SpaceX has officially closed out 2025 with its most ambitious year ever, completing a record-breaking 170 rocket launches across its Falcon and Starship programs. The milestone was highlighted by longtime SpaceX watcher Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt), who shared an infographic showing just how dramatically the company’s launch cadence has accelerated over the past decade.
SpaceX’s final tally for the year includes 165 Falcon 9 launches and five sub-orbital Starship flights. That figure represents a massive jump from 2024’s already eye-popping 138 launches, and nearly doubles the company’s total from just two years ago. To put things in perspective, SpaceX flew only seven missions back in 2015 — meaning its annual launch rate has increased more than twentyfold in a single decade.
Much of that growth has been driven by Starlink, SpaceX’s rapidly expanding satellite internet constellation. Falcon 9 has become the workhorse of the program, often flying multiple missions per week to deploy batches of satellites to low Earth orbit. SpaceX hit its 139th launch of the year back in October, topping last year’s total, and surpassed 150 Falcon 9 flights in November. The company continued pushing at full throttle through December to reach 170 total missions.
While Falcon 9 continues to dominate SpaceX’s launch manifest, Starship is quietly setting the stage for an even bigger leap. The company conducted five Starship test flights in 2025, laying the groundwork for what Elon Musk has described as “heavy launch activity” in 2026. SpaceX is currently targeting the debut of its next-generation Starship V3 design in the first quarter of next year, with commercial flights expected to follow. The first Starship missions are set to carry the much larger Starlink V3 satellites, said to significantly increase network speeds and capacity.
The record-breaking year also comes at a pivotal moment for the company. With Starship nearing operational readiness and launch cadence continuing to climb, Musk has confirmed SpaceX is preparing to go public in 2026 — a move widely expected to be one of the largest IPOs in history.
If 2025 was about proving SpaceX can sustain an unprecedented launch tempo, 2026 may be about redefining what’s possible in orbital and deep-space logistics.
