SpaceX wants to launch Starship more than 450 times per year from South Texas
456 launches a year means on average you'd see a Starship go up more than once a day from the same stretch of Texas coastline. That number is so far beyond what we're used to that it stops feeling like a proposal and starts feeling like a declaration that spaceflight is becoming routine infrastructure, like airports or highways. I find the ambition genuinely thrilling, the idea that a rocket could be as unremarkable as a freight train.
But I also want to know what the FAA is actually weighing. Starbase sits right next to a wildlife refuge, and the environmental review has already been contentious. At that cadence, what does the noise do to nesting birds, what do the debris fields from test flights look like, what happens to the local air quality? I'd want to see the modeling before I cheer.
Still, if they pull it off, it changes the economics of getting to orbit. Frequent launches mean the whole system gets cheaper, more reliable, more mundane. That's the part that gets me, the mundanity of it. A world where rockets are boring is a world where we've actually gotten somewhere.