Mass Value Report for February 2025

Starship has suffered delays and it now has an aggressive target. Will the flight rate be enough for the next Mars window?

As I write Starship is preparing for its eighth all up test flight. The Flight 7 anomaly has delayed the program, but the FAA has allowed Flight 8 to proceed while the investigation is ongoing. Last month I reported that the FCC licence gave a NET date of 24th February, and the flight is currently scheduled to fly on March 3rd.

This is going to be a pivotal year for Starship, and losing the ship on the first flight of the year is a delay SpaceX could have done without. To hit the 2026 window a lot needs to be done in a short space of time. This month I’m going to get into the numbers of what that means, but first I’ll do my usual update of my Falcon launch rate prediction.

Falcon Cadence

Falcon rockets are continuing to improve their own cadence though. There were 12 flights in February, compared to 13 in January, and accounting for the shorter month this is a fairly consistent rate of 1 flight every two and a half days.

Last month I made an estimate of the total flights in 2025 of 160, with a broad error range. This was done by comparing where SpaceX were at this point in previous years, relative to the final total for the year. Here is this months update to that prediction:

Improving somewhat on last month, SpaceX would be on course for 174±14 flights this year, compared to the stated goal of 180 flights.

Another method was to fit an exponential growth curve to a monthly launch rate, to be more sensitive to change over the year. That method projects 191 flights this year, but seeing how the line does not fit the last two months well this may be overly optimistic:

The first launch of this month resulted in a failure to properly dispose of the second stage after the payload had been delivered. It’s deorbit burn, which would have caused it to reenter over the pacific, could not be performed due to a liquid oxygen leak and instead it deorbited over Europe two weeks later with some debris from the stage causing damage on the ground in Poland. Interestingly the ground track for its reentry passed quite close to my house in Eastern England - but it was in the early hours of the morning so I slept through the event and missed the light show!

The rate at which second stage anomalies have been appearing has noticeably increased recently, but then again so has the total flight rate. More than a third of the flights that Falcon 9 has ever flown have occurred since the start of 2024, and half of the total flights have occurred since May 2023. A higher rate of anomalies might simply be due to there being so many more flights for them to occur on - but an alternate explanation is that the time pressure of manufacturing 2 new rocket stages a week is giving rise to issues with them - no other space company is producing stages at this clip nor have they done in recent history.

The delays to the launch schedule this time were minimal, with the next two flights occurring only 3 days later, suggesting there wasn’t much concern internally, and SpaceX have stated mitigations are in place to prevent it happening again which indicates the root cause is understood well enough.

The Starship Program

While one day Starship might show the kind of cadence that Falcon has achieved, the program is still in its early stage and has not yet started ramping up. Below I compare the pace of Starship launches with historical vehicles of its payload class. The current iteration seems to have settled into a pace that is comparable with the fastest rate of the Apollo program.