Starship: The Most Ambitious Spacecraft Ever Built
Musk dreams of sending Starship to Mars. First he'll need to prove it works.
At first everything looked good. The rocket lit its engines right on schedule, and lifted slowly off the launch pad. Before long it gathered pace, roaring towards an altitude of ten thousand meters on a methane-blue flame. Controllers began to slow its ascent: cutting its engines one by one until, perched ten kilometres high, Starship began to fall.
All this was deliberate, part of a carefully orchestrated sequence to test Starship’s ability to swoop through the atmosphere and land on solid ground. SpaceX had by then run this test twice already, and the contours of its Earthwards plunge, flipped on its side, were well known.
So too was the moment, seconds before impact looked inevitable, when Starship reignited its engines and turned once more towards the sky. Carefully the three engines slowed its descent, their methane-blue flame darting wildly as they steered the rocket to the landing pad. When it touched down the moment seemed surreal, as though a ten-story high building had lifted-off, soared into the atmosphere and then, calmly, settled back on the ground.
SpaceX had been waiting for his moment. The last two landing attempts had failed, ending in spectacular explosions as Starship smashed into the ground. This time, however, everything looked good. The rocket settled calmly on the ground, leaning slightly as it rested on the launch pad. “Third time’s the charm!”, an announcer celebrated, hailing each successful step of the test flight.
Then, gracefully, the whole thing blew up.
The explosion left twisted shards of blackened metal scattered across the launchpad. Starship itself was briefly blasted back into the air, ending up as a crumpled wreck on the ground. Later analysis showed the landing had been too hard, and a fire had been left to burn after the flight. Still, Elon Musk is nothing if not persistent. Three weeks later he tried again, watching as Starship blew up in mid-air and sent chunks of debris raining down on the launch site.
The spacecraft has flown just once more since those attempts. In early May 2021, Starship Serial Number Fifteen took off, plunged through the atmosphere and safely landed back on the ground. Though a small fire burned for some minutes after landing, Starship did not explode. For Elon Musk that was enough to declare victory: an orbital flight, he announced, would follow within months.
That didn’t happen. Getting to orbit has proven far harder than Musk imagined: so hard, indeed, that almost two years have now passed since the last test flight of Starship. Yet as SpaceX finally draws closer to an orbital flight - one could come as soon as March - attention is once again returning to the world’s most ambitious spacecraft.
Starship, if you listen to the hype, will soon change the world. Its mighty engines will not only power more mass into orbit than ever before, but they will also pave the way for vast new space telescopes, enormous space stations and even cities on Mars. If Musk is to be believed, Starship could usher in an era of rocket-based travel, making it possible to fly from Los Angeles to London in under an hour.
The explicit purpose of Starship, as introduced by Elon Musk in a 2016 speech, is to enable the colonisation of Mars. Sending people there, he noted, would currently cost around ten billion dollars per person, an utterly unaffordable sum. Starship would be the first rocket to lower that cost, allowing almost anyone who wanted to go to do so.
Key to this goal, he said, was a fully reusable spacecraft that could be refueled in orbit and was cheap and easy enough to mass produce. He went on to sketch out a vision of a “Mars Colonial Fleet”, composed of hundreds of Starships waiting in Earth orbit. As the planets come into alignment, an event that happens once every twenty-six months, they would depart en masse, carrying thousands of people towards the Red Planet.
Even with that stirring image in mind, it is hard to deny that colonising Mars is an ambitious goal, one bound to consume vast resources. Musk himself has sometimes seemed uncertain about the idea, and once suggested that the idea of Mars was simply an ambitious target to spark public interest. Even if he is serious about it, Mars is a fantastically hard problem to crack, though one that Starship could represent the first steps towards.
Until it does, Starship will need to earn its keep in other ways. Indeed, some uses are already becoming clear. NASA intends to use it as a landing vehicle on the Moon. In 2021 they contracted SpaceX to send Starship to the Moon, thus demonstrating that it can ferry astronauts to the lunar surface. Should all go well, Starship will play a key role in the American return to the Moon later this decade.
Starship has also drawn the interest of private parties. Jared Isaacman, an American billionaire, last year purchased the first crewed flight aboard Starship. Though a date, or even a year, for the mission is yet to be confirmed, Isaacman looks serious in his ambition. More spectacular - if somewhat less likely - is Dear Moon, a project by Japanese entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa to fly a crew of musicians and artists around the Moon.
Like SpaceX’s other rockets, Starship will find use transporting cargo and satellites into space. Starlink, SpaceX’s constellation of Internet satellites, will be an early beneficiary of this. Musk is counting on Starship to launch the second generation of his Starlink satellites; each of which is too large to fit in existing rockets. Commercial interest is also rising: a Japanese company last year signed a contract to orbit a communications satellite with the rocket.
Starship, strictly speaking, is made up of two components. The first, the part normally labelled “Starship”, is a fifty-meter-high spacecraft capable of carrying humans or cargo through space. It has its own engines, which it can use to change orbit or to land on Earth, the Moon or some other world.
The second part is the Super Heavy booster: an enormous rocket that will propel Starship into space. Its role is vital but short-lived. As soon as Starship reaches sufficient altitude, the Super Heavy booster will turn off, separate and fall back to Earth. It should, in theory, be capable of landing itself, allowing the booster to be reused in future missions.
Overall, the system is the most powerful rocket ever created, dwarfing the power of the Space Launch System or the Saturn V. It is also designed to be fully reusable, a crucial factor in lowering the cost of using it - and, therefore, of making it possible to reach Mars for a realistic price.
So far SpaceX has focused on testing the upper Starship stage. When they conducted tests in 2020 and 2021, Starship flew alone, without the support of the Super Heavy booster. That proved Starship can land, at least, but did nothing to show it can reach space. For this, SpaceX need the booster.
Here SpaceX has been making recent progress. Tests of the rocket’s Raptor engines took place in 2021, with more and more engines added through 2022. In total, the rocket should carry thirty-three engines, all of which need to work in coordination for a successful launch. Few rockets have ever attempted such a feat: the closest example, the Soviet N-1, never made it into orbit.
In February, however, SpaceX lit thirty-one engines simultaneously. The test was not a complete success - two engines failed to start - but, Musk said, it would have been enough for Starship to reach orbit. That may be a bit optimistic: SpaceX did not test the rocket engines at full power, fearing damage to the launch facilities. But it did show that the rocket can successfully fire and coordinate most of the engines at once.
The stage now seems set for an attempt at launching the full stack - Super Heavy and Starship - at once. Quite when it will happen is unclear: SpaceX has repeatedly said it will occur in the near future, and repeatedly been proven wrong. Yet a launch, or at least an attempt at launching, does seem likely to take place in the next few months.
Whenever it happens, the launch should see the Super Heavy booster fire Starship into a low orbit around the Earth. The booster itself will fall back into the ocean - though some reports suggest SpaceX may try to land it. Starship will fly briefly around the planet, before coming back to Earth somewhere close to Hawaii. SpaceX intends for this to demonstrate that Starship could land from orbit, though in this event it seems likely to splashdown in the Pacific instead.
As a test flight it is not especially ambitious. SpaceX are doing almost the bare minimum to demonstrate that the rocket works, and that Starship can guide itself back to Earth. It will generate headlines - the launch itself is bound to be spectacular - and plenty of useful data for SpaceX. But it will not demonstrate the full capabilities of Starship.
That is understandable. The system is extraordinary in its scope and design. Simply launching the biggest rocket ever made will be an astonishing achievement. Add in Starship’s size, re-usability and ambition, and it's clear that nothing like this has ever been attempted before. Even so, the system will almost certainly need many more tests before SpaceX have confidence it works well enough to carry people.
There is, too, the possibility that the whole thing ends in disaster. SpaceX has not been shy about blowing up their rockets in the past. Musk himself has admitted that the whole thing could simply explode or fail to reach orbit. But - unless the damage to launch facilities proves catastrophic - SpaceX is likely to keep trying until it works.
Once it does work, will Starship actually change anything? The question may seem stupid: after all, haven’t we already seen that it will fly crews of astronauts and help build cities on Mars? But for Starship to really revolutionise space travel, it will need to do much more than fly artists around the Moon.
Take the question of Mars first. Musk envisions using Starship to ferry millions of tonnes of material to the Martian surface, allowing thousands of colonists to set up bases and cities on the Red Planet. Starship, it is true, could enable this, but Musk will need an entire fleet of Starships to accomplish his goals.
Even worse, Starship simply gives him a way to get stuff to Mars. To actually set about colonising another planet will need far more technology and investment. Mars needs life support, it needs bases to be designed and built, it needs a way to feed colonists, to keep them alive during dust storms, freezing winters and the long periods when Earth lies on the other side of the Sun.
Mars, in short, is an enormous challenge. Starship could open the door to Mars, but it cannot, alone, go much further. Whatever the optimists say, Mars will be a project measured in decades, perhaps in centuries, if it ever happens at all.
The Moon may be a more realistic prospect. Starship could find semi-regular work supporting NASA’s missions, and perhaps prove a crucial component in building up future lunar bases. Yet this too is constrained by public budgets - and Congress is unlikely to cough up the sums needed for Starship to fly more than a couple of times per year. NASA may, one day, decide to refocus the whole Moon program around Starship instead of the SLS, but that prospect looks rather remote right now.
Cargo, then, may be where Starship can shine. Starlink certainly seems to need the rocket. But, then again, the demand for launching cargo into space is still small. Starship brings vast new capacity to an industry that already seems flooded with rockets. Even now SpaceX is devoting over half of its launches towards Starlink, with the remainder going to paying customers. Starship may end up looking like overkill for what is left - and end up suffering a fate rather like that of the rarely-flown Falcon Heavy.
The immediate uses for Starship, then, look limited. But in the longer run, the availability of a cheap super heavy launch vehicle may make itself felt. Just as the Falcon 9 encouraged a boom in small satellite applications, so might Starship change the possibilities for larger scale applications.
Starship would make it far easier to build commercial space stations, as NASA is now encouraging private companies to do. It would also make it easier to put ambitious projects - from orbiting solar farms to vast satellite constellations - in place. Starship could help usher in a new era of space astronomy: allowing researchers to build telescopes far larger than ever before, or to send mammoth probes to the outer Solar System.
These, however, are projects normally planned out decades in advance. Entrepreneurs, space agencies and researchers are only just beginning to think about how they might use the power Starship can offer. Eventually they will dream up novel architectures for human spaceflight or for space observatories unimaginable today. The potential, certainly, appears to be there. First, however, SpaceX will need to prove it works.
Starship is a revolution who will make space travel day to day like air travel