If SpaceX Goes Public in 2026, What Does That Mean for Space Exploration?

SpaceX is mulling an IPO in 2026. Here’s how that could affect its work with NASA and the push to put humans on Mars

By Ramin Skibba edited by Claire Cameron

Space & Physics

Elon Musk’s SpaceX may be on the cusp of going public: The company, which almost went bankrupt in the 2000s, is mulling an initial public offering (IPO) that would value it at as much as $1.5 trillion. The move could raise tens of billions of dollars for SpaceX, but there’s more than money at stake—the future of space exploration hangs in the balance, too.

SpaceX is integral to numerous critical missions with both NASA and the Pentagon, including ferrying crew and cargo to the International Space Station, placing satellites in orbit and being key to NASA’s plan to return astronauts to the moon by 2028. Its Starlink satellite Internet service is booming. And lest we forget, the company has its own long-term vision to land on and even colonize Mars.

Going public would put SpaceX in the company of older, traditional aerospace heavyweights, such as Boeing and Northrop Grumman, and industry upstarts, such as Rocket Lab and Firefly Aerospace. Still, SpaceX’s plans are startling, experts say.

“The fact that it’s maybe an all-in, holistic SpaceX IPO is a bit of a surprise,” says Matthew Weinzierl, a Harvard Business School researcher, who studies the private space sector. There was a sense that Musk might take Starlink, a subsidiary of SpaceX, public because it makes so much money but not that he would do so with the whole company, Weinzierl says.

If SpaceX goes public, that will mean more scrutiny, more shareholder interest and—perhaps most critically for space science—more investment to bolster its research and development work. “SpaceX has been a major driver of a lot of what we’re seeing in outer space right now,” both positive and negative, says Aaron Boley, a planetary scientist at the University of British Columbia and co-founder of the Outer Space Institute, a network of space experts.

An IPO could bring in an influx of capital to fund new projects, Weinzierl says, such as building solar-powered, orbital data centers to support artificial intelligence, perhaps including that of Musk’s own AI company xAI. Musk had suggested as much in October.

Fresh money could also support SpaceX in its work with NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense. The company’s contracts include billions of dollars to transport NASA astronauts and cargo to and from space, a $255-million deal to launch NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope in the spring of 2027 and billions of dollars to loft defense satellites into Earth orbit as part of the National Security Space Launch program. And in late October, the Wall Street Journal reported that SpaceX was set to secure a $2-billion contract to work on President Donald Trump’s Golden Dome missile defense project, for which it would develop satellites to track missiles and aircraft.

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Considering that NASA and the Pentagon are already so reliant on the commercial space industry—and especially SpaceX—going public might not change the company’s relationship with either agency much, says Clayton Swope, deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, a Washington, D.C.–based think tank. And SpaceX may have another government ally in recently confirmed NASA administrator Jared Isaacman. He flew to space with Space on two missions: Inspiration4and Polaris Dawn.

SpaceX’s potential IPO comes at a moment of grave uncertainty for NASA. Doubt is swirling around the future of the agency’s Artemis moon program, which is supposed to land astronauts on the lunar surface in 2028. SpaceX nabbed the NASA contract to build and operate its Human Landing System using SpaceX’s Starship megarocket as part of the Artemis III and Artemis IV missions. (Jeff Bezos’s rival company, Blue Origin, received the contract for Artemis V.)