SpaceX’s Starship megarocket could take off in 2025.
The 400-foot-tall (122 meters) Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket system ever built, and it’s designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. SpaceX believes this combination of brawn and efficiency is the key breakthrough that will allow humanity to achieve a variety of spaceflight feats — including the settlement of Mars, a long-held dream of company founder and CEO Elon Musk.
That vision may become clearer over the next 12 months or so, for Starship appears poised to make a big leap in 2025.
Starship has been featured six times to date: twice in 2023 and four times in 2024.
The vehicle made a lot of progress on these test flights, all of which flew from SpaceX’s Starbase site in South Texas. On the most recent three, for instance, both Starship elements — the Super Heavy booster and the 165-foot-tall (50 m) upper-stage spacecraft, known as Starship or simply Ship — survived the downward trip through Earth’s atmosphere in one piece.
Related: What’s next for SpaceX’s spacecraft after its sixth successful test flight?
And on Flight 5, which launched on Oct. 13, Starbase’s launch tower plucked the returning Super Heavy out of the air with its “chopstick” arms, demonstrating the recovery strategy that SpaceX plans to employ for both Starship stages on operational missions.
These tower captures may become commonplace by 2025. SpaceX has requested to quintuple the number of takeoffs allowed from Starbase over the next year, up to 25, and the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has given its initial approval.
A draft environmental assessment released through the FAA in November approves not only of Starbase’s 25 Starship launches, but also 50 tower captures on the: 25 of Super Heavy and 25 of Ship. SpaceX also already has an FAA license to launch Starship Flight. 7, which could go into effect in early to mid-January.
Such a surge would be huge for SpaceX, whose rocket-development strategy centers on flying, iterating and then flying again. And there’s no reason to think that goal is out of reach; after all, the company has launched more than 130 orbital missions in 2024, the vast majority of them with its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.
“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that the timeline they’re following is unprecedented,” astrophysicist Ehud Behar, a professor at the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, told Space. com.
And 25 Starship flights per year is far from the horizon goal; the company plans to continue ramping up the rate in 2026 and beyond.
“Elon would say next year he would love for us to do 25 missions a year, and in the next few years, 100,” Kathy Lueders, SpaceX’s general manager of Starbase operations, said in November at the SpaceX National Convention. Mexican Space Agency. Space Activities Conference, according to Gizmodo. “He was like, ‘Kathy, I’d love to pitch a couple times a day. ‘”
Not all of those long-duration missions will fly from Starbase: SpaceX also plans to launch Starship from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, which already hosts liftoffs for the company’s Falcon Nine and Falcon Heavy rockets.
SpaceX already has some undercover consumers for Starship, the leader among them NASA, which has selected the megarocket as the first manned lander for its Artemis lunar exploration program.
If all goes according to plan, Starship’s upper stage will put NASA astronauts down near the moon’s south pole on the Artemis 3 mission, which is currently slated to lift off in mid-2027.
This schedule has been delayed several times, most recently due to problems with NASA’s Orion team capsule. (The Artemis 3 plan calls for astronauts to leave Earth aboard Orion, NASA’s Space Launch System rocket. In lunar orbit, Orion will meet a modified upper stage spacecraft, which will take astronauts to the surface of the moon).
It’s unclear whether Artemis 3 will be airworthy in 2027, Behar said, given NASA’s budget constraints and the general difficulty of crewed missions, especially when they involve an entirely new spaceflight system. (How many successful uncrewed Starship flights will NASA need before putting its astronauts aboard the vehicle?)
But he’s convinced that Starship will then be in a position to play more prosaic roles in spaceflight.
“I think Starship, as a satellite launcher, is on the right track,” Behar said. “I don’t see why they wouldn’t respect the schedule. “
Related: NASA’s Artemis Program: Everything you need to know
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The spacecraft will become even larger and more resilient over time, according to SpaceX.
“With a few planned upgrades, Starship will have three times the thrust [at liftoff] of Saturn V at 10,000 metric tons of thrust, plus the added benefit of full reusability,” SpaceX manufacturing engineering manager Jessica Anderson said during the webcast of Starship’s sixth test flight, which occurred on Nov. 19.
“Starship 2 will be capable of carrying more than 100 tons to orbit, and Starship 3 will be able to lift more than 200 tons to orbit,” she added. “The amount of mass we’re able to launch per rocket is crucial to creating a self-sustaining city on Mars.”
Since Starship is completely reusable, the vehicle could deliver such powers for just $2 million to $3 million per flight, Musk said. This would be incredibly cheap; SpaceX is recently selling Falcon nine missions for around $67 million.
Those anticipated Starship numbers may be tailored toward Mars settlement, but the megarocket could end up flying a lot of missions closer to home as well. SpaceX plans to finish assembling its Starlink broadband megaconstellation using Starship, and variety of customers will likely find ways to take advantage of the vehicle as well, Behar said.
“I think we’ve learned the lesson that, if technology is developed and affordable, there will be uses for it,” he said.
“People forget that space is a place; it’s not really one thing,” Behar added. “There are a lot of things you can do in space, going from developing new materials to developing medicine. Right now, the threshold just to get there is very expensive.”
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Michael Wall is a Senior Space Editor at Space. com and joined the team in 2010. It mainly covers exoplanets, spaceflight, and military space, but is known for dabbling in the field of space art. His book about the search for extraterrestrial life, “Out There,” was published on November 13, 2018. Prior to becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He holds a Ph. D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a B. A. from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in clinical writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his most recent assignment is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.
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