The private space company has set an ambitious target of conducting 10,000 rocket launches each year within the next five years, according to federal aviation officials who say enhanced safety measures must come first.
FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford revealed Wednesday that he recently met with SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, who outlined the company’s bold expansion plans. This represents a dramatic increase from the 170 launches SpaceX completed in 2025, which deployed approximately 2,500 satellites into orbit.
During their discussion, Shotwell shared details “about the SpaceX five-year vision to get to 10,000 launches a year,” Bedford explained.
The company’s CEO Elon Musk has also discussed similar goals in recent media appearances. In a Forbes video interview released this week, Musk mentioned that the company currently operates 10,000 satellites in space and hopes to eventually deploy 10,000 communication satellites annually, though he didn’t provide specific timing.
However, Bedford emphasized that federal regulators will require significant improvements before approving such expansion. “We need to see a lot more reliability,” Bedford told reporters following a recent forum.
The FAA oversees licensing for all commercial space missions and works to reduce regulatory obstacles while ensuring launches don’t disrupt commercial aviation or pose safety risks.
Bedford described the meeting’s purpose as examining “the constraints that we see and what can we do planning wise now to put ourselves in a position to accommodate that type of a stretch goal.”
SpaceX has not yet provided comment on the discussions.
The FAA chief characterized their conversation as productive but direct. He and Shotwell “had a very frank conversation, we’re going to have to push ourselves, they’re going to have to push their reliability,” Bedford said.
The discussions come as President Donald Trump has called for returning to the moon before 2028. “To do that, we are going to have to work with industry to unlock that innovation,” Bedford noted.
Bedford acknowledged that while the FAA isn’t currently limiting space launch activities, that could change. “I can see a future where we will be the limiting factor, because we are not putting enough funding into our space team,” he warned.
The agency is currently analyzing data from previous launches to better assess potential risks. Safety protocols require blocking aircraft from certain areas during launches, which “can be very disruptive,” Bedford explained.
Earlier this year in January, SpaceX announced plans for an even more ambitious project involving 1 million satellites designed to orbit Earth and capture solar energy for powering artificial intelligence data centers.
