SpaceX is superb at reusing boosters, but how about building upper stages?

Rocket Lab, which flies a much smaller launcher than the Falcon 9, has launched two orbital missions from different spaceports within approximately seven-and-a-half days and from the same launch pad within about nine days.

SpaceX’s rapid cadence wouldn’t be possible without reusability, which allows the company to bring down costs and increase the launch rate. SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket is designed to be fully reusable, further reducing costs and potentially resolving any concerns about production bottlenecks.

Imagine, for a moment, the sprawling footprint and bloated headcount of SpaceX’s factory if it had to manufacture a new Falcon 9 booster, nine engines, and a payload fairing set every 2.7 days. How cost-effective could that be? Would it even be possible? It’s mind-boggling enough to visualize the blistering production pace for Falcon 9’s upper stages in Hawthorne or SpaceX’s Starlink satellites in Redmond, Washington.

As far as we know, SpaceX doesn’t have a plan to make reusable satellites. Some companies have interesting concepts for reusable satellites, but they are focused on in-space manufacturing instead of consumer services.

SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket is designed to be fully reusable, further reducing the marginal cost of each flight and potentially resolving any concerns about production bottlenecks. But someone will still need to build Starships, and a lot of them.

Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, has suggested that his company must produce 100 or more Starships per year to fulfill his Mars settlement ambitions, even with full reusability. When you think of the next-generation rocket factory, perhaps you should envision an airplane manufacturer, with multiple plants scattered around the country or globe.

With Falcon 9, SpaceX already produces more than 100 upper stages (and a handful of new boosters) each year. Starship is significantly larger and more sophisticated than a Falcon 9 upper stage, with higher-thrust, finely tuned Raptor engines and a heat shield that will be able to fly over and over again with no refurbishment. It will require larger buildings and likely, at least in the near term, more people on the manufacturing floor. Still, the Falcon 9’s upper stage is a complicated piece of equipment.

Putting aside the drama and challenge of catching and re-flying rockets, the task of building so many spaceships in a year is a tall order. While SpaceX’s competency with reusing Falcon 9 boosters gets a lot of attention—landing a rocket is still incredible, even after seeing it nearly 400 times—its manufacturing prowess with Falcon 9 upper stages suggests that building 100 Starships each year just might be doable someday.

Combining rocket reuse with high-rate manufacturing is fundamental for SpaceX’s Starship ambitions, and it’s already proving successful with Falcon 9. One might say it’s a match made for the heavens.