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Surprise, shock: SpaceX shattered its single-year launch document once more in 2025.
Elon Musk‘s firm has now set a brand new mark six years in a row, and the numbers are getting fairly foolish. The document has risen from 25 orbital liftoffs in 2020 to 31 (2021) to 61 (2022) to 96 (2023) to 134 (2024) and, now, to a whopping 163. And that is not together with 5 non-orbital Starship take a look at flights by SpaceX.
That’s a launch nearly each different day, a staggering cadence that leaves different corporations — and full nations — within the mud. Indeed, SpaceX launched nearly twice as many orbital missions as China did this year, and the company’s 2025 output represented about 85% of the United States’ total tally.
All 163 of those launches were conducted by SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9, which features a reusable first stage. (There were no liftoffs by the powerful Falcon Heavy, which hasn’t flown since October 2024.) And those Falcon 9 boosters came back to Earth for a safe landing on all but three occasions.
Two of the exceptions were launches in January and October that sent massive Spainsat NG communications satellites to geostationary transfer orbit. These were heavy lifts for the Falcon 9 first stage, which didn’t have enough fuel left over for a return to Earth.
The other non-landing was a failed attempt, suffered during the launch of a batch of Starlink internet satellites on March 3. The booster actually touched down successfully on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean as planned that day, but it tipped over after a fire broke out near its base and damaged a landing leg.
Speaking of Starlink missions: They dominated SpaceX’s manifest this year, making up 123 of the 167 Falcon 9 launches. Together, those missions lofted more than 3,000 satellites for the Starlink megaconstellation, which currently consists of more than 9,300 active spacecraft.
SpaceX notched a number of other milestones during this very busy year. For example, the company pulled off its 500th rocket landing and 500th launch of a used rocket in 2025. And it repeatedly extended the record for most launches by a single Falcon 9 booster, which currently stands at 32.
The 163 Falcon 9 missions weren’t SpaceX’s only liftoffs this year, though. The company also launched five suborbital test flights of Starship, a fully reusable vehicle that’s the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. SpaceX lost at least one of the megarocket’s two stages during the first three Starship flights of the year, but the most recent two, in August and October, were unalloyed successes.
We should see a lot more Starship action in 2026, including the stainless-steel vehicle’s first orbital flight — and maybe, if things go exceedingly well, an uncrewed trip to Mars.
Correction: An earlier version of this story initially reported the number of SpaceX’s orbital launches as 167 in 2025. It has been corrected to 163, per the company’s records.
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