SpaceX
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft nears launch debut as Falcon 9 tests wrap up
Known as Demonstration Mission 1 (DM-1), the inaugural flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft is closer than ever before as the company wraps up ground testing of the rocket that will launch it.
Meanwhile, astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken are continuing to prepare for DM-2 – the first launch of Crew Dragon with crew onboard – by familiarizing themselves with SpaceX’s completed hardware, software, and procedures.
Commercial crew astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are getting familiar with operating inside @SpaceX's Crew Dragon, fully suited! pic.twitter.com/41cqRwhzdp
— NASA Commercial Crew (@Commercial_Crew) November 2, 2018
Originally expected to occur before the end of 2017, Commercial Crew partners SpaceX, Boeing, and NASA have been forced to repeatedly delay the inaugural uncrewed and crewed launches of both the Crew Dragon (SpaceX) and Starliner (Boeing) crew transport vehicles, which have slipped roughly 3-6 months with every quarterly schedule update.
Generally speaking, the sources of those delays can be split evenly between NASA and its two commercial partners. A majority of the commercial-side slips can be attributed to unexpected hardware failures between the beginning of the Commercial Crew Program (CCP) and expected launch dates, with SpaceX experiencing two catastrophic failures of Falcon 9 (CRS-7 and Amos-6) and Boeing suffering a major anomaly while performing ground tests ahead of a Starliner pad-abort. Prior to the September 2016 Amos-6 failure of Falcon 9, SpaceX was arguably on track for the inaugural launch of Crew Dragon in late-2017/early-2018, having already completed a successful pad-abort demonstration in 2015 and eight successful launches since the CRS-7 failure.
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- In this illustration, a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft is shown in low-Earth orbit. (SpaceX)
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- SpaceX’s Demo Mission-1 Crew Dragon seen preparing for vacuum tests at a NASA-run facility, June 2018. (SpaceX)
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- The DM-1 Crew Dragon testing inside SpaceX’s anechoic chamber, May 2018. (SpaceX)
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- NASA Astronaut Suni Williams, fully suited in SpaceX’s spacesuit, interfaces with the display inside a mock-up of the Crew Dragon spacecraft in Hawthorne, California, during a testing exercise on April 3. (SpaceX)
The Statue and the Hare
Aside from serious hardware failures, the rest of SpaceX’s Commercial Crew delays can be blamed on the company’s tendency to relentlessly iterate, improve, and generally modify both its hardware and software, to the extent that SpaceX’s Vice President of Production stated in mid-2018 that “[SpaceX has] never built any two vehicles identically”. For NASA’s often dysfunctionally and counterproductively risk-averse human spaceflight divisions, that sentence alone is probably enough to trigger panic attacks. As a result, SpaceX has been led to significantly change its style of operations over the last several years, reaching some sort of compromise that was more acceptable to NASA.
Further, despite the failures of CRS-7 and Amos-6, SpaceX continued to dramatically modify Falcon 9’s design – a major vehicle-wide upgrade known as Falcon 9 1.2 (Full Thrust, Block 1) debuted on the CRS-7 return-to-flight, while Amos-6 would have been the first launch of Falcon 9 Block 3 and likely failed as a result of faster fueling procedures and much colder propellant. Less than a year later, SpaceX debuted Falcon 9 Block 4. Roughly half a year after that, SpaceX debuted Falcon 9 Block 5, perhaps the most significant upgrade to the rocket yet. Ultimately, all changes made to Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon translate into additional work for NASA and SpaceX, known formally as “certification” and informally as exhaustive testing sandwiched by mountains of paperwork.
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- DM-2 astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley train for their first flight in Crew Dragon. (NASA)
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- SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule C203 – then assigned DM-2 – is seen here in August 2018. (Pauline Acalin)
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- SpaceX installed its Crew Access Arm (CAA) in September 2018. (Tom Cross)
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- SpaceX’s extraordinary custom spacesuit. Crew Dragon astronauts will wear this suit while inside the space capsule. (Pauline Acalin)
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- A concert of Draco thrusters work to push Dragon away from the ISS and back towards Earth. (ESA)
In the case of the CCP, NASA itself has been a major source of delays as Boeing and SpaceX get much closer to launch dates and hardware is effectively completed, integrated, and ready to go. According to both Hans Koenigsmann (VP of Flight Reliability) and Gwynne Shotwell (President and COO) in the last few months, both executives were supremely confident that the hardware (Crew Dragon: capsule, trunk; Falcon 9: Merlins, upper stage, booster; Launch Complex 39A) would be ready for DM-1 no later than December 2018. Those statements imply that additional delays were unlikely to be a consequence of hardware readiness, indicating that delays beyond December would presumably be caused by paperwork and/or ISS scheduling.
In this sense, it could well be the case that NASA’s behind-schedule completion of critical certification and approval paperwork – paperwork that NASA alone required and knew it would have to finish prior to launch for the last several years – will or already have delayed SpaceX’s first Crew Dragon launch by at least a month. DM-1 is currently targeting a launch in January 2019.
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Elon Musk
Elon Musk just set a condition that could end Falcon 9 as we know it
Elon Musk says SpaceX will finally retire Falcon 9 once Starship flies reliably every week.
Elon Musk gave the clearest timeline yet for retiring Falcon 9, SpaceX’s workhorse rocket.
The comment came in a reply on X, where Musk wrote that “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.” He was responding to physicist Casey Handmer, who noted that NASA is reportedly uneasy about SpaceX phasing out Falcon after building what Handmer called the most successful launcher ever, with the fleet nearing 1,000 total launches.
Now @SciGuySpace reports NASA is in a tizzy because after running the most successful launcher ever for more than a decade and nearing 1000 launches, @SpaceX is planning to retire Falcon in favor of Starship in a few years.
Sorry, NASA, you’ve had 15 years to burn down the… https://t.co/uCNoMwK0v9
— Casey Handmer (@CJHandmer) August 22, 2026
Falcon 9 is still SpaceX’s busiest vehicle by far. The company is on pace for roughly 140 to 145 Falcon flights this year, following 165 in 2025, president Gwynne Shotwell told Time earlier in 2026. She has already said Falcon flights would “tail off” as Starship comes online, while reports indicate that SpaceX has stopped booking new Falcon 9 launches past 2028 and halted production of some expendable Falcon hardware, according to Bloomberg.
It’s worth noting that Musk’s post is a condition, and not a countdown on when Falcon will retire. Starship has not yet flown weekly, let alone daily. Its most recent flight in July ended with a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean, a milestone Musk pointed to earlier this month when he said the vehicle’s heat shield problem was effectively solved. SpaceX towed that ship to Christmas Island for inspection, and the next flight, Flight 14, is aimed at putting Starship into orbit for the first time. A tower catch attempt for the upper stage has been pushed back to what Musk has called “a few months” away.
SpaceX and a new Trump order that could rewrite the next decade of launches
The gap between Falcon’s role today and Starship’s promised role tomorrow matters most to NASA. Falcon and its Dragon capsule remain the only way the agency rotates astronauts to and from the International Space Station, and Starship is not certified to carry NASA crews. Musk’s post did not address how that handoff would work if Falcon winds down before a crew-rated Starship variant exists. The timing lines up with Musk’s other recent Starship comments. Two days before the Falcon post, he told a different X user that SpaceX is aiming for more than 30 Starship launches a day by 2030, or roughly 10,000 a year, a figure tied to the Trump administration’s new push for higher national launch cadence. Falcon, which took over a decade to reach its first 100 launches, was never built to approach that kind of volume.
For now, Falcon 9 keeps flying at a near-record pace while Starship works to prove it can do the job Musk has already picked out for it.
Elon Musk put a number on where he thinks SpaceX’s Starship program is headed by 2030, replying on X a day after President Trump signed a memo pushing the country toward 1,000 space launches and reentries a year.
The exchange started when Aaron Burnett, co-founder of propulsion startup Mach 33, posted that “1,000 launches/reentries is the goal,” quoting White House science adviser Michael Kratsios on the newly signed National Space Transportation Policy. Burnett noted that the FAA’s own bull-case forecast reached only 385 annual launches by 2030, while his firm’s conservative model already put SpaceX alone near 940. Musk responded, “We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized. Still tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!”
We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized.
Still tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 21, 2026
That figure is specific to Starship, the rocket SpaceX is still developing for orbital and lunar missions, not the Falcon 9 fleet that carries most of the company’s current launch volume. Starship has flown twice this year, a slower pace than the four and five flights SpaceX managed in 2024 and 2025. Getting from two flights a year to 30 a day is the scale of jump the new federal policy is meant to clear regulatory room for.
Trump’s memo, signed Thursday, directs agencies to identify new launch and reentry sites on federal land, including a new reentry site within 90 days, and to speed up the permitting and environmental reviews that have long slowed cadence growth. It also sets a goal of returning American astronauts to the moon by 2028 and placing initial lunar base elements by 2030, tying the launch buildout directly to NASA’s Artemis program.
SpaceX has already been pushing the FAA toward higher numbers on its own. The agency approved up to 44 annual Starship launches from Kennedy Space Center in February, on top of a 2024 review that raised the cap at Starbase in Texas to 25 a year. Those approvals cover a fraction of the 10,000 annual flights Musk is now describing, which shows how far current permitting still sits from the administration’s stated target.
The near-term test of all this is more modest. SpaceX cleared a full-duration, six-engine static fire on its next Starship vehicle this week, the last major hardware checkpoint before Flight 14, which is targeting no earlier than August 28 and is expected to attempt the vehicle’s first full orbital mission. Musk said last week that a tower catch of the upper stage is still probably months away, a reminder that the immediate roadmap remains far more incremental than the daily launch numbers he just posted.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced today that the company will likely attempt to catch the Starship upper stage with its launch tower arms “in a few months.”
In a post on X, Musk wrote, “Looks like we will probably catch the ship with the tower in a few months. If there had been a tower out to sea where we practiced landing the ship, it would have been caught.” He added that the first reflight of a Starship vehicle is expected by the end of 2026 or early 2027, describing it as “a fork in the road of history for consciousness reaching the stars.”
Looks like we will probably catch the ship with the tower in a few months. If there had been a tower out to sea where we practiced landing the ship, it would have been caught.
First reflight of the ship will be either end of this year or early next. That will be a fork in the… https://t.co/O5g9pqrzyo
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 20, 2026
Musk’s prediction comes amid ongoing progress toward full reusability of the Starship system, a two-stage rocket designed for rapid turnaround and dramatically lower launch costs. Catching the upper stage, known simply as “ship,” with the Mechazilla tower’s mechanical arms would mark a major milestone. It would allow both stages to return directly to the launch site for quick refurbishment and reuse, eliminating the need for ocean recovery.
Musk has previously signaled plans for a ship catch. In July, shortly after SpaceX’s wildly successful Starship 13 mission, he stated that the company would attempt to catch the ship with the tower on the next flight unless problems emerged in the mission data review. Earlier comments also outline conditions such as successful soft ocean landings before attempting a land recovery to minimize risk.
SpaceX has solved Starship’s biggest challenge, Elon Musk says
The latest update from Musk adjusts this timeline to a few months, reflecting the iterative nature of the test campaign.
SpaceX has already demonstrated the tower catch technique successfully with the Super Heavy booster on a couple of occasions. The first successful booster catch occurred during Flight 5 in October 2024, when the massive first stage returned to the Starbase pad in Texas and was plucked from the air by the tower arms.
Additional catches followed on later flights, including Flight 7, proving the concept for the booster and building confidence in the system as a whole.
Achieving a similar catch for the upper stage would represent a significant step forward. The ship returns from much higher speeds and greater heat loads after orbital or near-orbital flight. Success would advance SpaceX’s goal of full and rapid reusability, potentially reducing the cost of access to orbit by a factor of 100 or more and supporting ambitions for frequent satellite deployments, lunar missions, and eventual Mars flights.
Musk has long emphasized that true reusability, refueling rather than discarding hardware, is essential for making humanity a multi-planetary species.
As SpaceX continues refining Starship through successive test flights, the coming months will test whether the ambitious catch timeline can be met. The combination of prior booster successes and improving ship landing precision suggests the company is steadily closing in on this historic capability.
Elon Musk just set a condition that could end Falcon 9 as we know it
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