SpaceX Scrubs Launch at 40 Seconds Before Liftoff, Plans Friday Retry

SpaceX scrubbed a launch in 2026. The real story is why a pop star had to be there.

On the morning of May 21, 2026, SpaceX fueled the third-generation Starship rocket at its Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas, loaded its booster and upper stage, and began cycling toward a countdown that would approach T-minus 40 seconds before calling it off. The company said it was weather. Elon Musk later confirmed it was a hydraulic pin in the launch tower arm that failed to retract, preventing the tower's quick-disconnect mechanism from releasing the vehicle TechCrunch. The fix was straightforward, Musk said on X: they would try again Friday.

What SpaceX did not mention in its public statement was that it had arranged for Nicki Minaj to be present at the launch. The Grammy-winning rapper flew to Texas, watched from the designated viewing area, and left a reply on Musk's post about the scrub that accumulated six figures of engagement before the day was out Space.com. That was not incidental. It was the investor relations strategy.

Here is what the pop star accomplished that the pad could not. SpaceX filed its S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission on May 20, the day before the scrub SEC EDGAR. The filing shows a company that has lost more than $37 billion since inception, that consumed $3 billion in Starship R&D in 2025 alone, and that does not expect Starship to deliver a commercial payload to orbit until the second half of 2026. Flight 12 was supposed to be V3's debut: both booster and ship splashing down in the ocean rather than being recovered Spaceflight Now. The IPO it is targeting on June 11 values the company at $1.75 trillion. To get there, it needs investors to buy a trajectory, not a product. A trajectory requires a narrative. A narrative requires people watching. Sixty-nine percent of Americans say it is essential the U.S. remain a world leader in space exploration, but space spending consistently fares poorly against domestic priorities in polling Pew Research — meaning SpaceX's spectacle dependency is also a public funding dependency dressed in private clothing.

Nicki Minaj in the grandstand is what that looks like. She is not a guest. She is the answer to a specific problem: how do you convince institutional investors to price a pre-revenue rocket program at Berkshire Hathaway levels when the rocket in question has not yet delivered a payload to orbit? You fill the audience with people who are not asking that question. You generate engagement before the launch, then sympathy after the scrub, and you let the internet carry the story into the roadshow window. The Mercury 7 astronauts were sold to Life magazine in 1959 for the same reason. NASA sold the Moon with television broadcasts and taxpayer funding. SpaceX sells itself as inevitable, and inevitability is easier to market than a T-40 abort.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration opened an investigation on May 15 into the death of a contractor at Starbase; the person fell from an elevated work platform according to preliminary reports Scientific American. SpaceX did not publicly connect the May 15 postponement to the incident. The timing is coincidence, not causation. But a company weeks from a public markets debut that employs tens of thousands of people building rockets which occasionally explode is operating in a context where a worker fatality is not only a safety matter. It is a reputational one, and the reputational risk is proportional to how clean the narrative needs to be.

A PitchBook analyst covering SpaceX's pre-IPO coverage put it plainly: for an IPO leaning so heavily into narrative and symbolism, this V3 flight was the single most important catalyst remaining on the company's calendar Reuters. The scrub has not changed the June 11 pricing target. But if V3 slips past the roadshow window, the secondary market has already priced full Starship operational capacity into SpaceX shares. The first data point contradicting that narrative will not be a bad headline. It will be a launch that does not happen in time. That is not a PR problem. It is a valuation one.

The counter is straightforward: SpaceX has normalized iterative failure for years, and investors buying the IPO are buying a Mars roadmap, not a Q2 earnings story. Nicki Minaj in the crowd is just Musk being Musk. The pin did not retract at T-40, and the rocket will fly on Friday. All of that may be true. But a company that needs a pop star in the audience to maintain its narrative position before a $1.75 trillion pricing is a company whose valuation depends on something other than what is happening on the launch pad. That is worth knowing before you buy.