The Hidden Thread Behind the Trillion-Dollar Valuation: When SpaceX Lands on the Nasdaq, Where Will China's Aerospace Industry Head?

In 1969, Armstrong stepped onto the moon.

Five hundred million people around the world watched on their TVs, witnessing humanity's first footsteps beyond Earth.

That year, Americans believed that by 1990, they would establish a permanent base on the moon and land on Mars before 2000.

Space was no longer distant; it was on the agenda for the next generation.

However, as the afterglow of the Apollo missions faded, humanity's exploration efforts did not accelerate as expected. Instead, they fell into a long period of stagnation.

After the retirement of the space shuttles, the United States once lost the ability to send astronauts into space and had to buy seats on Russia's Soyuz spacecraft at high prices. The Apollo program became the peak of human space exploration and its last glory.

Half a century has passed, and the youngest footprints on the moon were still left in 1972.

It wasn't until 2002 that a South African - American began to seriously consider a question: Why can the Russians charge exorbitant prices with a decommissioned intercontinental missile?

When he tried to buy a ballistic missile to convert it into a rocket, he was spat on by Russian engineers. On the return flight, he said to his fellow companions, "I think we can build our own rockets."

In June 2002, SpaceX was founded in an old warehouse in El Segundo, California. Twenty - four years later, this company that builds its own rockets went public on the NASDAQ with a market value of $2.1 trillion, and the American Elon Musk became the world's first trillion - dollar billionaire in human history.

01 Dissecting SpaceX

SpaceX's market value is built on three interlocking flywheels.

The first layer is the Falcon 9, the world's first orbital - class reusable launch vehicle.

In 2025, it completed 170 launches, accounting for 83% of the world's orbital payloads. The marginal cost of a single launch was reduced to about $15 million, only one - fourth to one - fifth of the traditional quote. This technological system is the physical foundation for all of SpaceX's businesses.

The second layer is Starlink. In 2025, its revenue was $11.387 billion, operating profit was $4.423 billion, with a profit margin of 38.8%. The number of users soared from 2.3 million in 2023 to 10.3 million.

Starlink's profitability far exceeds that of traditional telecom operators. Ground base stations need to dig trenches, lay pipes, build towers, and hire maintenance workers for each new area; once Starlink's satellite constellation is deployed, the marginal cost of new users is almost zero. This is the ultimate version of fixed - cost sharing.

The third layer is xAI. After being incorporated into the SpaceX system, its revenue in 2025 was $3.2 billion, but it had an operating loss of $6.355 billion. It is currently the heaviest ballast in this machine.

Looking at the logical chain between the three layers, the low - cost launches of the Falcon 9 enable Starlink to quickly form a network; the cash flow from Starlink provides funds for the development of the Starship. Once the Starship matures, it will further reduce launch costs and increase payload capacity. SpaceX controls the transportation tools, launch demand, and end - customers, forming a complete business closed - loop on its own.

The process of dissecting the machine is also a process of finding cracks. The real profit quality of Starlink, the reliability of the Starship, and the authenticity of the AI business are all strong arguments for questioning whether the largest IPO in history is a bubble.

In 2024, Starlink's ARPU was $91 per month, dropping to $81 in 2025 and further to $66 in the first quarter of 2026.

The logic behind the price cut is to expand into the low - price markets in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. However, the North American market is approaching saturation, and the payment ability of new users continues to decline. That is to say, revenue growth is supported by volume, and profit growth is supported by economies of scale, but the value per user is declining.

Since its first flight in 2023, SpaceX has invested a total of $15 billion in the Starship project, with a research and development expenditure of about $3 billion in 2025 alone.

However, the 12th test flight still had multiple technical failures. Although the first flight of the Starship V3 achieved its phased test goals, the first stage crashed into the Gulf of Mexico during the recovery process.

The prospectus clearly lists the delay in Starship development as the highest - risk factor. All long - term stories, including the deployment of Starlink V3, orbital AI computing power, and Mars colonization, depend on the commercialization progress of the Starship.

For each year of delay in the Starship, the discounted value of these narratives will be reduced by one year.

xAI has signed a total of about $26 billion in annualized computing power leasing agreements with Anthropic and Google. It sounds like a solid barrier, but both contracts have a 90 - day advance notice cancellation clause. They are highly flexible procurement agreements, not long - term strategic contracts.

AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure have a much more mature ecosystem and stronger customer stickiness in the enterprise - level computing power market than SpaceX. xAI's advantage lies in cost competitiveness, not platform moats. Once the computing power leasing price drops or large customers' bargaining power increases, the valuation logic of this business needs to be recalculated.

At the same time, corporate governance is also questionable. Through a dual - class share structure, Musk still holds 85.1% of the voting rights after the IPO. Public investors are buying "options on Musk's dream," but they have little ability to correct this dream at the governance level.

Other technology giants can discuss management succession, but SpaceX cannot be objectively predicted without Musk. Once Musk has an unexpected situation, the existing valuation premium will probably quickly decline.

02 China Doesn't Need a Second Musk

Hidden in SpaceX's $2.1 trillion market value is a less obvious but highly - watched undercurrent: the deep participation of the Chinese supply chain. Some Chinese suppliers are moving from simple supply to deeper integration into the industrial chain.

In 2025, China completed 92 space launches throughout the year, including 50 commercial launches, accounting for more than half for the first time. A total of 377 spacecraft were sent into orbit, with 309 commercial satellites, accounting for 82%. The commercial space industry raised about 18.6 billion yuan in financing throughout the year, and the industry scale reached 2.5 - 2.8 trillion yuan.

Behind these numbers is an emerging industrial ecosystem.

In December 2025, the Zhuque - 3 and the Changzheng - 12A completed their first orbital flights one after another. Although the recovery process was not successful, China's reusable rockets have officially entered the engineering verification stage. More importantly than the success of recovery, the key technologies have been verified in actual flights.

In the same month, the Shanghai Stock Exchange issued guidelines for commercial rocket companies to list on the Science and Technology Innovation Board, clearly including commercial space in the scope of application of the fifth set of listing standards, without making strict requirements for revenue and net profit, and using "market value + R & D" as the main evaluation method.

Five leading companies, LandSpace, CAS Space, Tianbing Technology, GalaxySpace, and iSpace, have all launched IPO guidance on the Science and Technology Innovation Board.

From the perspective of the industrial chain, China's commercial space industry has passed the stage of building from scratch. Ten years ago, private rocket companies couldn't even buy core components; now, according to industry insiders, most of the core components and value of the entire rocket have been matched within the private system.

From engines, rocket body structures to satellite manufacturing and ground equipment, our supply chain is moving from scattered breakthroughs to systematic operation.

If SpaceX takes the path of single - point breakthrough and vertical integration, with a single main line to the end, high efficiency but concentrated risks, China's commercial space industry presents a multi - route parallel development.

Multiple liquid reusable rockets such as the Zhuque - 3, Hyperbola - 3, and Tianlong - 3 are being promoted simultaneously, with technical routes covering different directions such as stainless - steel rocket bodies, liquid oxygen methane, and liquid oxygen kerosene. This decentralized exploration increases the total cost in the short term, but it also means more room for trial and error.

Compared with SpaceX's business model of using applications to support R & D, China's path is more like an industrial cluster: rocket companies, satellite companies, operators, material and component enterprises grow independently, and then build an ecosystem through market coordination.

China doesn't need to copy Musk or SpaceX. China's advantages lie in the full - chain support of the manufacturing industry, the application scenarios provided by the ultra - large domestic demand market, and the institutional dividends continuously released by the policy side.

When SpaceX has proven that the space economy can be self - sustaining, China needs to prove that the space economy can be implemented on a large scale in another way.

03 Conclusion

Musk used a recovered rocket to turn space from a national project into a business that can be calculated.

This in itself is a great achievement. He brought space, which was once beyond the government budget, into the coordinate system of market logic.

The re - flight of the Falcon 9, the tens of millions of users of Starlink, and the roar of the Starship are all the most hardcore romances of this era.

However, there is often a fine line between greatness and a bubble.

The $2.1 trillion valuation corresponds to a revenue of $18.7 billion and a loss of $4.9 billion in 2025, as well as a potential market prediction of up to $285 trillion in the prospectus, of which $265 trillion comes from AI, and the AI business currently has an annual loss of $6.3 billion.

Goldman Sachs expects SpaceX's AI revenue to reach $322 billion in 2030, which means a 100 - fold increase in six years; Morningstar gives a fair valuation of $780 billion, less than half of the issuance valuation; short - seller Steve Eisman jokingly calls the prospectus "a science - fiction novel."

These disputes are not to deny SpaceX's achievements but to remind us that the capital market can pay a premium for a "great story in progress," but ultimately it also needs to see real numbers on the profit statement.

In this long - term game between the vast universe and financial statements, China is no longer a bystander. It is a potential participant in SpaceX's supply chain and a builder of China's commercial space industry.

Musk once said, "The main purpose of my personal wealth accumulation is to fund this cause. I really have no other motivation for asset accumulation except to do my best to make humanity a multi - planetary species." Whether this statement is completely sincere, no one knows.

But one thing is certain: When a person writes leaving the Earth into a business plan and really makes the world believe that this can happen, what he creates is not just a business model, but also a re - anchoring of possibilities.

SpaceX's IPO is a slice of an era. It carries both humanity's oldest exploration impulse and the most naked pricing logic of the capital market.

Greatness and bubbles, romance and calculation, the vast universe and financial statements have never been so closely intertwined as they are today.

In the next decade, the answer to "who is defining the space economy" will not be just SpaceX.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Zhi Xie Dao," author: Huo Rujun, published by 36Kr with authorization.