SpaceX wants to launch 456 Starships a year. That’s great news for Musk and bad news for the rest of us

Elon Musk has spent years promising a rocket that flies as often as an airliner, a radical idea by current aerospace standards. Now, his bombastic tale has a very real, very scary number attached to it: 456. That’s the number of Starship launches per year SpaceX has asked the Federal Aviation Administration to allow. It’s almost 40% more than all the orbital launch attempts worldwide in 2025—a record year with 329. The scientists who study what rockets and satellites leave behind...