ORLANDO, Fla. — Florida won’t get the next SpaceX Starship launch, but with the first of three launch towers on the Space Coast near completion, Elon Musk expects the company to build up the launch rate quickly.

“We expect Starship to fly weekly at some point in the first half of next year, and then second half of next year twice weekly or maybe even more frequently than that by the end of next year,” he said during SpaceX’s quarterly earnings call on Tuesday.

For now, SpaceX has its test launch site in Texas up and running, and expects to fly its 15th Starship test flight next month.

“We’re going to attempt to catch both the booster and the ship,” he said. “This will be — if we succeed — the first time that an orbital launch vehicle has been fully recovered.”

SpaceX has its first Florida site at Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39 near completion with a potential first operational launch before the end of the year.

It also continues to work on the first of two more towers at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 37, the former site of United Launch Alliance’s Delta IV Heavy launches. The company has stated that the first Canaveral tower would be up and running by mid-2027.

On Starship’s 14th test flight, the company was able to reach orbit for the first time. All previous flights had been suborbital.

The company had on three previous missions made successful captures of the Super Heavy booster, captured by the swiveling arms of the launch tower at its Texas site Starbase. It’s opted on recent launches, though, to bring the booster down over the Gulf for a controlled landing over water, which allowed them to work on the upper Starship spacecraft issues.

Now, Musk said the next flight will aim to have both the booster and upper Starship stage make controlled returns to its towers.

“This is a massive technology milestone. The only way that we can extend consciousness beyond Earth on a sustained basis is with a fully reusable orbital launch vehicle,” Musk said. “So this is a profound technology milestone in the history of civilization consciousness.”

With KSC and then Canaveral’s first tower operational, SpaceX would be able to launch from three sites next year.

“The rate at which we launch Starship will increase dramatically as we solve rapid and complete reusability,” Musk said. “So we’ll have complete reusability, then at first there will be a little bit of refurbishment that’s needed between each flight, and we’ll iron out the need for any refurbishment such that you can immediately land the rocket and launch it again just like an airplane.”

The company earlier this year also announced plans for a massive Starship launch site in Louisiana with the first towers ready as soon as 2028.

“That’s going to be an incredible asset to the country and to the world that will, I think at some point, probably have on the order of 20 or more launch towers, and enable the transport of millions of tons per year to orbit and beyond. So that’s really going to be a big deal,” he said.

SpaceX is also completing work on the massive Starship rocket manufacturing building called Gigabay at its KSC location, part of a $1.8 billion infrastructure project across both KSC and Canaveral announced last year.

But until Florida’s Gigabay is up and running, SpaceX plans to ship over the rockets as they’re built out at Texas’ Gigabay.

The company’s barge, named You’ll Thank Me Later, has been making runs between the two states and recently docked to bring some construction material at KSC’s turn basin.

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