SpaceX is 'attractively valued' after $100 billion Louisiana spaceport plan, Morgan Stanley says

Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas reiterated an overweight rating on SpaceX (ticker SPCX) and set a $300 price target, implying >70% upside from Tuesday’s close. The note highlights SpaceX’s $100B Louisiana Starbase plan (15 total pads; thousands of launches annually), arguing the stock no longer prices the more aggressive launch cadence beyond Jonas’s 2040 assumptions (~5.8k launches/year with 8 pads). Jonas frames the bull case as attractively valued at ~10x sales (70% growth) and ~25x EBIT (113% growth) on FY28 forecasts; shares were down ~1.2% midday.

Analysis

This is less about a single facility and more about the market repricing launch as a scalable industrial platform. If SpaceX can keep adding pads and cadence, the first-order winner is not just the company itself but every downstream payload owner that benefits from lower launch cost and higher launch availability; the first-order loser is any public launch competitor whose economics depend on scarcity pricing, especially small-launch names where utilization and pricing are fragile. That puts the cleanest public-market pressure on RKLB and, secondarily, on any space basket that has been trading as if launch bottlenecks are permanent.

The key risk is that investors are conflating optionality with cash flow. Over the next 1-3 months, the stock will likely trade on execution milestones—testing reliability, permitting, insurance, and pad buildout—because the valuation is being anchored to a 2040 outcome that is still highly path-dependent. Over 6-18 months, the real falsifier is whether higher cadence converts into contracted backlog and margin expansion rather than just higher capex and more operational complexity.

Contrarianly, the consensus is focusing too much on pad count and too little on bottlenecks that actually matter: flight reliability, launch cadence per pad, and customer willingness to pay for heavy lift at scale. If those improve, the biggest beneficiaries may be satellite operators and defense payload integrators rather than SpaceX equity itself. If they do not, this is a long-duration narrative stock that can de-rate quickly when the market realizes the revenue bridge is much longer than the headline ambition.

Key Decisions for Investors

• No chase in SPCX after the analyst upgrade; if we can access secondary liquidity, only add on a 10-15% pullback and only if launch/permitting milestones remain on track. Time horizon: 12-18 months. Risk/reward: >2:1 only if cadence execution improves.
• Short RKLB on strength or buy 3-6 month puts as a relative-value hedge against launch-price compression. Thesis fails if Rocket Lab accelerates backlog faster than SpaceX expands supply or if Neutron becomes a credible counterweight.
• Pair trade: long ASTS / short RKLB for 3-6 months. ASTS should benefit from cheaper and more frequent launch availability, while RKLB is more exposed to commoditization risk if SpaceX scales cadence aggressively. Monitor launch-cost headlines and ASTS deployment milestones.
• Stay neutral on MS; the note is sentiment-positive for coverage credibility, but there is no direct earnings linkage. Use any move in space-related equities as a better expression than owning the bank.
• Set an alert on SPCX for any regulatory or testing setback; a failure to convert ambition into demonstrated cadence would be the clearest trigger to fade the stock on a 1-3 month horizon.