SpaceX wants to launch 456 Starships a year. That’s great news for Musk and bad news for the rest of us

FastCompany: Elon Musk has spent years promising a rocket that flies as often as an airliner , a radical idea by current aerospace standards. Now, his bombastic tale has a very real, very scary number attached to it: 456. That’s the number of Starship launches per year SpaceX has asked the Federal Aviation Administration to allow. It’s almost 40% more than all the orbital launch attempts worldwide in 2025 —a record year with 329. The scientists who study what rockets and satellites leave behind in the sky think the whole world should be paying attention.

Leonard Schulz, a researcher at the Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany, who studies the metals that burned-up spacecraft leave behind, believes the entire planet needs to weigh in on this sudden increase in launches and the massive deployment of satellites that will come with it. “I think this problem should be addressed internationally: limits to the use of space need to be quickly established and adhered to by everyone; we only have one atmosphere,” he said in an email. SpaceX’s request works out to nearly two launches every weekday.

Every single year, Starship alone would fly more than three times the 135 missions NASA’s space shuttles flew in three decades. That’s a lot of rocket engines roaring over a coastline full of people and wildlife. And those satellites Starship will carry by the thousands? They will seed the upper atmosphere with metals whose effects nobody fully understands. And before that, they will crowd low Earth orbit, the band of space a few hundred miles up where most satellites circle the planet, and raise the odds of collisions. License to kill The FAA licenses every commercial launch in the U.S.

Before it lets SpaceX fly this often, it has to produce an environmental impact statement, a detailed study of what the plan would do to its surroundings (the FAA published a notice on Wednesday, announcing an environmental review of the plan). This one will cover an entire program of operations rather than a single project, and SpaceX’s request comes in two phases. In the first, Starbase, the company’s launch site next to the city of Brownsville, Texas, on the Gulf of Mexico, would go from 25 to 100 launches a year, plus 200 landings, which could take place at any hour from Monday to Friday.

The second phase would arrive “within several years,” according to the FAA, and raise the ceiling to 456 launches and 912 landings. (Starship goes up with its two stages in one piece; the stages come back down separately.) Launches would stop on weekends, but not at night. For its analysis, the agency assumes that half of all launches and landings would happen between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. Not every flight would come home. Starship’s booster could also make a gentle splashdown in the Gulf or be deliberately blown up in flight, and the spacecraft could splash down at sea or be discarded there.

The review will look at how all that noise and traffic affects the air, wetlands, groundwater, the coastline, and wildlife around Boca Chica, Texas, among other things. What happens to the global atmosphere and to orbit falls outside it. The U.S. will make this call alone, even though the Outer Space Treaty , which it signed in 1967, says that the exploration and use of space belong to all of humanity and that no nation can claim it as its own. Final countdown If Musk pulls this off, putting anything in space would get a lot cheaper, from internet satellites to the crewed moon missions NASA has hired the company to fly. That’s great!

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The article discusses a significant increase in SpaceX's launch plans, which could reshape the aerospace industry and influence brand strategies regarding sustainability and regulation.