SpaceX wants to launch Starship more than 450 times per year from South Texas

SpaceX wants to start flying its Starship megarocket a lot more often.

The company has requested permission to launch Starship from its Starbase site in South Texas up to 456 times per year.

That's a big jump from the currently allowed cadence of 25.

The U.S.

Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is in the early stages of reviewing the request.

Today (Oct.

14), the agency announced "its intent to prepare a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement, open a public scoping period and hold public scoping meetings for SpaceX’s proposal." Starship, which stands more than 400 feet (122 meters) tall, is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built.

It's also designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, a breakthrough that SpaceX believes will revolutionize spaceflight.

The megarocket has flown 14 times to date, all of them test flights from Starbase, which is near the Texas border city of Brownsville.

On the most recent jaunt, which lifted off on Sept.

28, Starship reached orbit for the first time and deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites — the first members of a new broadband constellation that could eventually consist of 100,000 spacecraft .

Assembling that network will require a lot of Starship launches.

And even more will be needed to build SpaceX's planned Starmind AI megaconstellation, which Elon Musk has said will harbor a million satellites .

Indeed, the world's richest man has said that SpaceX is targeting more than 10,000 Starship liftoffs per year by 2030.