A lawyer for SpaceX said she hopes the company will one day launch 15 million rocket flights per year.

Caryn Schenewerk, the senior legal counsel for the rocket company, made the comment on Thursday during a panel about airspace regulation at the 23rd annual Commercial Space Transportation Conference in Washington, DC.

If SpaceX achieved that launch rate, the bulk of the flights would be with its new steel rocket, Starship, and take hundreds of passengers on subhour international flights.

The panel also featured a veteran airline pilot who said his business would disappear if SpaceX pulled off its audacious plans.

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WASHINGTON — SpaceX is pushing to launch about two dozen missions into space this year. That would break its record of 21 launches in 2018.

But SpaceX has loftier launch-schedule ambitions than that: Earlier this month, Elon Musk laid out the math of how he plans to put 1 million people on Mars.

"Starship design goal is 3 flights/day avg rate, so ~1000 flights/year," Musk tweeted on January 16.

But SpaceX has far, far larger launch goals than even that, Caryn Schenewerk, the senior legal counsel for SpaceX, said Thursday at the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) 23rd annual Commercial Space Transportation Conference.

"I hope that we're at a million flights someday," Schenewerk said during a panel that explored how rocket ships and airplanes could share the skies.

She later added she would like to see 15 million launches per year.

"When we are at that point, it's going to be because we have worked our way up the safety trajectory in a way that allows us to operate there."

Schenewerk told Business Insider after the panel she could not immediately provide a notional timeline or breakdown of future launches without first consulting SpaceX's communications team.

However, with 1,000 starships built, the company's Mars habitation efforts could rack up 1 million launches in a year (per Musk's per-rocket launch math).

The rest of those 15 million annual hypothetical flights would likely be point-to-point travel by rocket ship.

'My business is going away'

An illustration of SpaceX's planned 39-story-tall Starship rocket system launching from Boca Chica, Texas. SpaceX/YouTube

Musk unveiled SpaceX's concept for the scheme in October 2017 with a video and called the idea "Earth to Earth." The goal of the scheme is to slash around-the-world and other international travel times down to under an hour instead of a day or longer.

Starship, a fully reusable launch vehicle the company is working to develop in Boca Chica, Texas, would blast passengers from one spaceport to another at 4.6 miles per second, or about 12 times as fast as a supersonic-jet flight.

At that speed, passengers could rocket from Los Angeles to New York in just 25 minutes, Bangkok to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in 27 minutes, London to New York in 29 minutes, and New Delhi to San Francisco in 40 minutes.

"Would feel similar to Space Mountain in a lot of ways, but you'd exit on another continent," Musk tweeted in 2018.

Schenewerk made her million-flights-per-year remarks while sitting next to Steve Jangelis, an airline captain and the aviation-safety chair of the Air Line Pilots Association. And he was quick to acknowledge that if SpaceX succeeded with its point-to-point plans, airline travel could see an implosion of demand.

"I'm a steam-locomotive operator right now," Jangelis told Business Insider from the dais. "You know, I have to be completely honest with you, my business is going away."

But a huge barrier to SpaceX realizing that rocket-powered future, and the ambitions of other companies to increase their launch cadence, are space-launch regulations.

Sharpshooting the airspace

An illustration of SpaceX's "Earth to Earth" concept of rocket-powered passenger travel. SpaceX/YouTube

Right now, launching a rocket from the US requires piles of applications, computer-driven safety analysis, and airspace closures that are large, long, and disruptive to the airline industry. Even if the rocket never takes off because of a technical glitch or bad weather and gets delayed, the closures still affect efficient commercial airline travel.

The FAA handles about 16 million commercial flights per year, so free airspace is a precious resource.

"We need to sharpshoot the airspace," Jangelis told Business Insider after the panel. "If we know that we're fueling a rocket, do we need to close off four hours of airspace and 265 miles downrange? ... No, we don't."

Jangelis said one caveat to solving the issue was getting launch-countdown, location, and other real-time telemetry data shared with the aviation industry. The trouble is, he said, launch companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and others don't freely share it.

"They don't want to give out what telemetry they have," Jangelis said.

Despite some tense moments on the panel, both aviation-industry representatives and launch providers appeared eager to update rocket-launch and spacecraft-landing regulations governed by the FAA. The agency's upcoming set of rules, called Streamlined Launch and Reentry Licensing Requirements, is due to be submitted this fall.

Jangelis said that while his working days in airplane-based aviation may be numbered, SpaceX has a long way before it hits its milestone. To get there, he said, the entire launch industry needs to learn to share data — especially if it wants to mirror airplanes' fatal accident rate of one in 1 billion while regularly launching 387-foot rockets from inland spaceports and over populated areas.

"We don't own the airspace. We're happy to share. The issue is we have to do it safely, and we have to do it on a pattern and learn from our mistakes," he said. "Everyone's starting to realize that there's a reason why we're so safe and we need to — we need a model after commercial aviation."

For her part, Schenewerk acknowledged there was a lot of work to be done to coordinate with airlines, but she also called for patience.

"I'm right there with you. Let's think about that big vision, that big day when lots of things are happening. But let's also not yell at our kid about not being able to fly an airplane when they can barely walk," she said. "I think that's where we are right now. We're still figuring out ... how to walk and run in this industry."