Musk’s SpaceX Delays Starship’s 13th Flight to Friday as Company Stock Trades at Just $118

Elon Musk-owned SpaceX pushed back the 13th test flight of its Starship rocket to Friday, July 24, after weather threatened to ruin critical heat shield imaging. This was the latest slip for a company whose shares have traded below their $135 initial public offering (IPO) price since mid-July.

SpaceX postponed the 13th flight test of its Starship rocket due to weather conditions, with the launch now targeted for Friday, July 24. It’s the third disruption in barely a week for the vehicle Musk is counting on to eventually carry astronauts to the moon and beyond.

A follow-up try on July 23 also slipped, this time because ground-based cameras needed clear skies to capture detailed images of Starship’s heat shield tiles during ascent (data SpaceX considers essential to proving the vehicle can be reused).

For Bitcoin.com News readers, the Starship saga carries a second storyline that has nothing to do with rockets but more to do with SpaceX’s balance sheet. Regulatory filings ahead of the company’s Nasdaq debut showed SpaceX holding 18,712 BTC, a position valued at roughly $1.29 billion in a May 20 filing tied to the company’s IPO paperwork (enough to rank SpaceX among the largest corporate bitcoin holders on U.S. markets).

Sister company Tesla carries its own bitcoin treasury of 11,509 BTC, which held steady through the second quarter alongside a $112 million impairment loss booked under standard accounting rules.

Musk said after the July 16 scrub that SpaceX would try again “hopefully in a few days,” and the company has stuck close to that timeline despite the additional weather delay. A clean flight Friday would mark Starship’s first successful deployment of an operational satellite payload, giving SpaceX’s newest shareholders, many of whom bought in above the current share price, their clearest reliability signal yet. Until then, both the rocket and the stock remain grounded below where they started.