SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket has the potential to transform the commercial space economy, ensure America’s position as the global leaders in the space race, and put humans on Mars for the first time. But first it has to get to orbit.
This is becoming much more likely as the Starship test program accelerates and the company demonstrates more and more of the rocket’s powerful capabilities. Yet to many, Starship is still essentially a vanity project from the world’s richest man. This article will attempt to explain the origins of the rocket and where it might be headed.
What is Starship?
Standing at nearly 400 feet tall, Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. For comparison, the company’s much-used Falcon 9 is 229 feet tall, and the Saturn V that brought Apollo missions to the moon was 363 feet tall.
Starship also represents the reason for SpaceX’s existence: to spread “the light of consciousness,” as Musk puts it, through the solar system, starting with the moon and Mars.
The rocket is composed of two stages: the Super Heavy booster and the second stage, which is also called Starship. At liftoff, the Super Heavy generates an incredible 16.7 million pounds of thrust using its 33 Raptor engines. That’s the amount of power needed to carry upward of 100-150 tons of cargo and crew to low Earth orbit — again, equivalent to the Saturn V but considerably more advanced in several ways.
The biggest change is that Starship is designed to be fully reusable, meaning that eventually both stages would return to the launch site to be rapidly refurbished and reused for the next mission. This would be a first in the history of rocketry. While SpaceX pioneered booster reuse with the Falcon 9 rocket, the upper stage is still left in orbit, to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.
Reusability, combined with the incredible payload capacity, could drive Starship costs (for SpaceX itself) down to as low as $2 million to $3 million per launch, Musk has claimed. While we don’t have a firm sense of what it costs the company to launch each Falcon 9, because SpaceX’s financials are confidential, they are priced at $69.75 million for the customer.
What are the origins of the Starship program?
Interplanetary travel has been embedded in the DNA of SpaceX practically since its inception. Elon Musk has talked about developing a heavy-lift rocket capable of carrying many tons of mass to low Earth orbit, the moon, and even farther for two decades. As early as 2005, Musk was publicly discussing his plans to build a rocket with a payload capacity of 100 tons to send to low Earth orbit.
The rocket now known as Starship has gone under a few different names: the “BFR” and “BFS” (Big F—ing Rocket/Ship or Big Falcon Rocket/Ship, depending on who you ask); the Mars Colonial Transporter; and the Interplanetary Transport System. In July 2019, the small second-stage prototype called “Starhopper” completed a small hop for the first time; that was followed by the first large-scale demonstrator, called SN15, which completed a high-altitude test flight for the first time in May 2021.
Of course, it hasn’t all been rosy: The company has also exploded a fair few prototypes along the way, and its first and second integrated flight tests in April 2023 and November 2023 ended in fiery midair explosions.
The Starship program has accelerated in recent years thanks to two main changes: the launch and operation of Starlink, SpaceX’s internet satellite constellation, which provides critical revenue to fuel Starship development, and a $4 billion Human Landing System (HLS) award from NASA to develop a version of Starship to land humans on the moon for the Artemis program. Which leads us to the next question …
Why does Starship matter?
Starship is often understood as one billionaire’s pet project, but that is a deep misreading of the purpose of Starship or the role it could play in the future of the space economy.
Regardless of when Starship might enter commercial operations, pretty much every industry expert agrees that it has the potential to fundamentally transform the space economy. As mentioned above, no other launch vehicle has ever been fully reusable, and those that are partially reusable don’t come close to the rocket’s mammoth size and power.
What does that mean? Well, with the ability to launch cargo in bulk essentially solved, one can begin to imagine many incredible and heretofore unthinkable possibilities — provided the rest of the industry can keep up.
Starship isn’t just a linchpin of growth for the commercial space industry. NASA also pinned the hopes of its Artemis program on the massive launch vehicle when it awarded SpaceX the HLS award in 2021, to deliver the crewed Starship capable of landing astronauts on the moon for the Artemis III mission. That award essentially transformed Starship from one company’s ambition into a major part of ensuring America’s continued supremacy in space.
When is the next flight test?
The sixth flight test is currently scheduled for no earlier than November 18. We break down the main flight objectives of the test here. The company will be attempting to re-create the successes of the previous test flight — including catching the Super Heavy booster using “chopstick” arms jutting out from the launch tower — as well as testing upgrades to hardware and software.
So, when are we going to Mars?
According to Musk’s most recent estimate — which it must be said, his estimates have not historically been particularly reliable — Starship will launch to Mars in 2026. That’s the soonest opportunity for an expedient mission according to the position of the two planets’ orbits around the sun. Whether SpaceX will have the rocket ready in time for such a long mission is unclear, chiefly because there are still some major technical challenges to de-risk, like on-orbit refueling.
That’s right: To reach Mars, or even the moon, for that matter, Starship would need to refuel using a Starship tanker that’s hanging out in orbit. That Starship would transfer propellant to the main vehicle before it could continue its journey. Refueling would need to take place a number of times — for Artemis III, SpaceX estimates needing to launch around 10 refueling tankers to orbit prior to that mission.
The Starship that will go to Mars will not look exactly like the ones flying today, Musk told SpaceX employees in April: The interplanetary Starship will likely be as tall as 500 feet, with even more room for crew and cargo.