# SpaceX

> SpaceX is an American spacecraft manufacturer and launch provider that builds Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Dragon, Starlink, and Starship, the largest rocket ever flown.

- Canonical: https://thespacewiki.com/wiki/spacex
- Updated: 2026-11-15
- Category: agencies
- License: CC BY-SA 4.0. Attribute "The Space Wiki (thespacewiki.com)".

| Fact | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Full name | Space Exploration Technologies Corp. |
| Founded | March 14, 2002 |
| Founder | [Elon Musk](/wiki/elon_musk) |
| Headquarters | Starbase, Texas, United States |
| Traded as | Nasdaq: SPCX (since June 12, 2026) |
| CEO | Elon Musk |
| President and COO | [Gwynne Shotwell](/wiki/gwynne_shotwell) |
| Employees | More than 22,000 (March 2026) |
| Revenue | 14.58 billion dollars (quarter ended September 30, 2026) |
| Active rockets | [Falcon 9](/wiki/falcon_9), [Falcon Heavy](/wiki/falcon_heavy), [Starship](/wiki/starship) (in testing) |
| Spacecraft | [Dragon 2](/wiki/crew_dragon), [Starlink](/wiki/starlink) satellites |
| Falcon launches | 716 (Falcon family, as of November 12, 2026) |

**SpaceX** (Space Exploration Technologies Corp.) is an American spacecraft manufacturer, launch provider, and satellite communications company headquartered in Starbase, Texas. It launches more mass to orbit than every other operator on Earth combined, deploying 1,041 metric tons across 78 missions in the first half of 2026,[23] and it is flight-testing [Starship](/wiki/starship), the largest and most powerful rocket ever flown,[1] which reached orbit for the first time on September 28, 2026.[66] On November 14, 2026, the launch tower at Starbase caught a Starship upper stage returning from orbit for the first time.[86]

[Elon Musk](/wiki/elon_musk) founded the company in 2002 with the stated goal of reducing the cost of spaceflight far enough to make life multiplanetary. Today it operates the [Falcon 9](/wiki/falcon_9) and [Falcon Heavy](/wiki/falcon_heavy) rockets, the Dragon spacecraft, and the [Starlink](/wiki/starlink) satellite internet constellation. Falcon rockets flew 77 of those 78 first-half missions,[23] and Falcon 9 had made 702 physical liftoffs through November 12, including 120 during 2026,[2] while Falcon Heavy had flown 14 times.[70] The company is also [NASA](/wiki/nasa)'s primary crew transportation provider to the [International Space Station](/wiki/international_space_station) and is building the Starship lunar lander for the [Artemis program](/wiki/artemis_program). In 2026 SpaceX absorbed Musk's artificial intelligence startup [xAI](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/xai) and went public on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, in the largest initial public offering in history.[9][10]

## Status as of November 2026

Starship flew for the fifteenth time on November 13. The booster aborted its catch attempt and exploded at an offshore splashdown, but the ship reached orbit, released 26 Starlink V3 satellites, and was caught by the Starbase launch tower on November 14, the first catch of an upper stage.[85][86] Falcon 9 had flown 120 times in 2026 through November 12,[2] and after August 25 SpaceX stopped launching Starlink satellites on Falcon 9 from Florida, saying those missions would move to Starship.[67][68] Falcon Heavy last flew on October 1, with the classified NROL-97 mission.[70] About 11,190 Starlink satellites were in orbit before the November 13 flight.[25] SpaceX's third-quarter report, covering July to September, showed revenue of 14.58 billion dollars, net income of 4.4 billion dollars and 13.6 million Starlink consumer subscribers.[87] On August 25 the company announced a 100 billion dollar Starship launch site in Louisiana, where it targets a first launch in 2029,[74][87] and on October 14 the FAA opened an environmental review of its request for up to 456 Starship launches a year from Starbase.[76]

## History

Elon Musk founded SpaceX in March 2002 to reduce launch cost and support eventual Mars exploration. The company began in El Segundo, California, and later moved to a larger factory in Hawthorne.[4]

The company's first rocket, the small Falcon 1, failed on its first three flights between 2006 and 2008. The fourth flight, on September 28, 2008, reached orbit and made Falcon 1 the first privately developed liquid-propellant rocket to do so. Three months later NASA awarded SpaceX a 1.6 billion dollar Commercial Resupply Services contract, a decision Musk has credited with saving the company from bankruptcy.[4] A fifth and final Falcon 1 flight put Malaysia's RazakSAT into orbit in July 2009, after which SpaceX retired the vehicle to concentrate on Falcon 9.[4]

Falcon 9 first flew in June 2010, and in May 2012 a Dragon capsule became the first commercial spacecraft to berth with the International Space Station. SpaceX then spent years learning to recover its boosters: the first successful landing came on December 21, 2015, and the first reflight of a used booster followed on March 30, 2017. Falcon Heavy debuted in February 2018, and in May 2020 the Demo-2 mission carried NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the station, the first crewed orbital flight by a private company.[4][5]

In the 2020s the company scaled up on every axis: Starlink grew into the world's largest satellite constellation, Starship development consumed the Boca Chica site in South Texas, and SpaceX moved its headquarters there in 2024. The surrounding area incorporated as the city of Starbase, Texas in May 2025, on a vote of 212 to 6 cast almost entirely by SpaceX employees and their families.[49]

The company itself changed shape in 2026. On February 2 SpaceX [acquired xAI](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/spacex_xai_merger), Musk's artificial intelligence startup, in an all-stock deal that valued the combined company at 1.25 trillion dollars, with 1 trillion attributed to SpaceX and 250 billion to xAI. The deal brought the [Grok](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/grok) chatbot and the X social platform under SpaceX, and Musk said its main purpose was to build [orbital data centers](/wiki/orbital_data_centers).[9] On June 12 the company listed on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX in the largest initial public offering in history; shares priced at 135 dollars,[61] closed their first day up 19 percent, and made Musk the world's first trillionaire.[10][11] The base offering raised about 75 billion dollars;[10] with the underwriters' option on 83,333,333 more shares taken up in full, the offering closed on June 15 at 638,888,888 Class A shares, worth about 86.25 billion dollars at the offering price,[65] for net proceeds of about 85.7 billion dollars, and was followed on June 26 by a 25 billion dollar inaugural bond issue.[23] The AI business completed its rebrand as SpaceXAI that July, a name Musk had announced in May for the merged operation,[12] and on October 4 Musk said it would be renamed again, as SpaceXSI.[80] SpaceX's first earnings report as a public company, on August 4, showed quarterly revenue of 7.8 billion dollars, up 92 percent from a year earlier and well ahead of expectations, against a 541 million dollar net loss and 18.4 billion dollars of quarterly capital spending, most of it on the AI buildout.[13][14][23] AI Wiki's [SpaceX article](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/spacex) covers the AI business in more depth.

## Organization and finances

Elon Musk is SpaceX's founder, chief executive, and chairman, and [Gwynne Shotwell](/wiki/gwynne_shotwell) is president and chief operating officer, responsible for day-to-day operations, launch, and customer relationships. The company's IPO prospectus disclosed more than 22,000 full-time employees as of March 2026.[61] Its registered headquarters is at Starbase, moved from Hawthorne in 2024, though the Hawthorne factory remains the main Falcon and Dragon production site.

The IPO ended more than two decades as a private company and forced SpaceX to publish figures it had previously kept internal. It reports three segments: Space, covering launch services and Starship development; Connectivity, covering Starlink and Starshield; and AI, which the company's third-quarter release calls Super Intelligence. For the quarter ended September 30, 2026, Connectivity and AI reported operating profits and Space lost 7 million dollars; a quarter earlier only Connectivity had been profitable.[87][23]

| Segment | Revenue, Q3 2026 | Income (loss) from operations | Capital spending |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Space | 1.77 billion dollars | -7 million dollars | 1.61 billion dollars |
| Connectivity | 5.25 billion dollars | 2.37 billion dollars | 1.54 billion dollars |
| AI | 7.56 billion dollars | 431 million dollars | 16.44 billion dollars |
| Total | 14.58 billion dollars | 2.79 billion dollars | 19.59 billion dollars |

Revenue for the quarter was up 161 percent year over year and 87 percent on the second quarter's 7.81 billion dollars, adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization were 8.8 billion dollars, and net income was 4.4 billion dollars, against a net loss of 541 million dollars in the second quarter.[87][23] Cursor, acquired on August 14, contributed 608 million dollars of the quarter's revenue.[87] SpaceX held 51.3 billion dollars in cash and cash equivalents and 38.6 billion dollars in marketable securities on September 30.[87] Its backlog stood at 62.96 billion dollars on that date, up from 47.5 billion at the end of June.[88][23] For the full year 2025 the prospectus reports 18.7 billion dollars of revenue, 11.4 billion of it from the Connectivity segment, which is mostly Starlink; its 4.4 billion dollars of operating income made it the only profitable segment that year as well, against losses in Space and AI.[61]

## Launch vehicles

SpaceX has flown four launch vehicle families: the small Falcon 1, retired in 2009,[4] the active Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, and Starship, which remains in flight testing.[1]

| Vehicle | First flight | Status | Payload to low Earth orbit |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Falcon 1 | 2006 | Retired (2009) | 450 kg |
| Falcon 9 | 2010 | Active | 22,000 kg (expendable) |
| Falcon Heavy | 2018 | Active | 63,800 kg (expendable) |
| Starship | 2023 | Flight testing | 100,000+ kg (planned) |

Falcon 9 is SpaceX's workhorse rocket. Its first stage lands on drone ships or landing zones and flies again, making SpaceX the first operator to repeatedly refly an orbital-class booster.[4] SpaceX's published price list quotes 74 million dollars for a dedicated Falcon 9 launch through 2026, with a maximum expendable performance of 22,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit, 8,300 kilograms to geostationary transfer orbit, and 4,020 kilograms to Mars.[24] The fleet leader, booster B1067, flew for a record 36th time on July 9, 2026, five years after its debut on a Dragon cargo mission,[26] and for a 37th time on August 25 on a Starlink mission from Cape Canaveral.[67] SpaceX then stopped launching Starlink satellites on Falcon 9 from Florida; Kiko Dontchev, its vice president for launch, said Starlink missions from the state would fly on Starship from then on, while Falcon 9 Starlink flights continued from Vandenberg.[68] By November 12, Falcon 9 had made 702 physical liftoffs, while SpaceX's live counter recorded 653 successful first-stage landings and 619 missions flown with a previously used booster.[2][3]

Falcon Heavy flies rarely. It has launched 14 times since February 2018.[70] Its April 29, 2026 flight with the ViaSat-3 F3 communications satellite was its first mission in 18 months and the first since [Europa Clipper](/wiki/europa_clipper) in October 2024; on that flight the two side boosters landed back at the Cape while the center core was expended.[27] Two more followed about a month apart: NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on August 30, the fourth primary NASA mission to fly on Falcon Heavy,[69] and the classified NROL-97 mission for the National Reconnaissance Office on October 1, which reused the side boosters from the Roman launch and expended a new center core.[70]

Starship is the proposed successor to much of the Falcon fleet, but it remains in flight testing. The fully reusable two-stage vehicle completed its twelfth integrated test flight on May 22, 2026, the first flight of the upgraded Version 3 design and its new Raptor 3 engines. The ship reached its target suborbital trajectory despite an engine shutdown during ascent, released 20 mass simulators and two modified Starlink spacecraft, and splashed down under control in the Indian Ocean. Controllers skipped the planned in-space engine relight after the ascent engine loss. The Super Heavy booster lost engines during its return and was destroyed on a hard water impact.[5] The FAA required SpaceX to complete a mishap investigation into the booster failure before Flight 13 could fly.[28]

Flight 13 followed on July 24, 2026, after a first attempt on July 16 ended in an automatic abort at T-0 when four Raptor engines failed to start.[15] The ship released 20 production Starlink V3 satellites onto a suborbital path; none entered an operational orbit. A Raptor engine relit in space, and the ship survived reentry to a propulsive splashdown in the Indian Ocean about 65 minutes after liftoff, staying intact in the water for the first time. The booster reached the Gulf but made a hard water impact and was destroyed after its return burn ended early.[16][29]

Musk told analysts on August 4 that the next flight would carry Starlink V3 satellites to an operational orbit for the first time,[56] and SpaceNews reported on August 21 that an attempt to catch the ship on that flight had become unlikely.[63] Flight 14 lifted off at 8:49 a.m. EDT on September 28, 2026, and became the first Starship to reach orbit. One of the ship's six Raptor engines shut down early, but a follow-up burn on a single engine completed the climb to an orbit about 180 miles high, and the ship then released 26 third-generation Starlink satellites, the first operational payload Starship has carried to low Earth orbit. Controllers cut the planned six-orbit mission short and brought the ship down under control north of Hawaii about three hours after launch, after which it tipped over and exploded as leftover propellant ignited. The booster lost one engine during ascent and apparently another during its boostback burn, but made a vertical splashdown a few miles off the Texas coast; SpaceX is keeping boosters to ocean landings as a precaution until upgrades have been tested.[66]

Flight 15 lifted off from Starbase on November 13, 2026, on the first attempt to bring both stages back to the launch site. An automated abort diverted the Super Heavy booster to an offshore splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, where it exploded, so no Version 3 booster has yet been caught. The ship reached orbit, deployed 26 more Starlink V3 satellites, and after about 14 orbits returned to Starbase, where the launch tower's arms caught it on November 14, the first catch of a Starship upper stage.[85][86]

## Launch sites and manufacturing

SpaceX launches Falcon rockets from three pads: Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Launch Complex 39A at NASA's [Kennedy Space Center](/wiki/kennedy_space_center), which handles crewed missions and Falcon Heavy, and Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California for polar orbits. In October 2025 the Department of the Air Force approved doubling Vandenberg activity from 50 to 100 launches a year, allowing up to 70 Falcon 9 flights from SLC-4 and adding SLC-6, the former Delta IV pad, for 25 Falcon 9 and five Falcon Heavy launches a year from about 2027. The California Coastal Commission had voted against the plan in August 2025, saying it lacked the data to judge the effects of launch noise and sonic booms on marine and land species; the federal approval went ahead anyway.[33]

Starship flies only from Starbase, where Pad 2 entered service with Flight 12 in May 2026 while the original Pad 1 is being rebuilt to the same design.[23] Three more Starship pads are approved or under construction in Florida. The Department of the Air Force cleared the redevelopment of Space Launch Complex 37 at Cape Canaveral in November 2025 for up to 76 Starship launches and 152 landings a year, and the FAA issued a record of decision on January 30, 2026 permitting up to 44 launches and 88 landings a year from LC-39A.[32][30] SpaceX is building one tower at LC-39A and two at SLC-37,[68] and at the end of September it planned its first Florida Starship launch for late 2026 or early 2027.[66] It announced a further Starship site on August 25, 2026: Starbase Louisiana, a 100 billion dollar complex at Pecan Island in Vermilion Parish that is planned to grow to five launch complexes with two pads each, with construction starting in 2027 and a first launch targeted for as early as 2029.[74][75]

Manufacturing is spread across four states. Falcon rockets and Dragon capsules are built in Hawthorne, California; engines are tested at McGregor, Texas; Starship vehicles are assembled at the Starfactory at Starbase; and Starlink hardware comes from Redmond, Washington, which the IPO prospectus said turned out about 70 satellites a week between December 2025 and April 2026, and from a user-terminal plant at Bastrop, Texas.[43][61]

## Dragon

[Dragon 2](/wiki/crew_dragon) is the only American spacecraft currently certified to carry crews to orbit. Since Demo-2 in 2020, SpaceX has flown regular crew rotation missions for NASA under the [Commercial Crew Program](/wiki/commercial_crew_program), along with a series of private flights: Inspiration4 in September 2021 (the first all-civilian orbital mission), the Axiom Space missions to the station, Polaris Dawn in September 2024 (the first commercial spacewalk), and Fram2 in 2025 (the first crewed flight over the poles). In January 2026 a Dragon brought Crew-11 home about a month early because of a medical concern involving one stable crew member; NASA did not identify the person or condition.[6][53] Crew-12 launched on February 13, 2026 from SLC-40 with NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot, and [Roscosmos](/wiki/roscosmos) cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, docking the following day to restore the station to a full complement.[50] That crew came home on October 8 after 237 days in orbit,[72] a week after Crew-13 launched on October 1 with NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov.[71]

Cargo Dragon continues to fly resupply missions under a Commercial Resupply Services 2 contract that NASA extended in November 2024 to run through the end of 2030; the agency had obligated about 2.8 billion dollars to SpaceX under that contract by then.[51] SpaceX's 35th resupply mission launched on October 13, 2026 with more than 6,300 pounds of cargo, including the last pair of the station's Roll-Out Solar Arrays.[73] NASA has separately ordered 14 crew rotation missions under a Commercial Crew Transportation Capability contract worth 4.93 billion dollars, also running through 2030.[52]

NASA selected a modified Dragon design, the US Deorbit Vehicle, to bring the International Space Station down safely after operations end. The June 2024 development contract has a maximum value of 843 million dollars; NASA will own and operate the finished vehicle and procure its launch separately. The controlled reentry is expected in 2031 under the current transition plan.[34][54]

## Starlink

[Starlink](/wiki/starlink) is SpaceX's satellite internet business and its main source of revenue. SpaceX reported 13.6 million Starlink consumer subscribers at the end of September 2026, up from 12.0 million at the end of June and 7.2 million a year earlier,[87][23][7] at an average revenue per consumer subscriber of 69 dollars a month.[87] It listed service in 174 countries, territories, and other markets at the end of September, up from 167 at midyear.[88][64] Of 13,096 Starlink satellites launched through November 12, 2026, about 11,190 were in orbit,[25] among them the first 26 operational third-generation satellites, which Starship carried to orbit on September 28.[66] Starship added 26 more on November 13.[85] Connectivity revenue reached 5.25 billion dollars in the third quarter of 2026, up 69 percent year over year, with 2.37 billion dollars of operating income.[87]

Newer satellites add direct-to-cellphone service, sold in the United States through T-Mobile and offered by carriers including SoftBank, NTT Docomo and Spark NZ. In May 2026 the FCC approved SpaceX's purchase of about 65 megahertz of nationwide spectrum from EchoStar, subject to a 2.4 billion dollar escrow condition, giving the company its first dedicated terrestrial wireless licenses for that business.[23][48] On October 6, 2026 the FCC partly granted a separate SpaceX application for a dedicated direct-to-device constellation of 15,000 satellites in shells between 326 and 335 kilometers up, though SpaceX may not begin service in the former EchoStar bands until the second step of that license transfer is completed.[77] Starlink has also signed inflight connectivity deals with airlines including American, Southwest, Virgin Atlantic, Iberia and Aer Lingus.[23] The constellation's scale has made SpaceX central to debates about [space debris](/wiki/space_debris) and orbital traffic management.

## Starshield and national security

Starshield is the government version of the Starlink platform, sold to national security customers for communications, sensing, and hosted payloads. SpaceX said it won more than 6 billion dollars in multi-year US government Starshield contracts during the second quarter of 2026 alone, mostly from two Space Force awards for low Earth orbit communications and sensing constellations.[23]

The larger of the two, announced on May 29, 2026 and worth 4.16 billion dollars, covers the first increment of the Space-Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator program, a sensing constellation intended to track aircraft, cruise missiles and other moving airborne targets from orbit as part of the Golden Dome missile defense architecture.[36] Two days earlier the Space Force awarded SpaceX 2.29 billion dollars to build the backbone of a Space Data Network, previously called MILNET: an optically interconnected mesh of Starshield satellites carrying military traffic through space instead of over ground relays, with a fully operational prototype required by the end of 2027.[35] The company also builds and operates a large classified imaging constellation for the National Reconnaissance Office.

## Starmind and AI infrastructure

SpaceX's February 2026 acquisition of xAI made AI infrastructure a core business alongside launch. The company ended June 2026 with 1.4 gigawatts of computing capacity and 2.6 billion dollars in quarterly AI revenue, against 15.8 billion dollars of AI capital spending in the same quarter.[13][23] Three months later it reported 1.7 gigawatts, 7.56 billion dollars of quarterly AI revenue and 16.4 billion dollars of AI capital spending.[87] During that quarter it also agreed to buy Anysphere, the company behind the Cursor AI coding tool,[23] and it completed the all-stock purchase on August 14, issuing about 391 million Class A shares at an implied equity value of 60 billion dollars.[62] On August 14, 2026, Musk forecast that orbital compute would become "the only way to scale AI," probably sometime in 2029, because of power availability and permitting constraints on land.[57] This was a dated forecast, not a demonstrated capability. SpaceX's IPO prospectus said deployment could begin as early as 2028, but also described the initiative as early-stage and unproven at commercial scale or at all; it warned that the schedule and required launch cadence may be difficult or impossible to determine.[58][61] The GAO reported in April that large centers would require solar arrays larger than any launched and assembled in space as of that month, while cooling at that scale remained unproven; it also identified manufacturing and launch costs as barriers.[59] A 2026 technical preprint found that general-purpose orbital computing for terrestrial users would require low space-to-ground communications intensity, high utilization, long service life, and combined launch and spacecraft costs below the public Falcon 9 dedicated-launch benchmark.[60] See [orbital data centers](/wiki/orbital_data_centers) for the technical and economic case in detail.

The scale of that ambition surfaced in a January 2026 regulatory filing: SpaceX asked the FCC for authority to operate an "Orbital Data Center system" of as many as one million satellites at altitudes between 500 and 2,000 kilometers, connected to one another and to Starlink by optical links, and asked to be excused from the deployment milestones that normally apply to new constellations.[17][18] The FCC's Space Bureau accepted it for filing on February 4, 2026; that procedural step was not an authorization.[17] The bureau asked SpaceX for more information on August 28, 2026, SpaceX answered on September 16, and the application was still pending review on November 14.[82][83][84]

On August 4, 2026, SpaceX said it is working with NVIDIA on the [Starmind](/wiki/starmind) AI1 compute payload, using NVIDIA [Rubin GPUs](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/nvidia_vera_rubin) and Vera CPUs.[19] SpaceX's current program page lists a 30-meter deployed height, 75-meter wingspan, up to 250 kilowatts of peak compute, 175 kilowatts of average compute, a 210-kilowatt solar array, and a 160-square-meter radiator. Those are company design figures, not flight measurements.[55] On August 24 Musk wrote that the two companies had adapted NVIDIA's Vera Rubin NVL72 rack for use in space and planned to put it in orbit in the fourth quarter of 2027, scaling up in 2028, and NVIDIA said the same day that the first-generation Starmind satellite would be based on that rack-scale system.[78][79] That target is earlier than the 2028 deployment start described in the IPO prospectus.[58][61]

Musk told analysts that SpaceX intended its broader AI-compute buildout to use NVIDIA hardware and that he expected total company computing capacity to exceed 2 gigawatts by the end of 2026, up from 1.4 gigawatts at the end of the second quarter.[20][22] The figure stood at 1.7 gigawatts on September 30.[87] That statement does not establish an exclusive supplier for every future AI1 design: SpaceX's Starmind page describes the payload architecture as modular and vendor agnostic.[55] NVIDIA's separate Space-1 announcement did not name SpaceX, so the public record does not identify AI1 as a Space-1 module.[21] SpaceX has not published AI1's total mass, unit cost, or launch price. Smaller rivals, including [Starcloud](/wiki/starcloud), are pursuing the same market at a much earlier scale.

## Starship and Mars

SpaceX is developing Starship at Starbase as a fully reusable system intended to carry more than 100 tonnes to orbit. Fifteen integrated flights have been conducted since April 2023, including the first "chopsticks" catch of a returning Super Heavy booster in October 2024, the Version 3 debut in May 2026, the release of production Starlink V3 satellites in July 2026,[16] the first orbital flight, which deployed 26 operational Starlink V3 satellites, in September 2026,[66] and the first tower catch of a ship returning from orbit, in November 2026.[86] Upcoming test objectives include in-space propellant transfer and higher-cadence launches from the new Pad 2,[1][5] along with the first reflight of a ship and the first launches from Florida.[66][86]

The company's stated long-term purpose is [Mars settlement](/wiki/mars_colonization). Musk has discussed sending uncrewed Starships toward [Mars](/wiki/mars) during favorable transfer windows, but in February 2026 he said SpaceX would focus on building a settlement on the [Moon](/wiki/the_moon) before sending people to Mars.[81] No firm Mars mission has been confirmed, and the near-term program remains focused on Earth-orbit testing and the lunar lander.

## NASA partnerships and Artemis

SpaceX holds NASA contracts across cargo, crew, science launches, and exploration. In 2021 NASA selected Starship as the Human Landing System for the Artemis program under a 2.89 billion dollar award. Under NASA's current architecture, the crewed [Artemis III](/wiki/artemis_program) mission is intended to test Earth-orbit rendezvous and docking with Starship and Blue Moon lander test vehicles. NASA plans to choose a provider after those demonstrations for the first crewed landing, assigned to Artemis IV no earlier than 2028. Starship still must demonstrate large-scale cryogenic propellant transfer and an uncrewed lunar landing before carrying astronauts to the surface.[8][47] SpaceX rockets have also launched flagship science missions such as Europa Clipper in October 2024 and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope in August 2026.[69]

## Regulation and environment

Every SpaceX launch requires an FAA license, and the agency's environmental reviews now set the ceiling on how often each site can fly. The FAA raised the Starbase limit from 5 to 25 Starship launches a year in a May 2025 record of decision,[31] then approved 44 launches and 88 landings a year at LC-39A in January 2026 while conceding that "significant effects associated with the proposed action are unavoidable," including noise and airspace closures that can delay Florida air traffic by up to two hours.[30] In July 2026 the Department of Transportation proposed exempting commercial launch licensing from 13 federal statutes, among them the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, and parts of the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts, a rule that would remove much of that review process.[46] In October 2026 the FAA opened public scoping for a programmatic environmental impact statement on SpaceX's request to raise the Starbase ceiling in two phases, first to 100 launches and 200 landings a year and eventually to as many as 456 launches and 912 landings, with comments due by November 30.[76]

The company has also been penalized. In September 2024 the FAA proposed 633,009 dollars in fines over two 2023 Falcon 9 launches conducted outside license terms, prompting Musk to say SpaceX would sue the agency for "regulatory overreach."[44] Texas and federal environmental regulators separately found that the Starbase deluge system had discharged industrial wastewater without a permit; SpaceX disputed the characterization, saying it had worked with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality throughout construction and testing, that the water is potable and mostly vaporized at launch, and that a mercury reading of 113 micrograms per liter in its permit application was a typographical error.[45]

## Criticism

Radio astronomers have measured interference from SpaceX's Starlink satellites. A Curtin University team led by Dylan Grigg cataloged 112,534 unintended radio emissions from 1,806 Starlink satellites in 76 million images taken by a prototype Square Kilometre Array station, finding satellite signals in up to 30 percent of images and detecting 703 satellites radiating at 150.8 MHz, a band reserved for radio astronomy. The authors note that Starlink is not breaking any rule, because International Telecommunication Union regulations cover intentional transmissions only, and argue the rules need updating.[37]

Orbital congestion is the second recurring complaint. SpaceX's own semi-annual reports to the FCC recorded 207,152 Starlink collision-avoidance maneuvers between December 2025 and May 2026, up from 148,696 in the previous six months and more than 355,000 across the year to May 31, 2026, which works out at more than 40 maneuvers per satellite per year.[38]

Workplace safety has drawn sustained scrutiny since a 2023 Reuters investigation documented at least 600 previously unreported injuries at SpaceX sites, including crush injuries, amputations, and one death, and found that the company had not filed required injury summaries with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for most of the preceding seven years.[39] The pattern has continued at Starbase: OSHA opened an investigation after a 25-year-old contractor died in a fall there on May 15, 2026, and the agency had already issued seven serious citations and 115,850 dollars in penalties in January 2026 over a crane collapse at the site's Massey test area, which SpaceX is contesting.[40]

A third line of criticism concerns concentration rather than conduct. Svetla Ben-Itzhak of Johns Hopkins University notes that five of every six US launches are flown by SpaceX and that Dragon is the country's only crewed spacecraft, so a financial, technical, or political disruption at one firm would propagate through the whole national program; she cites Musk's brief 2025 threat to decommission Dragon as a demonstration of the exposure, and argues for deliberate redundancy, including the requirement that NASA use at least two commercial lunar lander providers.[41] Industry data supports the underlying picture: BryceTech counted 165 SpaceX launches in 2025 out of 325 worldwide, carrying 85 percent of all satellites deployed that year.[42]

## References

1. [Starship - SpaceX](https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship/) - SpaceX.
2. [Falcon 9 Launch Catalog](https://planet4589.org/space/gcat/data/launch/Falcon9.html) - Jonathan McDowell, General Catalog of Artificial Space Objects, updated November 13, 2026.
3. [Falcon 9 Statistics](https://content.spacex.com/api/spacex-website/falcon-nine-stats) - SpaceX, live data read November 14, 2026.
4. [SpaceX Mission Milestones](https://www.spacex.com/mission) - SpaceX, accessed August 12, 2026.
5. [SpaceX launches more powerful Super Heavy-Starship rocket on test flight](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/spacex-launches-super-heavy-starship-rocket-version-3-test-flight/) - CBS News.
6. [SpaceX - Launches](https://www.spacex.com/launches) - SpaceX.
7. [SpaceX's Starlink Surpasses 12M Customers Across 160 Countries As Growth Accelerates](https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/spacex-starlink-surpasses-12m-customers-000951284.html) - Yahoo Finance.
8. [NASA Marches Toward Artemis III Mission in 2027, Names Crew Members](https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-marches-toward-artemis-iii-mission-in-2027-names-crew-members/) - NASA.
9. [Musk's xAI, SpaceX combo is the biggest merger of all time, valued at $1.25 trillion](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/03/musk-xai-spacex-biggest-merger-ever.html) - CNBC, February 3, 2026.
10. [SpaceX raising $75 billion in record-setting IPO as Nasdaq debut awaits](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/11/spacex-raises-75-billion-in-record-setting-ipo-ahead-of-nasdaq-debut.html) - CNBC, June 11, 2026.
11. [SpaceX IPO closes up 19% and delivers the world's first trillionaire](https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/12/spacex-ipo-closes-up-19-and-delivers-the-worlds-first-trillionaire/) - TechCrunch, June 12, 2026.
12. [xAI is now officially known as SpaceXAI](https://www.engadget.com/2209300/xai-now-officially-spacexai/) - Engadget, July 7, 2026.
13. [SpaceX revenue surges 92% to $7.8 billion, blowing past Wall Street expectations by nearly $1 billion](https://fortune.com/2026/08/04/spacex-revenue-surges-92-to-7-8-billion-blowing-past-wall-street-expectations-by-nearly-1-billion/) - Fortune, August 4, 2026.
14. [Elon pledges to give Nvidia a virtual monopoly over the stars](https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/08/05/elon-pledges-to-give-nvidia-a-virtual-monopoly-over-the-stars/5283605) - The Register, August 5, 2026.
15. [SpaceX Starship Flight 13 launch updates](https://www.space.com/news/live/spacex-starship-flight-13-launch-updates-july-24-2026) - Space.com, July 24, 2026.
16. [Super Heavy-Starship rocket chalks up mostly successful test flight](https://spaceflightnow.com/2026/07/25/super-heavy-starship-rocket-chalks-up-mostly-successful-test-flight/) - Spaceflight Now, July 25, 2026.
17. [Public Notice DA-26-113: Space Bureau accepts for filing and seeks comment on SpaceX's Orbital Data Center system application](https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-26-113A1.pdf) - Federal Communications Commission, February 4, 2026.
18. [SpaceX files plans for million-satellite orbital data center constellation](https://spacenews.com/spacex-files-plans-for-million-satellite-orbital-data-center-constellation/) - SpaceNews, January 2026.
19. [SpaceX announcement of the Starmind AI1 partnership with NVIDIA](https://x.com/SpaceX/status/2084723854534951218) - SpaceX on X, August 4, 2026.
20. [SpaceX (SPCX) Q2 2026 earnings: Soaring AI costs outweigh revenue beat in first report since IPO](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/04/spacex-spcx-earnings-live-updates-q2-2026.html) - CNBC, August 4, 2026.
21. [NVIDIA Launches Space Computing, Rocketing AI Into Orbit](https://investor.nvidia.com/news/press-release-details/2026/NVIDIA-Launches-Space-Computing-Rocketing-AI-Into-Orbit/default.aspx) - NVIDIA, March 16, 2026.
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45. [SpaceX tries to wash away Texas pollution allegations](https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/13/spacex_snaps_back_over_texas/) - The Register, August 13, 2024.
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47. [Revised Artemis lunar lander plans take shape](https://spacenews.com/revised-artemis-lunar-lander-plans-take-shape/) - SpaceNews, June 13, 2026.
48. [FCC approves SpaceX spectrum deal with $2.4 billion escrow condition](https://spacenews.com/fcc-approves-spacex-spectrum-deal-with-2-4-billion-escrow-condition/) - SpaceNews, May 2026.
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69. [NASA's Dark Universe-Seeking Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Launches](https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasas-dark-universe-seeking-nancy-grace-roman-space-telescope-launches/) - NASA, August 30, 2026.
70. [Falcon Heavy flies its first mission for U.S. spy satellite agency](https://spaceflightnow.com/2026/10/01/falcon-heavy-to-fly-its-first-mission-for-u-s-spy-satellite-agency/) - Spaceflight Now, October 1, 2026.
71. [NASA's SpaceX Crew-13 Launches to International Space Station](https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasas-spacex-crew-13-launches-to-international-space-station/) - NASA, October 1, 2026.
72. [NASA's SpaceX Crew-12 Splashes Down, Sets Briefing to Discuss Mission](https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasas-spacex-crew-12-splashes-down-sets-briefing-to-discuss-mission/) - NASA, October 8, 2026.
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74. [SpaceX Launches New Era of Commercial Spaceflight with $100 Billion Louisiana Campus](https://www.opportunitylouisiana.gov/news/spacex-launches-new-era-of-commercial-spaceflight-with-100-billion-louisiana-campus) - Louisiana Economic Development, August 25, 2026.
75. [SpaceX to develop Starship launch site in Louisiana](https://spacenews.com/spacex-to-develop-starship-launch-site-in-louisiana/) - SpaceNews, August 26, 2026.
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81. [Musk says SpaceX focus is on the moon rather than Mars](https://spacenews.com/musk-says-spacex-focus-is-on-the-moon-rather-than-mars/) - SpaceNews, February 9, 2026.
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