SpaceX aiming for 170 Falcon 9 launches this year, exec says

ORLANDO — SpaceX is on track to launch its Falcon 9 rockets up to 170 times by the end of the year, after surpassing its 2024 total in late October.

“We’re aiming for around 170 — between 165 and 170 — which means 25 to 30 more launches to go,” Kiko Dontchev, the company’s vice president of launch, said during a Wednesday session at the Space Economy Summit 2025. In fact, he told attendees, the next launch is scheduled for Wednesday night.

All together, “we’ll get to 2,400, 2,200 [metric tons launched] or something like that, which is absurd in the grand scheme of where things have been,” he added.

Historically, that is close to the global record for metric tons launched to space by all companies and nations — about 2,500 metric tons in 2024, according to Jonathan’s Space Report, compiled by astronomer Jonathan McDowell.

“It’s not what you need to actually go to Mars, but it’s a step on the way,” Dontchev said, echoing SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s overarching goal to land people on Mars in the coming years.

The behemoth Starship-Super Heavy design is central to that plan, Dontchev said, but he noted that for the moment, the Falcon 9 is still the company’s workhorse.

“Reusability is what has enabled this massive cadence. And if you think about the arc of humanity and what happens when a new mode of transportation is unlocked, you get this huge leap in capability right, whether it’s the railroad, interstate highway steam, from sailing ships to steam ships,” he said. “That’s what Falcon 9’s done. It’s allowed an entire economy to get built in low-Earth orbit.”

But he noted Falcon 9 is only partially resuable, because SpaceX must build a new second stage for each launch. For Starship, SpaceX intends to recover and refly both the boosters and upper stages, and in doing so create the first fully reusable rocket.

Version 3 of the Starship upper stage is already in production, Dontchev said: “I’m very hopeful we’re going to fly that early next year, and maybe as early as January, but it’s a development program.”

He added that “safety is our top priority, so we really do want to make sure we get this right because there’s a lot riding on it.”

Construction continues on Starship launch facilities at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and “hopefully another one soon” at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, he said.

“You’re going to see a very, very vibrant spaceport here at the Cape,” Dontchev added.