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
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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.
SpaceX launch tickets
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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.
Welp, that was quite a post launch fire. Rest in pieces Falcon.
SCL live viewshttps://t.co/lIR57w5ug9 pic.twitter.com/KzgW6LWvna
— Julia Bergeron (@julia_bergeron) March 5, 2025
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.
1) Sea states have been historically bad on the west coast this winter preventing us from efficiently returning boosters and fairings over Ro-Ro barge to Vandenberg. We can go over the road but it requires removing legs/fins to enable highway transport and is generally very…
— Kiko Dontchev (@TurkeyBeaver) March 11, 2025
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.
Just flew booster 1088 for the third time in 23 days (would have been 21 days if not for weather). Major props to the SpaceX Vandy team!
https://t.co/2IyEVWi4zu
— Jon Edwards (@edwards345) April 4, 2025
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.
Teams encapsulated @NASA’s SPHEREx Observatory and PUNCH satellites into Falcon 9’s fairing ahead of arriving at the hangar at pad 4E in California pic.twitter.com/tvwSQXZAYz
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) March 4, 2025
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.
Flags fly, and so do Dragons!
Crew Dragon Endurance and Falcon 9 rocket into the Florida skies carrying four astronauts to the International Space Station! The American and mission flags waving as the mission begins.
God speed Crew-10!
Replay from @NASASpaceflight… pic.twitter.com/tZp3HfMGaF
— Sawyer R. (@thenasaman) March 14, 2025
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.
