Can SpaceX truly scale Starship flights from about a handful per
year to hundreds annually without the whole operation
buckling under technical strain, regulatory red tape, or even
physics? Well, Elon Musk is confident and
says yes. But while his vision for a high
frequency, low cost launch system has impressive
engineering and financial logic, it also asks for an almost
absurd level of coordination between manufacturing, rocket
science, environmental law, and bureaucratic patients.
Now SpaceX is building a production machine.
They can spit out skyscraper sized launch vehicles faster
than Boeing can roll out 730 sevens and hoping they don't
explode mid air or offend too many environmentalists.
This is the machine that builds the machines.
And to understand why this question matters, let's talk
dollars in cents. Space launch costs are
traditionally astronomical. By reusing hardware, especially
enormous boosters in spacecraft, SpaceX claims it can get the
marginal cost of the launch down to between two and $5 million.
If that's true, it would upend how nations, corporations and
universities think about space. Now imagine sending up
telescopes, satellites or research labs without filing a
Congressional Budget proposal first.
Now multiply that by hundreds of launches per year.
And then there's the longer term agenda.
Starship isn't just about putting satellites in orbit.
SpaceX wants it to carry cargo, crew and infrastructure to the
moon, Mars, and maybe even around Earth like an
intercontinental bullet train. If you believe Elon Musk and
Spacex's goal is about turning humanity into a multi planetary
species. And whether you find that noble
or narcissistic, the practical effects could shift not just the
space industry, but geopolitics, climate adaptation strategies,
and future colonization ethics. Now let's start with the nuts
and bolts, though. Or more accurately, the
stainless steel and the methyllocks.
Starship's propulsion system relies on Raptor engines,
methane, liquid oxygen combination the SpaceX insists
is cheaper, cleaner and more forward thinking than the
traditional kerosene or hydrogen based setups. the Super Heavy
booster alone uses 33 Raptor engines, producing £16.7 million
of thrust. Now Starship itself adds another
six. That's 39 high performance
engines per launch vehicle, all of which need to be built,
tested, installed and also not explode.
Each engine needs to be reusable.
That means no single use disposable parts like in old
space. Producing turbo pump systems and
combustion chambers with high tolerances and repeatability is
incredibly difficult, even with cutting edge manufacturing and
in a workforce that must grow fast and stay skilled, it's a
lot to juggle. Now about the rocket factory.
Stainless steel was chosen because it's relatively cheap,
holds up well under extreme temperatures, and doesn't melt
if it brushes up against a few orbital micrometeoroids.
But welding it into a 400 foot tall launch vehicles takes
precision machinery, massive facilities, and a ton of human
labor. Thousands of people.
SpaceX is using a segmented stacking approach, rolling and
welding cylindrical sections together like a massive cosmic
soda can. And unlike traditional aerospace
workflows that iterate slowly and carefully, SpaceX operates
on a parallel development model. They build multiple vehicles at
once. Incorporating lessons from each
test into the next batch on paper speeds up learning and
practice. It risks letting systemic flaws
propagate across units before they're caught.
Think of it as beta testing a software update.
Except your app is 120 ton rocket.
And a crash doesn't just mean losing data, that means a crater
the size of a Walmart parking lot.
Now the launch. To launch hundreds of these
things a year, SpaceX needs an industrial supply chain the
somewhere between Amazon Prime and Cold War era military
surplus. Each Starship needs mountains of
stainless steel, methane, and liquid oxygen.
Not to mention rare earth materials for electronics,
thermal tiles for re entry, and enough avionics to run an air
traffic Control Center. All of this has to be delivered
just in time, without quality issues and with an ion costs.
They've even carved out a dedicated supply chain manager
role to grease the gears. Now what do you do once you're
flying? Skyscrapers are built though you
test them, often violently. Recently and as of March 2025,
SpaceX has conducted 8 major flight tests.
Some of them have been successful, others ended in
rapid unscheduled disassembly, also known as giant airborne
fireballs and rains of metal. And while the booster's vertical
landings have shown promise, Starship record is Messier
controlled. Re entry remains a particular
problem. Thermal protection systems and
flight software haven't always been up to the job, and these
tests are divided into phases. Suborbital flights test basic
separation in descent controls. Now orbital flights will check
how well Starship performs beyond Earth's atmosphere.
And eventually Spacek wants to load this thing with people in
cargo means life support, interior pressurization, payload
integration, and eventually FAA and NASA certifications.
None of that is fast, though, and none of it can be skipped
unless you're comfortable sending astronauts up on a
maybe. Much of Starship's operation
relies on automation. The craft flies itself from take
off to re entry to landing. That means the flight software
has to make thousands of decisions in real time, with no
room for major bugs. SpaceX is iterating that code
fast, of course, updating systems after nearly every test.
But more autonomy means more complexity and more code and
more changes for something that go wrong.
If the machine gets confused midair, If the code isn't
absolutely 100% perfect, or if an engineering team pulls a
Sprint and produces even 10 lines of spaghetti code, or
someone makes code that will unintentionally create thousands
of lines of code that works subpar, the whole mission is in
jeopardy. Luckily, SpaceX prides itself on
being the home for the best of the best coders in the world, so
that's very unlikely to happen. Then then there's the matter of
where all this action is taking place.
Starbase, Texas. SpaceX wants to jump from 5
launches per year to 25 by 2025, and that's it.
Starbase alone? That requires FAA approval and
compliance with a range of environmental regulations.
They're not minor hurdles, and the agency's assessment focuses
on everything from local wildlife disruption to chemical
runoff. For instance, methane combustion
produces industrial byproducts that must be managed properly.
SpaceX has been working on mitigation strategies, noise
buffers, wastewater treatment, and ecosystem monitoring, but
the pace of permitting is slower than Musk's ambitions.
If the AEA, if the FAA doesn't sign off, SpaceX can't launch.
No amount of engineering or posting on X can fix that.
So is the dream of hundreds of launches per year even remotely
feasible? Let's look at the upside first.
If they can mass produce Starships with consistent
quality, reusability could slash cost to a few $1,000,000 per
launch. Methane is fuel, is relatively
cheap, and has the bonus of being producible on Mars.
The development model, while risky, allows SpaceX to learn
from failure faster than anyone else in the game.
Not paper. It's a formula for industry
domination, but none of that guarantees success.
Coordinating 33 engines with flawless timing, developing a
safe and reusable spacecraft, and maintaining production
without major defects would be an enormous task for even a
national space agency. Add to that a regulatory
framework that doesn't move at Silicon Valley speeds, and
you've got a lot of room for the wheels to come off.
The production goals are ambitious 25 launches in 2025,
leading up to crude Artemis missions by 2026 or 2027, and
eventual Mars colonization attempts in the Twenty 30s.
Every milestone is dependent on hardware working, software
behaving, permits being granted, and funding continuing.
A single failure in any of these columns could delay the whole
show. Whether you think SpaceX is on
the brink of a new era or skating on the edge of an
unsustainable hype machine, one thing's clear.
They're going for it. Full throttle, minimum brakes,
heavy on the spectacle. But if the aim is to make Earth
a multi planet species, there's no room for half assing this.
It's the future of humanity at stake.
Let me know what you think in the comments.
Also, leave a like while you're down there.
Do you think SpaceX is on the verge of sending us to Mars?
Or do you think they're just a few failures away from, well,
failure? Let me go down to the comments
below. Take care of yourselves and each
other and I'll see you in the next one.