It was one of the most striking technological events of the year. On 13 October, Starship, the world’s largest and most powerful rocket, blasted into space from a launchpad in Texas. Its main booster reached an altitude of more than 65km before it began to hurtle back to Earth at a velocity greater than the speed of sound.
A crash was averted when the rocket – built by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company – reignited its engines and slowed down until it hovered tantilisingly over the tower from which it had been fired aloft only seven minutes earlier. Pincer claws grasped the giant launcher and held it firmly in their grip, ready for refurbishment and relaunch.
“This is a day for the engineering history books,” said SpaceX engineer Kate Tice.
The prestigious research journal Science was equally enthusiastic: “The feat heralds a new era of affordable heavy-lift rockets that could slash the cost of doing science in space,” it announced last month when it gave an award to Starship’s October flight as one of its Breakthroughs of the Year.
Musk’s company has already reduced the cost of putting cargo into orbit round the Earth by a factor of 10, the journal revealed. Once Starship – the most powerful launcher ever built, and designed to be fully and rapidly reusable – is in full operation later this year, further reductions of a similar magnitude can be expected, it added.
This view is shared by many space engineers who believe that Starship is poised to make a major leap with a schedule that could see it carry out launches every two or three weeks. SpaceX engineers have learned how to reclaim and reuse its main booster stage and will do the same for its upper stage this year, they say.
A total of 25 flights are now planned for the year ahead, an astonishingly ambitious programme. “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that the schedule they work by is unprecedented,” astrophysicist Ehud Behar, a professor at the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, told the website Space.com.
For scientists, the benefits of Starship are straightforward. Costs of missions on the resuable launcher could plummet from present levels and make it possible for them to carry out research in space which they simply have not been able to afford. This point is crucial, said Science in its editorial on Starship’s achievements.
Access to space has been too precious to risk failure in the past, and so components on Nasa missions are tested over and over again, pushing up costs, it pointed out. “But with routine Starship flights, scientists will be able to take more chances, building instruments with cheap, off-the-shelf parts and launching them often.”
Fleets of robot rovers could be sent to Mars, not just single vehicles, while flotillas of mirror segments could be flown in formation to create giant self-assembled telescopes in space. Such visions are exciting –though there are downsides to the success of Musk’s rocketry.
For a start, there is the likelihood that Starship could doom Nasa’s own rocket system, the problem-plagued, vastly expensive Space Launch System (SLS) that the agency has been planning for decades. Its rockets are expendable, unlike the reusable Starship, while each SLS launch is expected to cost billions of dollars compared with the $10m target that Musk plans for his system. Many scientists predict that Starship will make SLS redundant within a few years.
The other main problem for many scientists in dealing with SpaceX is that they find it difficult to accept Musk’s rightwing politics and his close association with Donald Trump. He has been a vocal critic of US immigration policy, disdainful of many democratic politicians, and has recently been given licence by Trump to cut $500bn from the US federal budget.
In any case, Musk’s hopes for his Starship have less to do with his scientific aspirations and much more with his hopes of using the giant rocket to begin the eventual colonisation of Mars. Last September, he pledged that SpaceX would launch the first uncrewed Starship missions to Mars in two years. If successful, these would be followed with crewed flights in four years. Ultimately, Musk envisages there could be a colony of up to a million people living on Mars within 30 years, he has said.
The controversial billionaire’s plan has earned him a great deal of attention – and derision. Certainly, sending humans on the 140m-mile journey to the red planet, surviving dangerous bursts of cosmic radiation and finding ways to grow food in a world that lacks water – and has an atmosphere whose average pressure is less than 1% of Earth’s at sea level – is challenging, to put it mildly.
Leaving Earth for Mars “would be like leaving a messy room so you can live in a toxic waste dump”, state Kelly and Zach Weinersmith in their book, A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?, which won the 2024 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book prize.
It is a view shared by Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, who has also attacked Musk’s Mars proposals. “Don’t ever expect mass emigration from Earth,” he said. “It’s a dangerous delusion to think that space offers an escape from Earth’s problems. We’ve got to solve these here. Coping with climate change may seem daunting, but it’s a doddle compared to terraforming Mars. Nowhere in our solar system offers an environment even as clement as the Antarctic, the ocean bed, or the top of Everest.
“There’s no ‘Planet B’ for ordinary risk-averse people.”
From this perspective, Starship may have some impact on space science, but it is unlikely to change the course of human history.
