(Image credit: Brandon Bell/Getty Images) Starship flying more and more often Starship has flown six times to date in its fully stacked configuration — twice in 2023 and four times so far in 2024. But we can expect that rate to balloon in the near future. SpaceX is apparently targeting 25 Starship launches in 2025, and 100 just a few years after that. And, if all goes to plan, some of those missions will go beyond beyond Earth orbit. Starship will be the first crewed lander for NASA's Artemis program of moon exploration, for example, and the current schedule calls for the vehicle to deliver agency astronauts to the lunar south polar region on the Artemis 3 mission in late 2026. The megarocket could also launch toward the Red Planet that same year, according to Musk. "I am highly confident that we can send several uncrewed Starships to Mars in 2 years. If those ships don't increment the crater count on Mars, then crewed ships can be sent in 4 years," he said in an X post on Tuesday night. (Earth and Mars align properly for interplanetary missions every 26 months.) These bold plans will require a lot of hardware, especially on the Ship side. While each Super Heavy booster will generally come back down to Earth just minutes after launch for inspection and re-flight, the upper stages will stay in space for long stretches, so more of them will be needed. Indeed, Tice and her Flight 6 webcast co-host, SpaceX manufacturing engineering manager Jessica Anderson, said the company eventually aims to build one Ship every eight hours. This work will be done at Starfactory, the manufacturing facility that SpaceX is constructing at Starbase. RELATED STORIES: