As Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, recently proudly exclaimed, "At 5,000 tons, Starship is the largest flying object ever made. Thrust is more than double the Saturn V moon rocket. It is the first spaceship design capable of making life multiplanetary."
After the nail-biting launch at the beginning of June, when Starship’s first-stage booster, Super Heavy, made a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico and the upper stage made a controlled landing burn before landing in the Indian Ocean, the company is reportedly planning to manufacture one new Starship rocket every single day.
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SpaceX aims to accomplish this ambitious plan in Starfactory, a new manufacturing facility under construction at the company’s Starbase site in South Texas.
"We have Ships and Super Heavy boosters built and either ready to launch or in testing for the next several flights with more coming off of the production line as SpaceX’s Starfactory continues to grow," Jessie Anderson, SpaceX’s Falcon Structures Manufacturing Engineering Manager, said on SpaceX’s livestream. "The latest phase of the factory currently under construction will come online this summer, giving us several 100,000 more square feet of space."
"When you step into this factory, it is truly inspirational. My heart jumps out of my chest," Kate Tice, manager of SpaceX Quality Systems Engineering, said during the livestream. "Now, this will enable us to increase our production rate significantly as we build toward our long-term goal of producing one Ship per day and coming off the production line soon, Starship Version Two."
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As Musk explained on X, formerly Twitter, "Version 2 of the ship holds more propellant, reduces dry mass and improves reliability."
But is this extremely ambitious goal to manufacture one Starship per day realistic? How many have they built so far?
In a presentation to SpaceX employees in April this year, Musk said they would need to build several thousand vehicles per year and carry out 10 launches per day to send around 1 million people and numerous millions of tons of supplies to Mars. Is this something his company can realistically accomplish, or is it just one of Musk’s pipe dreams?
The exact number of fully constructed Starships varies depending on the count of all prototypes and test vehicles. According to the extensive Wikipedia page, since the initial steel test article Starhopper was constructed at Boca Chica in 2018, SpaceX has built 36 more ships, making it 37 in total so far, with an additional two under construction since January 2024.
Of those 37, three are currently under repair, and the others were destroyed, scrapped, or retired during the years.
According to the same page, an additional seven Starship-based test articles were also destroyed, scrapped, or retired.
Since June 2010, SpaceX has also launched rockets from the Falcon 9 family 354 times, with 352 full mission successes, two failures, and one partial success.
Not including two Starship test flights, SpaceX only completed 96 launches for 2023. So far this year, SpaceX has completed 50 launches and needs to do 94 more to fulfill its plan for 2024.
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