Key Takeaways
- Elon Musk said SpaceX’s planned Starbase Louisiana alone could handle 10,000 Starship launches a year, as many as the FAA expects for every US launch and reentry combined by 2035.
- SpaceX told the FAA that the agency’s outdated air traffic processes now limit how often rockets can fly. It proposed dedicated launch corridors, faster approvals and real-time flight tracking.
- Starship’s own pace is the nearer limit: Musk now guides to weekly flights in the first half of 2027, after saying in August that he expected a flight a day within a year.
- At about 53x forward earnings, SpaceX needs Starship to speed up before the FAA’s airspace rules start to matter.
SpaceX (SPCX) just told Washington it will soon have more rockets than the sky can handle. (Or it will someday, anyway.)
The FAA had asked for input on where to build new spaceports and how to give launches priority in US airspace. SpaceX answered on Tuesday. It said the agency’s air traffic control structure and processes are out of date and can’t support many more launches or reentries than happen today.
The FAA expects US launches and reentries to reach 10,000 a year by 2035. It counted a record 204 commercial launch and reentry operations in fiscal 2025.
Musk’s response on X? “10k Starship launches/year is just from Starbase Louisiana.”
So one spaceport would match the FAA’s forecast for the whole country.
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Thirty a day from one site
Ten thousand launches a year is about 27 a day, every day. A summary of SpaceX’s comment posted on X says Starbase Louisiana is designed for about 30 launches and reentries a day, so Musk’s figure matches the design.
SpaceX also proposed fixes: dedicated launch corridors, faster approvals and real-time flight tracking. It pointed to Cleared, its own airspace coordination tool, which it says major US airlines already use.
The site itself is a long way off. SpaceX said in August that it plans to spend around $100 billion on the Louisiana spaceport near Pecan Island. Construction is set to start in 2027, and the first launch is targeted for 2029.
And SpaceX has shown it will spend. Capital spending nearly quintupled from 2023 to 2025.
Over the last twelve months, it’s even higher: $55.1 billion. Most of this year’s spending has gone to AI data centers, which took $40.0 billion of the $48.1 billion SpaceX spent in the first nine months of 2026.
Starlink V3 needs the launches
The data centers get the headlines, but Starlink still earns the profit. Its Connectivity segment made $2.37 billion of SpaceX’s $2.79 billion of third-quarter operating income.
Starlink’s next step depends on Starship. Musk posted that “Starlink V3, which only just started launching, will have ~100 times more bandwidth than the current V2 system.” Each V3 satellite carries 1 terabit per second, and a full Starship carries up to 60 of them, which SpaceX says equals 20 Falcon 9 launches. Flight 14 put 26 V3s in orbit on Sept. 28. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell expects a few hundred to be up by mid-2027.
Analysts expect revenue to grow nearly 7x, from $48.8 billion in 2026 to $330 billion in 2028.
Most of the recent growth has come from renting out AI compute: $6.75 billion of the third quarter’s $9.00 billion year-over-year revenue increase. A fight over airspace in 2035 shouldn’t move estimates for 2027 or 2028.
Starship is the nearer bottleneck
The 10,000 figure is what Louisiana is built to handle someday. Starship still has to fly that often, and it’s behind Musk’s own dates.
In August, Musk said he expected at least one Starship flight a day within a year. On SpaceX’s third-quarter call in October, he guided to weekly flights in the first half of 2027 and twice-weekly flights by the end of that year. Twice a week comes to about 100 flights a year, or roughly 1% of the Louisiana figure. Flight 14 also lost an engine early, cut its mission to about three hours from a planned ten, and lost both stages.
The FAA links the two issues itself. Administrator Bryan Bedford told [Reuters](LINK NEEDED) that regulators would need much better reliability before approving a big jump in launch frequency. Regulators also have a say on the ground: on Oct. 14, a Federal Register notice opened scoping for an environmental review of Starship operations at Boca Chica.
The politics matter more as SpaceX’s share of the sky grows. SpaceX flew 161 of the 195 licensed US launches in fiscal 2025, and critics have noticed. “You cannot have a private company have a monopoly on orbital launch capacity,” The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last said on The Next Level podcast. Asking for airspace priority when you already fly most US launches feeds that argument.
The FAA is a 2029 problem
My take: SpaceX has a real point about the FAA. A spaceport built for about 30 operations a day can’t run on an air traffic process that SpaceX says can’t handle much more than today’s few hundred a year.
But Louisiana’s first launch isn’t targeted until 2029. Until then, what limits Starlink V3 is how often Starship can fly. At about 53x forward earnings on a market value of about $2 trillion, SpaceX is priced for that to go right.
Of course, Flight 15 comes first. Musk expects it in November, and it will try to catch both the booster and the ship. Two catches would put weekly flights within reach, and that’s when the FAA’s airspace rules start to matter.
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Please note that the articles on TIKR are not intended to serve as investment or financial advice from TIKR or our content team, nor are they recommendations to buy or sell any stocks. We create our content based on TIKR Terminal’s investment data and analysts’ estimates. Our analysis might not include recent company news or important updates. TIKR has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading, and happy investing!
