Elon Musk said SpaceX should wind down Falcon once Starship is flying reliably several times per week, so the company’s scarcest engineering and production talent can push Starship toward several flights per day.
“Once Starship is flying reliably several times per week, it makes sense to shift super scarce SpaceX engineering and production resources to Starship to get launch rate to several times per day, which means winding down Falcon,” Musk wrote on X late Saturday, replying in a thread about NASA’s reaction to SpaceX’s longer-term Falcon plans.
The comment puts a clearer condition on a shift the industry has already been watching. Falcon 9 remains the world’s busiest orbital workhorse, with SpaceX on pace for roughly 140–145 Falcon flights this year after 165 Falcon 9 missions in 2025, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell told Time earlier in 2026. She also said Falcon flights would “tail off” as Starship comes online.
Ars Technica reported in May that the slowdown is deliberate, not a Falcon problem: Kennedy’s Launch Complex 39A is being steered toward Starship and Falcon Heavy, East Coast droneship capacity is being reshuffled for Starship logistics, and more Falcon 9 Starlink traffic is moving to Vandenberg. Falcon is still expected to fly NASA crew and national-security missions into the 2030s while the International Space Station stays aloft.
Musk’s Saturday post is the sharp end of that roadmap. Weekly Starship reliability becomes the trigger to stop spreading limited people and factory capacity across two vehicle families, then use that focus to chase a daily-class Starship cadence that Falcon cannot match for next-generation Starlink, lunar refueling, and heavier payloads.
SpaceX is still in the middle of proving that cadence. The ship assigned to Flight 14 just completed a full-duration, 60-second static fire with all six Raptors, a hardware check sitting in front of the next test flight after Flight 13’s orbital milestones.
Falcon is still flying hard in the meantime, including Friday’s Falcon 9 loft of 29 Starlink satellites.
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