At 07:25 on 13 October 2024, a rocket taller than any ever built lifted off from Starbase, a dusty patch of coastal Texas metres from the Mexican border. The cheers inside SpaceX's control room grew loudest not at ignition, but seven minutes later, when the spent booster reversed its fall, reignited its engines, and was caught mid-air by a mechanical arm engineers had nicknamed "Mechazilla." That single manoeuvre — never achieved before in the history of spaceflight — compressed the entire commercial logic of SpaceX into one arresting image: expensive hardware, returned intact, ready to fly again. The reusable booster is not merely an engineering trophy.

It is the financial foundation on which SpaceX's ambitions rest. Every recovered rocket is one that does not need to be manufactured from scratch, and that arithmetic is expected to reduce the cost of lifting cargo to orbit by an order of magnitude. Elon Musk, who described the catch as "a big step towards making life multiplanetary," has long argued that affordability is the precondition for everything else — Moon bases, Mars colonies, and the satellite internet grids that already generate billions in annual revenue for the company's Starlink division. Until now, access to SpaceX equity has been restricted to Musk himself and a carefully chosen circle of wealthy private institutions.

That changes on 12 June, when shares will begin trading publicly for the first time. UK retail investors are expected to receive an allocation worth approximately £1.5 billion, a figure that has already triggered a surge in new account registrations at several British brokerages.