Key Points

• Starship's 14th test flight, targeted for as soon as Tuesday, Sept. 22, is the program's first attempt to reach Earth orbit.

• The flight is set to deploy 26 next-generation V3 Starlink satellites, Starship's first revenue-producing payload.

• SpaceX's space segment posted a $542 million operating loss in the second quarter as Starship research spending climbed.

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SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX) is getting ready to send Starship to orbit for the first time. The company is targeting the rocket's 14th test flight for as soon as Tuesday, Sept. 22 (pending regulatory sign-off as of this writing).

And the attempt won't be flying empty. The ship is set to deploy 26 of Starlink's next-generation V3 satellites, the first Starship cargo with revenue attached.

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Both milestones matter, because with SpaceX's market value near $2 trillion, a lot rests on what this rocket is eventually supposed to do.

I don't think the flight will settle whether SpaceX is worth $2 trillion. But the outcome should say a lot about when one of the company's costliest promises starts showing up in the numbers.

A test flight with paying cargo

Notably, SpaceX won't attempt to catch the booster or the ship this time. CEO Elon Musk walked back an earlier plan to catch the ship, saying an explosion at this point would be too big a setback for the company, and the booster showed engine-relight trouble on the previous flight.

The cargo is the point. Each V3 satellite is designed to support 1 terabit per second of downlink capacity, about 10 times what the current generation delivers. And SpaceX has framed the per-launch payoff: a full load of V3 satellites should add about 20 times the network capacity of a Falcon 9 launch of today's satellites.

Starlink needs the room, too. Subscribers ended June at 12.0 million (twice the year-ago count), and keeping up that pace will likely take much bigger capacity additions than the current satellites provide.

Starship has rehearsed the delivery. July's Flight 13 deployed 20 production V3 satellites and achieved all of its flight objectives, according to SpaceX. But like every Starship test so far, it stopped short of orbit, so those satellites never joined the working network.

Starship is why the launch business loses money

Starship's costs land in SpaceX's space segment, home of the launch business. Segment revenue rose 29% from a year earlier to $962 million in the second quarter of 2026, helped by more large customer launches. The segment still posted a $542 million operating loss, however, wider than the $369 million loss a year earlier. The driver is research and development (R&D). Space R&D spending climbed from $693 million in the year-ago quarter to $930 million in the first quarter of 2026 and nearly $1.1 billion in the second.

SpaceX said in its August earnings release that it kept accelerating those investments because it believes Starship will "reduce the cost to orbit by 99% or more relative to the historical average" and unlock revenue potential across the whole business.

In the meantime, none of the tech company's profits run through Starship. SpaceX put 1,041 metric tons into orbit across 78 launches in this year's first half, the bulk of it Starlink hardware. And the connectivity segment those satellites feed generated $1.7 billion of income from operations in the second quarter, up 79% year over year.

What would the outcome change?

Mostly, the timing. An orbital Starship could give SpaceX a much bigger delivery vehicle for its most profitable business, and each later mission could add capacity the network can sell. Success could also start turning that cost claim into something investors can track, flight by flight.

A failure, meanwhile, probably wouldn't change much about today's business. Starlink's subscribers are served by satellites Falcon 9 already delivers, and the launch schedule doesn't depend on Starship. What a lost ship would cost is time -- more quarters of climbing research spending before the payoff, and a longer wait for the V3 capacity step-up.

The price already assumes the answer

The problem for anyone thinking about buying ahead of the launch is the stock's valuation. At about $152 as of this writing, SpaceX is valued near $2 trillion -- more than 60 times sales even if you annualize the second quarter's $7.8 billion of revenue. A price like that, for a company that lost $541 million last quarter, only makes sense if the expensive projects work -- and Starship is one of the costliest of them.

Of course, a clean flight is a big milestone, and it could give the stock a lift. But orbit alone doesn't make shares cheap, and a failure would stretch a timeline the price already leans on.

Would I buy the growth stock ahead of Flight 14? No. I would avoid buying shares here, whichever way the launch goes.

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Daniel Sparks and his clients do not have positions in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.