As I write, SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket has just achieved another huge milestone. It has successfully made it to orbit for the first time. It’s another major milestone towards a total transformation of the economics of space – so to celebrate, here’s a re-up of my previously paywalled post from October 2024 about the downstream implications of Starship, and why it is important.
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A former SpaceX employee once described to me why he thinks Elon Musk is… the way he is.
As he sees it, Musk thinks like an engineer. You try to build something, continue to iterate on it, and once you’ve successfully built it… you have been proven correct – whatever you end up with is proven to be the correct way to do it.
And the problem is that this approach is, as we know, utterly disastrous if you’re trying to build a social network like Twitter, because people are not just widgets that respond mechanically to the laws of physics. People are complicated.
However, there is some value to this approach.
For example, if you’re building electric cars or rockets, thinking like an engineer is extremely effective. In those cases, development is about changing variables and seeing what works best. If prototypes blow up en route, it doesn’t matter, as each experiment nudges you closer to your goal.
We saw this for ourselves on Sunday. On the fifth ever fully-stacked launch of SpaceX’s new Starship rocket, Musk’s company successfully used a pair of ‘chopsticks’ on the launch tower to capture the ‘Super Heavy’ first stage booster of the company’s new Starship rocket as it returned to Earth.
I watched the live stream, and I can safely say that it was one of the most incredible things I have ever seen. Even more so than when the company landed two Falcon Heavy boosters for the first time six years ago.
Why? Because Starship and the Super Heavy Booster are together the height of a 40-storey building, and capturing the first stage is equivalent to precision manoeuvring a 22-storey building, and plucking it out of the air.
However, it’s not just the visual spectacle or the feat of engineering that was important. What really makes it incredible is what this technological moment represents.
In the medium to long term, this is the first rocket we’ve ever built that could conceivably one day, get humans to Mars.1
But in the short-term, this was the moment that SpaceX transformed the economics of space… again.
And I think the consequences of this are going to be a really, really big deal for everyone back on Earth, for reasons that I’ll now explain.
Collapsing prices
SpaceX has already changed the economics of space once before.
Only a few years ago, getting a kilogram of material to orbit cost somewhere between $10,000 and $20,000. But in 2015, SpaceX changed the world by successfully executing a controlled landing of the first stage of the Falcon 9, the company’s smaller rocket.
This is a more recent landing – scenes like this are now routine.
In an instant the ability to land slashed the price of launching payloads to orbit, for the same obvious reason it’s cheaper to re-use an aeroplane than build a brand new one for every flight. Today, the price per kilogram to orbit is around $2700.
What this means in practice is that we2 can get a hell of a lot more into space, for cheaper. Instead of having to build a new rocket every time, SpaceX now has a fleet of boosters that are reusable. Some have now flown around 20 times, and without having to manufacture many more,3 the company is today able to launch multiple times per week – something that was unimaginable before.
And this alone has transformed what we’re able to do in space. For example, it’s become feasible for smaller companies and start-ups to launch their own small satellites.
That’s why we’re currently living through a boom in satellites designed for things such as environmental monitoring (eg, GHGSat, which monitors greenhouse gas emissions), asset tracking (so that companies can monitor shipping containers and the like), and scientific research.
There are also new imaging satellites that can experiment with less proven technology. For example – in 2022 a British company called Sen launched a small satellite on a Falcon 9 that can deliver live, 4K footage from space – something that hadn’t been done before. This makes it conceivable that eventually we could have an entire network of cameras providing virtually real-time views of the entire Earth.4
And it’s how Sen was able to capture a video of Hurricane Milton – which looks like something we’d only usually see in a computer-generated simulation:
Anyway, this doesn’t even scratch the surface of what capabilities have emerged now that we humans have access to this new launch capacity. Not least because I haven’t even mentioned SpaceX’s own Starlink satellite internet yet, which today has over 6000 satellites in orbit providing broadband-style speeds to, well, conceivably everywhere. If SpaceX hadn’t reduced the cost of spaceflight, there’s no way that such a network could ever have been built.5
An order of magnitude
However, though the above is cool, it’s almost old news now.
What the Starship launch and catch demonstrated is that the components of the new rocket work: That something of its size can make it to space, and that its constituent parts can return to Earth to be used again. I’m sure there will be more explosions and mishaps before the rocket is fully ready, but the fundamental theory of Starship has been demonstrated.
In other words, Musk has been proven correct. This is officially how a Mars-capable rocket works.
So now it is only a matter of time before the design is finessed, and flights become routine – much like the Falcon 9 now.6 And once this happens, the price for launching stuff into space will collapse all over again.
In fact, Musk himself has claimed that Starship could make a mere $10 (yes, ten dollars) per kilogram to orbit possible. And whether or not he is bullshitting, as per his previous wild claims, the reality is that given the payload capacity of the new rocket and the cost of launching, prices to orbit will almost certainly fall by several orders of magnitude.
And this is why I wonder if we – humans – are not quite prepared for what this will mean.
The new, new economics will transform what is possible in space – because costs falling and scale increasing can lead to new, emergent capabilities.
For example, smartphones went from expensive, experimental devices that only the rich could afford, to something that can be picked up for £50. As a result, there are now over seven billion smartphones in the world, and all but the very, very poorest have access to the technology – which has changed how the world communicates, shares information, and does business.
So what new capabilities will emerge from the new economics of space?
One obvious one is that it will become viable to launch many more probes to explore the solar system. And it might be possible to send probes to places faster too, because Starship can carry more propellant, so it can burn more fuel to increase speed. I won’t be surprised if future missions to Mars and Venus don’t just send one probe, but send a fleet.
I wonder if we could also see the rapid emergence of new space telescopes too. The James Webb Space Telescope, which launched in 2021 cost $10bn – and though something like that was always going to be expensive, it’s conceivable that the next telescope could be cheaper. This isn’t just because of the cost of launch, but because Starship’s larger payload bay will mean that telescopes won’t require such a wildly complicated mechanism to fold out its mirror – so money can be saved in the design phase.
There are many other possible pure science applications too – of varying levels of plausibility. For example, Casey Handmer has already written a great post about some of them, covering everything from how Starships could be connected together in orbit to form huge new space stations, to how they could deliver the large payloads to the Moon that we’re going to need to establish a permanent presence on the lunar surface.7
But much as with the Falcon 9 cost collapse, this isn’t just about scientific research. What’s probably more important in the short-term is how Starship will make it possible to launch many more satellites that look back at the Earth.
For example, it will make deploying Starlink even cheaper. At the moment, a Falcon 9 can deploy up to 60 Starlink satellites in one go – and with Starship, this will increase to up to 400 with each launch. That could make it even more plausible to have broadband access everywhere.
And as with the small satellite examples above, launching satellites will become more affordable for even smaller companies and organisations.
And hell, there’s even some mad-sounding proposals to use space-based solar panels to generate electricity, which would then be sent via microwave link back to Earth – just like in Sim City 2000. I’ve no idea how plausible this is, but Starship will at least nudge us closer to experimenting with it.
Scale and the Musk of it all
I think what makes Starship so exciting – and so important – is the scale it enables. Just as the container ship revolutionised the transportation of goods around the world, and just as modern passenger jets were a step-change from the tiny propeller planes in the early years of flight, Starship is going to change humanity’s relationship with space.
That’s why I wonder if we’ve collectively not yet woken up to what is about to happen.
And perhaps this is unsurprising, as it would have been hard to predict how the world was about to change a year before the launch of the iPhone, or the public release of ChatGPT. Similarly, I suspect that Elon Musk being such a hateful person makes us not want to acknowledge the importance of this technological moment.
But I think what Sunday’s launch confirmed is that Starship is now not a matter of “if”, but “when”. And that means when we think about the near future we now need to imagine a world where space is a much bigger part of our everyday lives.
Musk has said that the company plans to launch multiple Starships to Mars in 2026 (without human passengers). At this point it’s hard to know whether this is plausible or just typical Muskian bullshit as he has a long history of overly-optimistic timelines. But hell, after what I saw yesterday, I almost believe him. [2026 update: Unsurprisingly it was overly-optimistic]
I always point this out but something I like about space is that it lends itself to saying “we” in reference to all of humanity. Non-Americans say without thinking “we went to the Moon”, speaking on behalf of all humans. What a beautiful thing.
The company does still make some new Falcon 9 boosters, as some missions require boosters to be expended, such as when the rocket needs extra thrust to get something heavy into space, or into a particular orbit – not leaving enough fuel for the booster to reach a landing pad.
I spoke to the company earlier this year for another article, and they found a very clever workaround for something annoying. Typically, footage from space has been extremely low quality (look at the quality of footage from ISS, for example). So how have they got the bandwidth for 4K? Instead of using a tonne of capacity, Sen’s satellite encodes and compresses the video to H265 on device, before sending it to the ground.
Starlink broke even for the first time at the end of last year, and some back-of-the-envelope estimates on the value to the business suggest that SpaceX is now basically just an ISP that happens to also launch rockets.
In fact, we can probably expect the rest of the development process to speed up, as engineers now have a flight-proven booster to analyse and improve upon, instead of just data transmitted before previous launch attempts exploded.
In fact Starship is part of NASA’s Artemis plan for landing on the Moon – a modified version of Starship will act as the lunar lander that will take astronauts down to the surface.
FT Alphville would like a word:
https://www.ft.com/content/0fd15797-ac89-4222-a4bb-03a6a1330f48
Your Argos link is broken. Your point still stands though.