Mass Value Report for October 2025

Starship V2 passes its final test, while LandSpace and Blue Origin approach reusability

This month, the 11th full stack flight of Starship flew and was a complete success - achieving all of the objectives originally set for Flight 7 back in January. With this Version 2 of Starship, and its launch mount, are now retired for good.

Starship Flight 11 taking off. Credit: SpaceX

As has been the case with all the flights before which had controlled reentries, the Ship was somewhat toasty on arrival but survived. The thermal protection system is being tested hard by SpaceX, and each time the ship itself survives - which is good - but the TPS still evidently needs more work.

This will have to wait for a while - Version 3 of Starship requires new engines and a new launch mount, and it is not clear when SpaceX will be able to resume test flights.

Elsewhere, competitors in the United States and China are trying to catch up - we will get to that below, but first lets visit the Falcon model again.

Falcon Flights

There have been 15 Falcon 9 flights this month, 12 of them Starlink flights. This is an impressive flight rate, and an increase on previous months. However, there is some evidence the Falcon program is getting towards the asymptote of its growth.

To show this I will revisit a plot I used last year to show the impact of the anomalies experienced on the flight rate. Starting in 2022, I scale each cumulative flight line by 57% year on year. This is the growth rate between 2022 and 2023, so they line up well. 2024 continued the pattern until the first anomaly of that year, after which it not only broke from the trend due to the stand down, but also continued at a lower rate for some time afterwards. 2025 has dropped even further below the growth trend: