SpaceX (SPCX) stock closed down for the week, falling back to its IPO price as another share unlock hit and new rocket-competition headlines hit the public float.
SpaceX shares did rise on Friday, though the stock was over 2% for the week and had dropped below its $135 IPO price.
On Thursday, around 319 million shares held by early employees and investors became eligible to trade, part of a staggered lockup that will release about 88% of SpaceX’s 13 billion shares through 2027.
The stock withstood a big unlock earlier this month. On Aug. 6, up to 911.5 million shares became tradable. The stock absorbed it and rose 6%, a massively bullish move.
The larger supply tests are still coming, with a 1.3 billion-share tranche set to unlock around SpaceX’s third quarter earnings in early November, followed by the 180-day expiry in December. CEO Elon Musk’s 6.42 billion shares stay locked until June 2027.
In other SpaceX news this week, CEO Elon Musk gave an update on Starship.
“Looks like we will probably catch the ship with the tower in a few months. If there had been a tower out to sea where we practiced landing the ship, it would have been caught,” he said in a post on X. “First reflight of the ship will be either end of this year or early next.”
SpaceX had earlier planned this Starship catch for sometime in August, but clearly that timeline has been pushed back.
This comes after a big milestone was reached in China.
Chinese startup LandSpace on Tuesday landed the first stage of its Zhuque-3 rocket on a pad at the Dongfeng Commercial Space Innovation Pilot Zone in northwest China, the first time a Chinese company has recovered an orbital-class booster on land.
The rocket’s upper stage delivered satellites to orbit on the vehicle’s second-ever flight. Its December 2025 debut reached orbit but lost the booster to what LandSpace described as abnormal combustion during descent.
The milestone narrows the competitive gap that sets SpaceX apart from every other launch provider, including US rivals like Rocket Lab (RKLB). The Chinese Zhuque-3 is a 216-foot-tall rocket that can lift 40,350 pounds of cargo to low earth orbit, versus the 230-foot SpaceX Falcon 9’s 50,265-pound payload.
But SpaceX’s track record speaks for itself. SpaceX has landed boosters more than 600 times since 2015. LandSpace has now done it once.
But it now appears reusable rocketry is no longer solely a SpaceX achievement.
Pras Subramanian is Lead Transportation Reporter for Yahoo Finance. You can follow him on X and on Instagram.
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