SpaceX has big plans for its Starship rocket. After a groundbreaking test flight in which the landing tower caught the booster, company founder and CEO Elon Musk wants to see the megarocket fly up to 25 times next year, trying to reach a launch rate of 100 flights per year, and eventually a Starship launched every day.

Just a month after launching Starship and grabbing the rocket’s booster with giant mechanical arms, SpaceX is preparing to do it again, aiming for more frequent flights of the super-heavy launch vehicle. “Elon would say he’d love for us to do 25 missions a year next year and a hundred missions in the next few years,” said Kathy Lueders, general manager of SpaceX’s Boca Chica operations. in question During the Mexican Space Agency’s National Space Activities Congress conference. “He was telling me, ‘Kathy, I would love to throw a few times a day’… big dreams.”

By comparison, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 has already launched 100 times this year, but it’s a tried-and-true rocket since 2010. Starship is still in development and undergoing constant modifications, so the goal of 25 launches in 2025 is quite ambitious. . This means a launch almost every two weeks. This is a big question.

Musk had always dreamed of ambitious timelines for his rocket company, but the billionaire frequently complained about regulatory restrictions that prevented him from achieving them. SpaceX last month applied Modify Starship’s current license to launch from the Boca Chica field in Texas and request that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) increase launch and landing tempo by up to 25 times. The FAA is evaluating SpaceX’s request and analyzing Starship’s environmental impact at the launch site.

SpaceX has previously complained that the FAA is holding back Starship. “Starships need to fly. The safer we fly, the faster we learn; “The faster we learn, the quicker we can achieve full and rapid reuse of the rocket,” he said. wrote in a blog post earlier this year. “Unfortunately, we continue to be stuck in a reality where it takes longer to prepare government paperwork to license a rocket launch than it does to design and build the actual hardware.”

starship removed for the rocket’s fifth test flight on Sunday, October 13 at 8:25 a.m. ET from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas. For the first time, Starship’s 71-foot-tall Super Heavy booster slowly descended toward a special tower called Mechazilla, which has extended mechanical arms that grip the rocket like a giant chopstick.

SpaceX is ready to see rocket flight again, aiming for Starship’s sixth test flight on Monday, November 18. This will be another suborbital flight, and SpaceX will attempt to capture another Starship booster, as well as restart one of the Raptor engines in space for the first time and conduct maneuver tests for reentry and landing. This should mark the fastest turnaround of a Starship test flight, with the rocket launching again just a month after its last launch; This is an indication that SpaceX is increasing its launch pace as it tries to push Starship towards normal operations.

“We want to continue to understand the flight dynamics on Starship,” Lueders said during the conference. “Specifically, you want to make sure that we can actually control an orbiting vehicle before we get it into orbit. The next few missions… allow us to figure that out.”

Looking at what happens next, SpaceX may need to continue its fight against regulators to see its rocket flying that frequently by next year. That fight could take a new form next year, with Donald Trump returning to office for a second term and Musk serving as head of the Office of Government Efficiency. Musk’s appointment to the US government could move Starship forward faster, but would likely have some serious environmental and safety repercussions.