ROUTINE BUT NEVER BORING: SpaceX aims to launch 144 missions next year.

“This year, we’re going to attempt to fly 100 flights,” Bill Gerstenmaier, the vice president of build and flight reliability at SpaceX, said on Wednesday (Oct. 18) during a hearing of the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Space and Science.

“As we look to next year, we want to increase that flight rate to about 12 flights per month, or 144 flights,” he added during the hearing, which was called “Promoting Safety, Innovation and Competitiveness in U.S. Commercial Human Space Activities.”

Hitting the century mark this year would require a significant ramp-up in launch cadence, from one mission every 3.9 days to one every 2.8 days.

But SpaceX is certainly capable of meeting that latter number. The company has launched two missions in a single day multiple times; this past March, for example, it sent two of its Falcon 9 rockets skyward less than 4.5 hours apart.

The reusable rockets never fail to impress, but maybe underappreciated are the human capital and infrastructure that make the high-speed cadence possible.