After SpaceX’s Starship launches, what happens next?
SpaceX's Starship launches from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, Thursday, April 20, 2023. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
The first test launch of the Starship/Superheavy rocket was an “incomplete success,” as it blew up in the skies over the Gulf of Mexico. Still, SpaceX got a lot of data for the next attempt. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, it was not the beginning of the end, but certainly be the end of the beginning. A great deal must happen before the Starship is an operational vehicle as reliable as the company’s Falcon 9 rocket.
SpaceX will have to fly the Starship/Superheavy rocket over and over again so that not only Starship reaches orbit but both the Starship and Superheavy stages land back at the Starbase launch facility in Boca Chica, Texas intact, without blowing up. Then the company will have to turn around the launch vehicle and send it into orbit again within an absurdly short time.
If Starship is expected to take people and material to the moon, Mars and beyond, SpaceX will have to master in-orbit refueling. Refueling a Starship for a deep space mission may involve sending other Starships as tankers or developing a prepositioned depot. Preparing a Starship to go beyond low Earth orbit will require multiple launches of tanker rockets over a short period of time.
Project Artemis, the NASA-led effort to return humans to the lunar surface, depends on Starship becoming operational by the time Artemis III is ready to launch. NASA is depending on SpaceX to get the Starship configured as a Human Landing System (HLS) by late 2025. Starship is also slated to take a crew of artists around the moon as part of the Dear Moon private space flight. The third private Polaris mission to Earth orbit is also slated to fly on a Starship.
Finally, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk needs an operational Starship system if he wants to fulfill his lifelong dream of building a self-sufficient city on Mars. He plans to send fleets of Starships across the interplanetary void with human beings willing to risk their lives to build a new home on another world and the material and tools they will need to do so.
Anyway, for Musk and his engineers, no pressure.
Still, SpaceX has a track record that gives one confidence that it will succeed in creating the biggest rocket in history. The company, after all, mastered reusable rockets with the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy that could be turned around in days instead of months — a feat that eluded NASA with the space shuttle. No one will make money betting that SpaceX won’t be able to bring the Starship to operational status.
Once the Starship is operation, it will likely become as much of a game changer as the jumbo jet was for aviation and the racing galleon was for ocean travel. It will not only be able to deliver more than 100 tons of people and material throughout the solar system, but it will be able to lift unimaginably large payloads into space. These payloads are likely to include commercial space stations, large space telescopes, space-based anti-missile defense stations, as well as nuclear propelled and powered robotic probes that can open the outer planets to serious exploration.
The real promise of the SpaceX Starship is how it will lower the cost per kilogram of sending people and things into space. According to an article in Science, Musk suggests that launching something on Starship will cost just $10 a kilogram. NASA estimates that it costs $2,720 a kilogram to launch something on the Falcon 9. The space shuttle, NASA’s original attempt to achieve cheap access to space, had an average cost of $54,500 per kilogram to launch astronauts and cargo into space. Launch cost are on a steep, downward trajectory.
Even if Musk is off by a little, the Starship, once it becomes an operational vehicle, will make many missions possible in space that have so far been only pipe dreams because of costs. The rocket could become the basis of a transportation infrastructure that could bring raw materials from lunar and asteroid mines to orbiting factories and then the finished products down to Earth. The Starship could enable a space-based economy that could generate unimaginable wealth.
The world can seem a dire place, filled with wars and rumors of wars, crime, political mendacity and media demagoguery. But just as the Apollo program brightened the 1960s, what is going on in Boca Chica is providing at least one example of courage, vision and beauty. The development of Starship is proof that hope exists for humanity after all of a future better than the present.
Mark R. Whittington is the author of space exploration studies “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond,” and “Why is America Going Back to the Moon?” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.