Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more! Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. Such tower catches could become a relatively common sight in 2025. SpaceX has applied to increase the number of permitted Starship liftoffs from Starbase fivefold in the coming year, to 25 — and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has given its preliminary blessing. A draft environmental assessment released by the FAA in November approves not just the 25 Starship launches from Starbase but 50 tower catches at the site as well — 25 of Super Heavy and 25 of Ship. SpaceX also already has an FAA license for the Starship Flight 7 launch, which could occur 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 understand that the schedule they work by is unprecedented," astrophysicist Ehud Behar, a professor at the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology, told Space.com. SpaceX's Starship Flight 5 Super Heavy booster approaches its launch tower for the first-ever landing and capture at the pad after launching on a suborbital test flight from Starbase in South Texas on Oct. 13, 2024. (Image credit: SpaceX) 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 to have us have 25 missions a year, and in the next few years, 100,” Kathy Lueders, general manager of SpaceX’s Starbase operations, said in November during the Mexico Space Agency’s National Congress of Space Activities conference, according to Gizmodo. "He was telling me, ‘Kathy, I would love to launch a couple of times a day.'" Not all of these future missions will fly from Starbase: SpaceX also plans to launch Starship from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, which already hosts liftoffs of the company's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. Crewed flights coming SpaceX already has some customers lined up for Starship, chief among them NASA, which tapped the megarocket to be the first crewed lander for its Artemis program of moon exploration. 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. That schedule has been pushed back multiple times, most recently due to issues with NASA's Orion crew capsule. (The Artemis 3 plan calls for astronauts to leave Earth aboard Orion, using NASA's Space Launch System rocket. In lunar orbit, Orion will meet up with a modified Starship upper stage, which will carry the astronauts down to the moon's surface.) It's unclear if Artemis 3 will be ready to fly in 2027, Behar said, given NASA's budget constraints and the overall difficulty of crewed missions, especially when they involve a brand-new spaceflight system. (How many successful uncrewed Starship flights will NASA want to see before putting its astronauts on the vehicle?) But he's confident that Starship will be ready to perform more prosaic spaceflight roles by then. "I think Starship, as a launcher of satellites, seems to be on track," Behar said. "I don't see a reason why they won't be on schedule."