Elon Musk's rocket company SpaceX Corp is set to raise $500 million at a $30.5 billion valuation, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the fundraising.
The company is raising the capital from existing shareholders and new investor Baillie Gifford & Co, the third-largest shareholder in Musk-led electric carmaker Tesla Inc. (TSLA).
SpaceX did not immediately responded to Reuters request for comment.
SpaceX investors are paying $186 per share for new stock in the latest funding round, the Wall Street Journal reported, adding that it is up about 10 percent from the $169-per-share paid during an April fundraising.
In April, Reuters reported that SpaceX was raising $507 million in a new round of funding, valuing the company at around $26 billion.
The Hawthorne, California-based company has outlined plans for a trip to Mars in 2022, to be followed by a manned mission to the red planet by 2024.
Separately, SpaceX's launch of a long-delayed navigation satellite for the U.S. military was halted on Tuesday, postponing for at least a day the space transportation company's first designated national security mission for the United States.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, carrying a roughly $500 million global positioning system (GPS) satellite built by Lockheed Martin (LMT.N), was due to take off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral shortly after 9:30 a.m. local time (1730 GMT), but was stopped minutes before takeoff.
“This abort was triggered by the onboard Falcon 9 flight computer,” a SpaceX official narrating the launch sequence said. He said SpaceX would attempt the launch on Wednesday morning.
SpaceX later tweeted that the Falcon 9 and payload remain healthy and that it delayed the launch because of an “out of family” reading on the rocket’s first stage sensors.
A successful launch would be a significant victory for Musk, a billionaire entrepreneur who spent years trying to break into the market for lucrative military space launches, long dominated by Lockheed and Boeing (BA.N).
SpaceX sued the U.S. Air Force in 2014 in protest over the military’s award of a multibillion-dollar, non-compete contract for 36 rocket launches to United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Boeing and Lockheed.
SpaceX dropped the lawsuit in 2015 after the Air Force agreed to open up competition, according to SpaceX’s website.
The next year, SpaceX won a $83 million Air Force contract to launch the GPS III satellite, which will have a lifespan of 15 years, Air Force spokesman William Russell said by phone.
Tuesday’s launch was to be the first of 32 satellites in production by Lockheed under contracts worth a combined $12.6 billion for the Air Force’s GPS III program, Lockheed spokesman Chip Eschenfelder said.
U.S. Vice President Mike Pence traveled to Florida to attend the launch, which he called “an important step forward as we seek to secure American leadership in space.”
“Once fully operational, this latest generation of GPS satellites will bring new capabilities to users, including three times greater accuracy and up to eight times the anti-jamming capabilities,” said Russell.
The GPS satellite launch was originally scheduled for 2014 but has been hobbled by production delays, the Air Force said.
The next GPS III satellite will launch in mid-2019, Eschenfelder said, while subsequent satellites undergo testing in the company’s Colorado processing facility.
The launch marks SpaceX’s first so-called National Security Space mission as defined by the U.S. military, SpaceX said.
The Hawthorne, California-based company has previously launched payloads for the Department of Defense in 2017 that were not designated as a National Security Space missions.
© 2026 Thomson/Reuters. All rights reserved.