface and back, while Musk hopes to ultimately use Starship for Mars missions. Musk's biographer Walter Isaacson recalled on X that at a meeting in December 2020, Musk proposed and insisted that the launch tower's robotic arms could catch the returning Starship. "This means far more to humanity than most people realize. I will always remember the expressions on the engineers' faces in the Starbase conference room at that time." Milestone and pressure on the stock price After Friday's failed booster recovery, SpaceX's stock price (ticker SPCX) fell as much as 2% in after-hours trading; before trading began this Monday, the stock price was only 3% above its IPO issue price of $135, and down 38% from its all-time high of $225.64 set shortly after listing last June. What is weighing more on market sentiment are AI-related factors, namely concerns that industry-wide growth from this new technology will slow. Precisely because of this, Starship's progress is regarded as a key variable affecting valuation: it can both expand Starlink's capacity and provide a cost path for space computing power. On the competitive landscape, Bernstein believes rivals are still far behind SpaceX. The institution noted that SpaceX demonstrated reusability on Falcon 9 as early as 2016, and "SpaceX is effectively about a decade ahead of its competitors." According to reports, SpaceX is also the first private company to put a liquid-fueled rocket into orbit, the first private company to visit the International Space Station, and the first rocket company valued at more than $1 trillion. Saturday's "chopsticks catching the spacecraft" adds another item to that list. Starship reuse is the "cost inflection point" of SpaceX's business model Bringing the spacecraft back to the launch tower rather than letting it splash down in the sea means the rocket's inspection, repair, and re-launch can be completed on the ground, without having to salvage and rebuild it piece by piece. Citi commented that a fully reusable rocket is the industry's "holy grail." SpaceX's long-term goal is to launch Starship thousands of times a year, while its current partially reusable Falcon 9 launches hundreds of times a year and carries most of the world's orbital cargo. Morgan Stanley believes that capturing the spacecraft itself is more difficult than capturing the booster. The booster does not experience the thermal and mechanical stress of a full orbital re-entry, while the Starship spacecraft must withstand the extreme environment of high-speed atmospheric re-entry. If the spacecraft can still be captured by the tower after re-entry, that would be the most critical step in a fully reusable system. This is also why Morgan Stanley emphasizes that the market underestimates the importance of this mission. If the double capture had succeeded, it would not only be a short-term catalyst for the stock price, but would also significantly reduce execution risk in commercial reuse of the Starship system, Starlink deployment, and future AI computing expansion. Starship's commercial value is first reflected in Starlink. Starlink is currently SpaceX's profit center, serving more than 13 million users in more than 170 countries, operating more than 11,000 satellites in low Earth orbit, and generating about $3.5 billion in third-quarter EBITDA, up from $1.9 billion in the same period of 2025. A single Starship flight can carry up to 60 Starlink V3 satellites. V3 is nearly four times the size of V2 and has about ten times the data transmission capacity of the latter, meaning only Starship can send heavier satellites into space. In the 14th test flight on September 28, SpaceX had already released 26 V3 satellites. From a commercial perspective, progress in Starship reuse directly determines whether SpaceX can further drive down launch costs and significantly amplify single-launch capability. The faster and more stable rocket reuse is, the faster Starlink deployment will be, and the higher the revenue ceiling for the global connectivity business and AI infrastructure business. Analysts believe the longer-term imagination lies in in-orbit computing. Musk wants to build AI data centers in space, possibly starting in late 2027, and Starship's reusability is precisely the prerequisite for lowering the unit cost to orbit. He posted on November 4 that "space data centers now look quite attractive"; Bernstein also believes that the bottleneck for orbital data centers is not physics, but the pace of deployment. This article is reprinted from Wallstreetcn, edited by GMTEight: Li Fo.