SpaceX starts 2025 with Falcon records and Starship problems

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SpaceX kicked off 2025 by continuing its record-breaking pace of Falcon 9 launches while also setting new firsts with its Dragon program. The company continued the deployment of its Starlink satellite internet constellation, growing in number of users and availability of its direct-to-cell services.

SpaceX’s Starship rocket also suffered two back-to-back failures of a new version of its upper stage, although it continued recovering Super Heavy boosters, and it’s poised to reuse one in the rocket’s next flight.

Falcon and Dragon programs

SpaceX started 2025 with the goal of launching 180 missions with its Falcon rockets by the end of the year. While the company has made great progress toward this goal in the first quarter of the year, it still fell short of the cadence needed to reach such a goal.

About two months into the year, SpaceX revised this goal and lowered it to 170 missions by the end of the year due to continued delays in the schedule. 

Despite this, the company improved its launch cadence compared to the first quarter of last year. While SpaceX launched 31 times in Q1 2024, it completed 36 missions in Q1 2025 — a 16% year-on-year increase in cadence. 

The current launch cadence would translate into a total of 144 missions by the end of the year, but such a result assumes a constant cadence. If we apply the 16 percent year-on-year increase in cadence result from comparing the Q1 2025 performance to Q1 2024, then the result would be a total of 155 missions by the end of the year. 

That estimate is also not entirely complete, as it considers an increase in cadence as a constant. On top of that, last year’s failures of the Falcon family of rockets resulted in a slower cadence during the third quarter of the year, leading to an overall lower number of launches than could have been performed otherwise. If no issues arise, SpaceX may be very close to its launch target by the end of the year. 

Moreover, the company launched more than any other entity in the world in Q1 2025, with China trailing behind SpaceX at 17 missions.

Launcher origin Launches Successes Failures Partial Failures
US SpaceX 36 36 0 0
Others 6 6 0 0
China 17 16 1 0
Russia 4 4 0 0
Europe 2 1 1 0
Japan 1 1 0 0
India 1 1 0 0
TOTAL 67 65 2 0

Table showing the number of launches per country of origin and their outcomes in the first quarter of 2025.

While the first quarter of 2025 has been failure-free for Falcon, it has not been trouble-free. In February 2025, a second stage failed to deorbit after completing the Starlink Group 11-4 mission. SpaceX later stated in an update that a liquid oxygen leak led to higher-than-expected rates during the coast phase of the mission. This led to the decision to not execute the stage’s deorbit burn for disposal, and it was left in orbit.

The second stage’s orbit eventually decayed due to atmospheric drag, and it reentered over northern Europe on Feb. 19, with some debris reaching the ground in Poland and Germany.

During the first quarter of 2025, SpaceX also lost booster B1086 on its fifth flight following its landing on the Starlink Group 12-20 mission. The company first reported that a post-landing fire on the engine bay had affected the structural integrity of one of the landing legs, leading to the stage toppling over and being destroyed. 

Observations of the booster’s return to Port Canaveral confirmed this, with portions of the stage’s aluminum-lithium structure visibly melted by the fire that took place after landing. 

However, officials from the company later stated that this post-landing fire had been caused by an issue during the ascent portion of the mission. According to Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice president of build and flight reliability, a fuel leak started on one of the engines approximately 85 seconds into flight. 

This fuel vaporized due to the hot parts of the engine boiling it off. The fuel never caught on fire because the booster was well past the thickest parts of the atmosphere, where there’s very little to no oxygen. Then, when the booster reentered the atmosphere and landed on the droneship, the leaked fuel caught on fire, causing the structural failure of the landing leg and melting several of the aluminum components on the booster.

According to Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX’s vice president of launch, the company subsequently stood down from future flights due to this issue to further investigate the cause and improve the fleet’s reliability. This led to a nine-day gap in Falcon 9 launches, the longest gap in launches since the launch failure of Starlink Group 9-3 in July of last year. 

Despite these issues, no primary mission was compromised in the first quarter of the year, and, as mentioned, SpaceX’s launch cadence was better than it was in the first quarter of last year. This improved cadence has also led to several records being broken. For example, SpaceX broke the turnaround time record for its launch pads at Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) and Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E).

Launch Pad Previous record New record
SLC-40 2d 15h 53min 2d 8h 59min 30s
SLC-4E 3d 15h 23min 30s 2d 22h 21min 10s

Table comparing previous and new record turnaround times at SLC-40 and SLC-4E. 

SpaceX also broke the record for the shortest time span across three different launches, completing the Crew-10, Transporter-13, and Starlink Group 12-16 missions in less than 13 hours. 

The company also broke records for Falcon booster reuse with one Falcon 9 booster, B1067, currently serving as the fleet’s life leader with 26 flights. Another booster, B1088, also broke the record for fastest turnaround time at nine days, three hours, 39 minutes, and 28 seconds between the launch of NASA’s SPHEREx and PUNCH and the launch of NROL-57. 

This booster also had a short turnaround time after NROL-57, and while it didn’t break any records, it represented the booster’s third flight in just 23 days. 

As of the end of March 2025, SpaceX had 17 active boosters in its fleet, with six flying from the company’s west coast launch site and 11 flying from Florida. The company added another booster, B1093, to the group of first stages flying from Vandenberg at the start of Q2 2025. Other new boosters, such as B1091, B1094, and B1095, are also expected to be introduced into the fleet in the coming months. 

SpaceX also made great use of reused fairing halves, with at least one of them, SN185, believed to have flown well over 25 times. Tracking Falcon fairing halves is not trivial, as the company rarely discloses the number of flights for each of their missions. 

However, in recent months, SpaceX has started to install the serial numbers of these fairing halves near their base, allowing observers to identify them before, during, or after their flights. Although this has only permitted a limited and partial tracking of the fairing fleet, it’s been enough to identify halves like SN185 as leading in the number of flights. 

Photo of Falcon 9 on LC-39A with a zoomed-in view showing the recently-added serial numbers to each of the fairing halves. For this mission, Falcon 9 was flying with fairing halves SN203-15 and SN212-8. (Credit: Sawyer Rosenstein for NSF)

Several of these milestones are set to be followed by many more in the near and long term of the program. This is reflected not just in the expected number of missions but also in the paperwork that the company is preparing for the future of the Falcon program. 

In March 2025, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) released a draft environmental assessment (EA) for SpaceX Falcon 9 launch operations at SLC-40. This environmental assessment studies the environmental effects of increasing the launch cadence at the launch site from 70 to 120 launches per year. 

This follows the EA performed in 2020, which studied several activities, including the effects of launching up to 50 times annually from SLC-40. SpaceX subsequently performed two written re-evaluations of this EA, one in 2023 and another in 2024, to increase the number to 56 and 70 launches per year. 

The new EA also includes a study into SpaceX conducting up to 36 landing operations at a new landing zone within SLC-40. SpaceX states that this new landing zone will accommodate Falcon’s return-to-launch-site landings in Florida once its current lease of Launch Complex 13 — where Landing Zones 1 and 2 are located — expires in July 2025. 

Map of the new landing zone within SLC-40 as shown on the draft EA (Credit: FAA)

At the same time, the company is preparing a separate EA with NASA evaluating a similar arrangement for Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A). The EA for LC-39A is analyzing the effects of increasing the launch cadence to up to 36 launches annually and allowing up to 20 landings of boosters at a new landing zone within LC-39A. LC-39A’s new landing zone would be located to the north and would likely feature two landing pads to support Falcon Heavy landing operations. 

According to SpaceX on the draft EA for SLC-40, the Space Launch Delta 45 has implemented a new policy by which launch providers wanting to return their reusable boosters to land in Florida must build their own landing pad within the same complex they launch from.

This measure aims to free up space for other launch providers to perform their missions and minimize impacts on other providers at the space coast with large closeout areas and hazard zones.

Under these new rules, a Falcon rocket launched from one launch pad will have to land at that pad’s landing zone if SpaceX wants to return it to land. This means that if Falcon 9 launches from LC-39A, it cannot return and land at the landing pad at SLC-40 — only the landing pad at LC-39A. 

During the first quarter of 2025, SpaceX launched ten customer launches.

Month Government Commercial Smallsat Starlink Starshield TOTAL
January 0 3 1 8 1 13
February 0 2 0 10 0 12
March 3 0 1 6 1 11
TOTAL 3 5 2 24 2 36

Table showing the type of SpaceX missions and their monthly amounts in 2024.

In January, SpaceX launched two separate lunar landers, Firefly’s Blue Ghost and iSpace’s Hakuto-R, to the Moon. In February, another Falcon 9 launched Intuitive Machines’ second Nova-C lander to the Moon.

The company also launched two geostationary communications satellites, Thuraya 4-NGS and Spainsat-NG I. The latter had to make use of an expendable Falcon 9, B1073, in order to lift the heavy satellite into a supersynchronous transfer orbit.  Maxar’s fifth and sixth WorldView Legion satellites also made their way into orbit on Falcon 9 in February, completing the company’s WorldView Legion constellation. 

Falcon 9 also launched two NASA science missions in just one flight, with NASA’s SPHEREx and PUNCH missions flying together into Sun-synchronous orbit on the same rocket. In March, SpaceX supported a mission for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), NROL-69, which is believed to have carried a new Naval Ocean Surveillance System satellite for the U.S. Navy. 

The company also completed two Transporter missions as part of its Smallsat Rideshare Program, launching more than 200 payloads into orbit between both flights. 

SpaceX also launched the Crew-10 mission for NASA, carrying NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, JAXA astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov to the International Space Station. The mission paved the way for the return of Crew-9, which returned NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore after their Starliner spacecraft was deemed unsafe for their return. 

Along with Williams and Wilmore, Crew-9 returned NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, who served as commander and mission specialist, respectively. Their return also marked the end of Dragon splashdowns off the coast of Florida as the company moved its Dragon recovery operations to the west coast. 

SpaceX kicked off the second quarter of 2025 with another human spaceflight, Fram2, becoming the first crewed mission to fly into polar orbit. The mission was crewed by mission commander Chun Wang, vehicle commander Jannicke Mikkelsen, vehicle pilot Rabea Rogge, and mission specialist and medical officer Eric Philips. 

The three-and-a-half-day mission also marked the first time SpaceX recovered a Crew Dragon in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California. This change allows SpaceX to safely dispose of Dragon’s trunk after its deorbit burn without threatening inhabited areas uprange from the splashdown area. 

Previously, the company had been discarding the trunks before Dragon’s deorbit burn, stranding them in orbit. These would then go through orbital decay due to atmospheric drag, randomly reentering over any part of the globe between 51.6 degrees north and 51.6 degrees south. 

Over the years, this has led to sizable pieces of trunk debris from multiple missions eventually landing over inhabited areas of the globe. With this change, the trunk burns up over the Pacific Ocean, and any surviving debris falls into the water. 

In the second quarter of 2025, SpaceX is expected to launch a similar amount of customer missions as in the first quarter. Some of these will include the launches of up to three Smallsat Rideshare Program missions, up to two geostationary communications satellites, a GPS-III satellite for the U.S. Space Force, another Axiom crewed mission, and a Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) mission for NASA.

Starlink and Starshield

During the first quarter of 2025, SpaceX also carried out 24 Starlink missions, continuing the trend from the last few years, where Starlink missions represent approximately two-thirds of the SpaceX manifest. The company also carried out two dedicated customer missions in support of the NRO’s Proliferated Space Architecture program. 

Across these missions, SpaceX launched 573 satellites, of which 356 Starlink were v2 Mini satellites, 182 were Starlink Direct-to-Cell satellites, and 35 were Starshield satellites for the NRO. 

While the Starlink constellation has grown in number of satellites, so has the user base. In the first quarter of the year, Starlink passed over five million users worldwide, adding about 200,000 users every month on average. 

Starlink partner T-Mobile also opened its beta program of SpaceX’s Direct-to-Cell service in the United States. The service currently only offers text messaging to users out of 5G coverage, but voice and data capabilities are expected to be added soon. Other mobile operators in countries like Japan, New Zealand, and Australia have begun opening beta services of Starlink’s direct-to-cell connectivity.

Starlink’s capabilities have also extended further in the aviation sector, with major airlines like Qatar Airways and United Airlines deploying updates to their aircraft fleet with the Starlink aviation antenna. The FAA has already approved the installation of these antennas in some of the most commonly flown aircraft in the world, like the Airbus A320 and A350 or the Boeing 737 and the Boeing 777 planes.

Given the number of missions that SpaceX plans for 2025, it’s very likely that this year will be the first to feature more than 100 Starlink missions. The NRO also plans to launch up to half a dozen launches in support of its Proliferated Space Architecture program.

In recent flights, SpaceX has started to use the optimized Starlink v2 Mini satellites it unveiled at the end of last year. These are about 23 percent lighter while delivering more connectivity than the previous v2 Mini satellite design. 

This has allowed the company to launch up to 28 of these in a single Falcon 9 mission, which means it can add more capability in orbit with each Starlink mission.

Starship

Eventually, SpaceX’s Starship rocket — the largest and most powerful rocket in the world — will largely be responsible for adding Starlink capability into orbit. During the first quarter of the year, SpaceX tried twice to demonstrate Starship’s ability to carry out such Starlink missions, but in both cases, the second stage of the rocket fell short of its goals. 

These missions represented the first flights of a new version of the rocket’s upper stage, often dubbed as “Block 2” or “Starship V2.” This version features extended tanks with larger propellant capacity for upgraded performance. It also includes several upgrades to its avionics, communications, and power systems. 

Block 2 also introduces several changes to the ship’s manufacturing, simplifying several parts of the vehicle and making use of SpaceX’s new Starfactory and Mega Bay 2 buildings at Starbase. The upgraded ship also featured a new payload bay and Starlink PEZ dispenser compared to the first version of the ship. 

One of the ship’s key design changes was the move away from a single methane transfer tube running through the liquid oxygen tank. Instead, Block 2 features one central transfer tube that splits into three for the three center Raptor engines, with each Raptor Vacuum engine having its own transfer tube connected to the aft end of the methane tank. 

This change to the fuel distribution system is what led to the demise of Ship 33 on Starship’s seventh flight. During that mission, SpaceX was aiming to debut not just a new version of the ship but also several demonstrations, such as deploying Starlink satellite simulators, performing an in-space relight of a Raptor engine, and reentering through the atmosphere with missing heatshield tiles. The ship also featured new heat-resistant materials and catch-enabling hardware. 

However, during the flight, about eight minutes after launch, Ship 33 lost several engines and was eventually lost. The company later explained that this was due to higher-than-expected harmonic responses on the vehicle that ruptured lines in the fuel distribution system. These led to leaks and fires in the engine attic — a portion of the engine bay between the engine shielding and the aft dome of the vehicle — leading to the subsequent failure of engines and the ship as a whole. 

SpaceX planned to solve these issues for the next flight, which flew Ship 34. The vehicle featured a set up hardware changes as well as a different thrust profile of the engines that would reduce the amount of vibration imparted on the ship. The flight was also expected to demonstrate the same experiments that were on Ship 33’s launch. 

Starship’s eighth flight, launched less than two months after the seventh flight, also ended short of its intended mission. During Ship 34’s ascent, once again at around the eight minute mark in the flight, the vehicle started to lose engines and spun out of control. SpaceX has yet to reveal the cause of Ship 34’s demise although it’s notable to mention the similarity of its failure with Ship 33’s failure on Starship Flight 7. 

On both flights, Ship 33 and 34 reentered over the Caribbean Sea, scattering debris across highly active flight routes in the area. Debris from both failures have also been found washing ashore on islands or falling on inhabited areas of the Turks and Caicos. 

The second quarter of the year will therefore be critical for the future of the Starship program. The two back-to-back failures have forced the company to defer several technical demonstrations needed for the future of the rocket, such as Starlink satellite deployment, an in-space relight of Raptor with the new block 2 upgrades, and demonstrating the capability of the ship to be caught after a return from orbit.

Despite the failures of the upper stage of Starship, its booster stage, Super Heavy, has found full success in the two flights of Starship in 2025 so far. Booster 14 and Booster 15, the Super Heavy boosters for Starship Flight 7 and Flight 8 respectively, successfully delivered their ships into the intended trajectory and returned back to the launch site for a landing at the launch tower.

Since then, SpaceX has spent several weeks refurbishing, testing, and preparing Booster 14 for its next flight, which is planned to be on Starship’s next flight, Flight 9. The company also announced that 29 out of the 33 engines on the booster are flight-proven, demonstrating the reusability of not just Super Heavy but also of its Raptor engines. 

Booster 14’s next flight will be paired with Ship 35, and while the details of the mission are likely still in flux, it is expected that Ship 35 will try to accomplish all objectives from Flight 7 and Flight 8. That flight is currently scheduled for no earlier than early May, although it’s dependent on a positive engine test campaign and pre-launch preparations of Ship 35. 

During the first quarter of the year, SpaceX also continued work on the second launch pad at Starbase, Orbital Launch Pad B (OLP-B). During that time, the company installed several new tanks, subcoolers, and cryogenic pumps at the tank farm that will supply OLP-B’s launch operations.

Teams have also installed a new water deluge tank farm and system that connects to the launch pad’s flame trench. That flame trench is also in the final stages of its construction with the latest major piece of progress being the installation of the watercooled flame diverter into the trench. 

SpaceX also unveiled in March its intentions to build a larger version of its Mega Bay buildings both at Starbase and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Work has already begun at Starbase for this new building by removing the High Bay and STARGATE buildings to make room for the new Giga Bay. 

In Florida, the Giga Bay construction is at a more advanced state than Starbase, with foundation work already well underway. According to SpaceX, both Giga Bay buildings are expected to be complete by the end of 2026 and will allow the construction of future versions of the ship and booster at a higher cadence than now.

SpaceX is also making great progress at LC-39A, where teams have begun digging the flame trench for Starship’s pad at the site. The company also announced in March it is aiming to launch Starship from that site by the end of 2025, with initial vehicles being produced at Starbase and being sent over to Florida for launch.

(Lead image: Top left: View of the payload stack from Starlink Group 6-80 with 28 Starlink v2 Mini satellites onboard (Credit: SpaceX). Top right: Crew Dragon Resilience flying over the Earth’s poles during Fram2 (Credit: SpaceX). Bottom left: Crew-9 crew on orbit inside Crew Dragon Freedom (Credit: NASA). Bottom right: Booster 15 landing burn during Starship’s eighth test flight (Credit: SpaceX))

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