Astronomy Prints 🌌: Editor’s Choice: A gut check to the White House’s 1,000 annual launches goal

08/26/2026

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By Dan Robitzski

One thousand missions to space (and reentries) launched from American soil by the year 2030. That’s the goal set out in new updates to the National Space Transportation Policy, which got updated for the first time in 13 years last week.

“The United States must establish and maintain space transportation capabilities that ensure access to the full range of orbital regimes relevant to United States interests, from suborbital and very-low Earth orbit altitudes to the lunar surface, Lagrange points and deep space,” the policy states.

It is, to say the least, an ambitious goal. Especially given reports that access to space is harder to come by.

In 2025, there were 181 American launches (165 of which used the Falcon 9), and there were 144 in 2024, according to the American Enterprise Institute’s Space Data Navigator.

Unsure what to make of a five to six-fold increase in launches over the next three years, I asked AEI senior fellow Todd Harrison for his thoughts.

“I think it is at the upper limit but not totally unreasonable,” Harrison told me in a conversation over email. “If you look at the rate of growth in U.S. launches from 2020 through 2025, the compound annual growth rate was a little over 37%. If you extrapolate that exponential growth rate through 2030, it puts you at around 900 launches per year.”

However, he thought that the number may be “far-fetched,” given that newer and upcoming launch vehicles have higher payload capacity than their predecessors, suggesting that there may be fewer launches of more heavily-laden spacecraft in the next few years.

There were other reasons that the prediction may not hold.

“We are roughly 2/3 of the way through the year and have 114 launches. If you extrapolate that through the end of the year, that will mean a total of about 170, which is less than last year’s 181 and far from the trend line projection of 248 (a 37% increase over last year),” Harrison said.

“I think the reason we are seeing a plateau is that the Falcon 9 is likely at or near its maximum launch rate,” he added. "They are literally launching one almost every other day. That could be due to a variety of constraints on the pads, recovery boats, upper stage production, booster refurbishment, etc.”

To that point, the National Space Transportation Policy focuses on launch infrastructure more than it does launch vehicles, with the goal of improving launch and reentry sites and increasing access to them.

Ultimately, the number may not prove realistic. But that’s not the end of the world, Harrison said, since the stakes of a general policy document making an incorrect projection are fairly inconsequential.

“If it is used for budgeting, setting staffing levels, or building facilities, I would want something that accounts for projected satellite launches, new launch vehicles coming online and other factors to make it more bounded and realistic,” he said.

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SIGNIFICANT DIGIT

125,000 Acres

The amount of land in Louisiana SpaceX acquired to build Starbase Louisiana, a planned launch facility that would include 10 Starship launch pads.

Shackleton Crater, at the south pole of the moon, is believed to host quantities of water ice deep within its shadow. Credit: NASA

CHANG’E-7 DELAYED

China decided to delay Chang’e-7, a robotic lunar south polar landing mission, just hours before its planned launch on Aug. 24. Now, the mission may not launch until next year, based on ambiguous language in the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO)’s postponement announcement. The announcement read that the “launch … cannot take place during the planned window this year,” potentially referring to that specific launch window or any launch window in 2026.

Like for NASA’s Artemis missions, weather played an unfortunate role in mission planning, with Typhoon Narra nearby likely being the reason for the postponement.

The limitations for suitable launch windows stem from the overall mission plan for Chang’e-7, in which a lunar orbiter will observe the moon for weeks or maybe months to gather imagery prior to a landing attempt. The landing site is thought to be Peak Near Shackleton, which due to its elevation can receive nonstop illumination for several months at a time. The logic behind the timing, likely, is to target the start of one such time period so that the mission can operate in continuous light for as long as possible.

The delay, if longer than a month, could allow the U.S. to land near the lunar south pole first.

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Ursa Major, a Colorado-based defense technology company that builds rocket engines, hypersonic missiles and solid rocket motors, plans to go public through a merger with a blank-check company in a deal valuing the combined business at about $2.3 billion.

NASA is working with Advanced Space on the CAPSTONE 02 mission, scheduled to launch in late 2027. It will feature two spacecraft built by Terran Orbital that will operate in a highly elliptical lunar orbit.

Kepler Communications announced the start of commercial in-orbit optical data relay service, marking the smallsat operator’s expansion beyond the Internet of Things connectivity business it began more than a decade ago.

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