This may be a transcendent year for SpaceX

If that test goes well, following a review of data, SpaceX could become the world's first private company to launch humans into orbit before summer this year. According to Paul Wooster, the principal Mars development engineer at SpaceX, the company has spent a little more than four years working on optimizing the shape, materials, and performance of the Starship vehicle. Although Musk's timelines are not particularly reliable, he said this vehicle may be ready for test flights in two or three months.A launch of the full-scale Starship vehicle—which one day may ferry humans to the Moon or Mars—would represent a key step toward SpaceX's ultimate goal of settling Mars. This will be the first consumer-facing product that SpaceX offers and, if it's successful, could eventually provide revenues to accelerate the development of Starship and its Super Heavy rocket.After peaking at 22 total launches in 2018, the company took a step back in 2019 with 13 orbital launches—11 by the Falcon 9 rocket and two by the Falcon Heavy launch vehicle.But barring catastrophe, we can probably expect SpaceX to easily eclipse its record of 22 launches this year.