SpaceX may be looking beyond the world’s most successful rocket to build a much more powerful launch vehicle.
The Falcon 9 rocket is the workhorse of the modern space industry, launching 165 times last year alone, 12 times more than Saturn V did in its entire career. But this year its launch numbers will dip for the first time in years, to around 145.
The rocket itself is fine, Ars Technica reported, but SpaceX is eager to shift focus to the much larger Starship, capable of carrying many times the payload, making orbital data centers and Mars missions plausible. Rival Blue Origin has only just cracked the reusable-rocket tech that Falcon mastered; SpaceX may already be moving a generation beyond it.