SpaceX has big plans for its Starship rocket. After a groundbreaking test flight, during which the landing tower captured the booster, the company’s founder and CEO, Elon Musk, wants to see the megarocket fly up to 25 times next year, reaching a launch rate of 100 flights per year, and eventually one spacecraft launched daily.

A little more than a month after launching Starship and recovering the rocket’s propellant with giant mechanical arms, SpaceX is preparing to do it again by aiming for more frequent flights of the super heavy launcher. “He would say, next year, he would love for us to do 25 missions a year and in the next few years, a hundred,” Kathy Lueders, SpaceX’s general manager of operations in Boca Chica, said during the conference of the National Congress of Space Activities of the Mexican Space Agency. “He would tell me, ‘Kathy, I would love to go for it several times a day’…big dreams.”

For comparison, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 has already launched 100 times this year, but it is a proven rocket that has been around since 2010. Starship is still in development and undergoing constant modifications, the goal of 25 launches in 2025 is therefore very ambitious. . That’s almost one launch every two weeks. This is a big ask.

Musk has always imagined ambitious deadlines for his rocket company, but the billionaire has often complained about regulatory constraints that have prevented him from achieving them. Last month, SpaceX applied to modify its existing license for Starship launches from the Boca Chica site in Texas, asking the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to increase its launch and landing rate by up to 25 times. The FAA is evaluating SpaceX’s request and analyzing the environmental impact of Starship at the launch site.

SpaceX has previously complained about the FAA holding Starship back. “Ships must fly. The safer we fly, the faster we learn; the faster we learn, the faster we will achieve complete and rapid reuse of rockets,” the company said. wrote in a blog post earlier this year. “Unfortunately, we remain stuck in a reality where it takes more time to complete the government paperwork to authorize a rocket launch than it does to design and build the hardware itself.”

Spacecraft took off on Sunday, October 13 at 8:25 a.m. ET from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas, for the rocket’s fifth test flight. For the first time, Starship’s 71-meter-tall Super Heavy booster descended gently toward a special tower, named Mechazilla, with extended mechanical arms that grabbed the rocket like a pair of giant chopsticks.

SpaceX is ready to see its rocket fly again, targeting Starship’s sixth test flight on Monday, November 18. This will be another suborbital flight, and SpaceX will attempt another thruster capture from the Starship, re-fire one of its Raptor engines in space for the first time, and perform test maneuvers for its re-entry and descent . This is expected to mark the fastest turnaround time for a Starship test flight, with the rocket launching again just over a month after its last launch, an indication that SpaceX is accelerating its launch pace as he seeks to push Starship toward regular operations.

“We want to continue to understand the dynamics of flight on Starship,” Lueders said at the conference. “In particular, you want to make sure that we can actually control an orbital vehicle before we put it into orbit. These next missions are… to make sure we understand that.

As for what happens next, SpaceX may still have to continue its fight with regulators to see its rocket flying this frequently by next year. This fight could take a new shape by next year, with Donald Trump returning to power for his second term, with Musk at his side as head of the Department of Government Effectiveness. Musk’s appointment to the US government could move Starship forward more quickly, but with likely serious environmental and security implications.