SpaceX spending on Starship tops $15 billion in rush for airline-like rocketry

SpaceX has spent more than $15 billion developing its next-generation Starship rocket, according to the company’s IPO registration reviewed by Reuters, a sum that dwarfs the cost of its workhorse Falcon rocket as Elon Musk’s space company nears a decade trying to perfect a fully reusable launch system.

The future of SpaceX’s most lucrative businesses as it sprints toward public markets at a $1.75 trillion valuation rests largely on Starship, a towering two-stage rocket system central to Musk’s ambitions to launch larger batches of Starlink satellites, carry humans to the moon and Mars, and eventually deploy thousands of artificial intelligence computing satellites as an alternative to power-hungry data centres on Earth.