SpaceX’s second earnings call as a public company had big numbers, but the part rocket fans will remember is the roadmap. Starship Flight 15 should fly next month and try to catch both stages with the tower. Starship should fly weekly in the first half of 2027. And SpaceX told investors to expect $33 billion to $37 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2027, more than double what it just reported.
The quarter in one paragraph
For the three months to September 30, SpaceX reported revenue of $14.58 billion, up 161% from a year earlier, net income of $4.4 billion and adjusted EBITDA of $8.8 billion, according to its investor release. The Super Intelligence segment, which now includes Grok and the Cursor coding business SpaceX bought in August, was the largest at $7.56 billion. Connectivity, which is mostly Starlink, brought in $5.25 billion, and the Space segment $1.77 billion. Capital spending hit $19.6 billion. We dug into the profit side in Tuesday’s Stock Watch. Here’s what the company said is coming next.
Starship: catch both stages, then go weekly
Flight 14 on September 28 was the first Starship to reach orbit, and it deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites, which SpaceX counted as Starship’s first revenue flight. Next is the hard part. Elon Musk confirmed that Flight 15, expected next month, will try to catch both the Super Heavy booster and the ship. “If we succeed, it will be the first time that an orbital launch vehicle has been fully recovered,” he said, putting the odds at “more likely than not” and adding that SpaceX has “a steady stream of Starship flight attempts through the end of this year” if it falls short.
President Gwynne Shotwell handled the paperwork side. After “significant constructive engagement with the FAA,” SpaceX expects the Flight 15 license “to include return to launch site and tower catch for both stages,” per the call transcript. The webcast even played a roughly 80-second animation of the ship sliding into the chopsticks, which Teslarati broke down frame by frame. The booster has been caught three times before, on Flights 5, 7 and 8. A ship, coming back from orbit much faster, never has. We first reported the double-catch plan earlier this month.
After that, the cadence talk got aggressive. Musk said Starship should fly weekly at some point in the first half of 2027 and twice a week or more by the end of 2027. To support it, SpaceX is planning a Starbase in Louisiana that could eventually hold 20 or more launch towers, with the first launch from there targeted for 2029, the release says. Musk said the internal goal is actually 2028.
Starlink: 13.6 million users and a lot of airplanes
Starlink ended the quarter with 13.6 million consumer subscribers, and average revenue per user rose to $69 a month. Aviation is the quiet star. SpaceX said Starlink is contracted on about 12,000 aircraft and installed on more than 3,800, and its aviation terminal production rate has roughly quadrupled since the start of the year. Korean Air and Asiana flew their first Starlink-equipped planes during the quarter, so the in-flight Wi-Fi race is now very much an Asian story too. If you’ve been following United and Southwest’s rollouts, the numbers here say that’s just the start.
Compute, chips and that 2027 number
On the AI side, SpaceX had about 1.7 gigawatts of nameplate compute at the end of September, expects about 2.2 GW by the end of October and 2.5 to 3 GW by the end of the year. Fourth-quarter capital spending is guided at $35 billion to $40 billion, roughly double the third quarter. The Terafab chip project, which SpaceX shares with Tesla, has a timeline for the first time: a test SRAM chip around May or June 2027 from the research fab in Austin, and volume production in about the third quarter of 2028 at the main site in Gibbons Creek, Texas. Musk added his usual “big error bars” warning.
The headline-grabber was Musk’s comment that SpaceX’s annualized revenue run rate could reach “$500 billion to $1 trillion by the end of ’27.” Treat that as a Musk target, not guidance. The actual guidance is the first-quarter 2027 revenue range of $33 billion to $37 billion, which CFO Bret Johnsen tied to “increased visibility” into compute contracts over the next six months. Drive Tesla Canada has a full breakdown of the segment numbers. Investors liked what they heard. The stock rose about 8% after hours.
For readers in Japan, the timing works out neatly: if Flight 15 goes “a little before Thanksgiving,” as Musk told the Giga Texas crowd this month, it would land on a late-November morning here. We’ll have the times as soon as SpaceX posts them. Our earnings preview listed what to watch, and the merger news from the same call is in today’s lead story.
Sources: SpaceX Q3 2026 results release, SpaceX Q3 2026 earnings call transcript (The Motley Fool), Drive Tesla Canada, Teslarati, Teslarati (results), SpaceX on X.
— The EVX News team
Featured image: Starship Ship 39 inside Megabay 2 at Starbase, Texas, January 2026. Photo: U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Alexander Kubitza, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain (U.S. government work).
