Rocket Lab to acquire Iridium in $8 billion satellite deal

Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas reiterated a Buy rating and $300 price target on SpaceX, implying roughly 99% upside, as investors await Starship's first orbital test on September 22. The 14th Starship flight is expected to send the vehicle into orbit and deploy 26 Starlink V3 satellites, tying the launch directly to one of SpaceX's biggest growth businesses. CEO Elon Musk has said Starlink V3 deployment will begin in September and that the next-generation satellites could eventually deliver more than 100 times the bandwidth of the current constellation. Bernstein analyst Douglas Harned maintained an Outperform rating with a $248 target, implying about 64% upside, and said gaining Starship reusability to enable orbital data centers remains most important for SpaceX's valuation; he expects the Connectivity business to generate more than $100 billion in EBITDA by 2031. William Blair analyst Louis DiPalma called the latest deal SpaceXAI's fourth compute agreement in the past four months exceeding $11 billion in ARR, while Wall Street's average SpaceX price target stands at $232.07, implying about 54% upside.

Viasat, Inc. announced that its ViaSat-3 F2 satellite has entered service across the Americas, completing the ViaSat-3 constellation and significantly expanding the company's network capacity, flexibility and resilience in the region. The satellite is designed to provide more than one terabit per second of throughput capacity over the Americas, with advanced beamforming technology that dynamically allocates capacity to high-demand flight routes, shipping lanes and geographic regions. With ViaSat-3 F1 already in service and F3 entering service across Asia-Pacific in August, completion of the ViaSat-3 constellation has tripled the bandwidth available across Viasat's global fleet, supporting its aviation, maritime, government and broadband customers. Chairman and CEO Mark Dankberg called the milestone a major step for Viasat and its customers, saying the VS3 satellites are the most advanced commercial satellites in the world in terms of adaptive beam forming, user performance and resilience to interference, and that the technology sets new commercial standards for solar power generation and thermal dissipation. Viasat, based in Carlsbad, California, completed its acquisition of Inmarsat in May 2023.

Baron Capital holds roughly $25 billion in SpaceX shares, and founder Ron Baron projects that Starlink alone can grow into a $1 trillion revenue line within a decade. SpaceX, trading under the ticker SPCX, closed at $150.88 on September 16, 2026, up 5.15% on the session but down 6.26% from its post-IPO reference, with a market capitalization near $1.16 trillion. SpaceX's Q2 connectivity revenue reached $4.29 billion, up 66% year over year, with enterprise and government revenue inside that line growing 108%, even as consumer ARPU slipped from $85 to $66. Baron's model rests on expanding the constellation to 100,000 satellites, with each generation deorbited every five years and replaced by hardware ten times more capable, a plan that depends on Starship V3 cutting the cost to orbit by 99% or more. SpaceX spent $18.37 billion on capex in Q2 alone, including $15.83 billion on AI compute, and placed a $25 billion inaugural investment-grade bond issuance to fund the buildout, according to Baron Capital. GAO researchers reviewing space-based data centers in April 2026 flagged that cooling at scale remains unproven because heat disperses poorly in the vacuum of space, and that on-orbit servicing is underdeveloped, undercutting Baron's claim that orbital compute costs just $2 one time. The near-term milestone to watch is the Starship V3 test-flight cadence, since a launch-economics breakthrough is the single variable that decides whether the 100,000-satellite plan is arithmetic or fiction.