Dear Reader,
Simmy Adelman here with Behind the Markets.
Monday morning, SpaceX made history.
Starship — the most powerful rocket ever built — completed its first orbital flight.
Six laps around the Earth.
Nearly ten hours in space.
Splashdown in the Pacific near Chile.
One engine shut down too early during the ascent, and flight controllers spent several tense minutes weighing whether to continue before deciding to push ahead.
When the orbital insertion burn completed successfully, Mission Control made the announcement the whole room had been waiting for.
"Starship is orbital."
The room erupted….
Why This Matters
This wasn't a stunt.
This was a proof of concept for everything that comes next.
Starship is the vehicle NASA has chosen to land humans on the Moon for the Artemis program.
It's the rocket Elon Musk plans to use to eventually send people to Mars.
And it's the backbone of SpaceX's entire next chapter — the one that justifies the $1.77 trillion valuation and the $75 billion raised in the IPO.
For three years, SpaceX has been testing Starship in progressively more ambitious flights.
Flight after flight, something went wrong.
Engines failed. The vehicle broke apart. Tests were scrubbed.
Monday was different.
Monday, Starship did what it was built to do.
What It Means for the Space Economy
We’ve talked about this many times on this channel.
The commercial space economy is still in its early innings.
Goldman Sachs calls it a multi-trillion dollar opportunity.
And Starship is the infrastructure that makes most of it possible.
Think about what a fully reusable heavy-lift rocket actually unlocks.
Cheaper access to orbit means more satellites.
More satellites means better global communications, better GPS, better weather data, better defense systems.
A rocket that can carry 100 tons to low Earth orbit and return to fly again changes the economics of everything above the atmosphere.
That's what Monday proved is now possible.
One Thing Worth Watching
The companies building things that go on Starship — or that depend on Starship to get into orbit — just got a very important piece of news.
The vehicle works.
The architecture is real.
The roadmap is no longer theoretical.
We've been watching the space economy closely here, and Monday's flight is one of those moments that separates the before from the after.
If you've missed this story so far, this may be your last chance to get positioned before it's too late.
NASA is paying Elon Musk up to $843 million to destroy the $150 billion International Space Station.
But Elon will NOT build the replacement.
That job is poised to go to a tiny firm less than half a percent the size of SpaceX.
And by our calculations it's set to hand early investors up to 39X their money.
Here's why there's almost no time left.
NASA's new fiscal year begins on October 1st — tomorrow.
That's when the money for this historic project gets deployed and the final call for bids closes.
By our research, this tiny firm is far ahead of every competitor.
We believe that's exactly why one of the largest aerospace companies on Earth scrapped its own bid and decided to team up with them instead.
Once NASA makes it official, the first mover advantage evaporates.
Monday’s Starship flight just made this more urgent — not less.
The clock is now running.
Watch the full briefing here>>>
Have a wonderful Wednesday.
I'll see you tomorrow.
All the best,
Simmy Adelman, Editor-in-Chief
Behind the Markets
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Written by Simcha Adelman