Italy’s Intesa Sanpaolo invests in SpaceX
October 9, 2023
By Chris Forrester
Italian largest bank, Intesa Sanpaolo, has announced that it intends to invest in Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket business. The bank is Italy’s largest.
Intesa Sanpaolo said in a press release that the move is in line with the bank’s business plan for 2022-2025. In the plan, innovation represents one of the most important aspects of value creation.
The bank said that “the aerospace sector as having a particularly important role in the development of world economies and has therefore decided to invest in a player that has demonstrated a cutting-edge vision of the near future”.
Intesa Sanpaolo noted that SpaceX has attracted the attention of the whole world thanks to a number of historical milestones:
· Only private company capable of returning a spacecraft from low-Earth orbit
· In 2012, its Dragon spacecraft became the first commercial spacecraft to deliver cargo to and from the International Space Station
· In 2020, SpaceX became the first private company to take humans to the International Space Station
· Its Falcon 9 is the world’s first and only orbital class reusable rocket, driving down the cost of space access
In addition, the bank noted the achievements of SpaceX in the development of Starship. This is a new generation of fully reusable launch vehicles capable of delivering people and cargo to Mars and other destinations in the solar system. At the moment, the company is already at the testing stage and made its first attempt to reach orbit in the spring of 2023. The next test flight date has not been set yet.
The amount of the investment was not disclosed.