Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship: Why the Rocket Is Critical to Its Future

When Elon Musk first announced plans for a super-heavy, reusable rocket in 2012, his vision was to transport people to Mars. Today, he sees Starship as the backbone of his entire space business, and its $2 trillion market valuation hinges on the launcher’s technological and commercial success. The tallest and most powerful rocket ever built, Starship is meant to lift upgraded satellites for SpaceX’s booming Starlink internet-from-space venture and a fleet of up to a million spacecraft to serve as data centers for artificial intelligence, a project that underpinned the company’s blockbuster share sale this summer. On top of all of that, Starship is still tasked with realizing Musk’s lifelong dream of turning humanity into a “multiplanetary species.” It’s supposed to send people to the moon as soon as this decade, and then eventually to the red planet. Starship’s economic model relies on the rocket being able to land after a mission and quickly relaunch. Several technical hurdles remain before that can happen. The clock is ticking as the company is laying the groundwork to retire Falcon 9, the company’s workhorse rocket that transformed the economics of space. Igniting all of Starship’s 33 Raptor engines at once is a complicated feat. And it’s such a forceful launch environment that SpaceX caused significant damage to its own launch pad during Starship’s April 2023 debut as the company didn’t have proper mitigations in place. Starship’s giant structure is subjected to enormous stresses, and even the tiniest overlooked defect could cause a catastrophic explosion. After a handful of Starship explosions in the upper atmosphere during tests, the craft can now reach orbit and deploy batches of satellites. It must show it can do this again and again to build out the Starlink network and put future data centers in space. SpaceX has also returned both Starship and its booster to Earth relatively intact, even demonstrating that it can “catch” the booster at the launch site. SpaceX has yet to demonstrate it can land the main upper rocket in the same way, though. The feat is especially challenging for the spaceship component as it must brake from orbital speeds and survive scorching temperatures as it plunges through the planet’s atmosphere. Starship’s heat-shield tiles are meant to protect the spacecraft during reentry. While the shield has shown it can keep Starship intact, it’s not yet clear that it will be robust enough to allow for full and rapid reusability. Musk says that the heat shield problem is essentially “solved.” Some heat shield experts have cast doubt on the Starship design, saying the vehicle still experiences extensive damage when returning from space. The orbital refueling required for moon missions is a complicated process that will require potentially dozens of back-to-back Starship launches, and SpaceX has not been clear about exactly how many launches will be required. Transferring thousands of tons of cryogenic liquid oxygen and methane in zero gravity is an unprecedented engineering challenge. The liquids must be kept at super-cold temperatures, otherwise they will boil away into gas. During propellant transfer, some small fraction will inevitably heat up and be lost. Even when the propellant is being stored in the depot, a portion is likely to boil off over time. The amount of boil-off will play a big role in the number of refueling flights needed. Then there’s the ultimate goal that Starship was conceived for: landing on other worlds. SpaceX must demonstrate the rocket’s ability to both land upright on another world like the moon and then take off again without a hitch. SpaceX has never landed anything on another planet, and the moon can be a tricky place for a landing vehicle to remain upright. A Starship that’s an economically viable alternative to the Falcon 9 would be something more akin to a commercial airplane than an orbital rocket, with much of the cost associated with launching the vehicle ultimately revolving around fuel. Musk has made bold predictions for the cost of a single Starship launch, claiming that one flight could run between $2 and $10 million. That’s far less than the starting price of $74 million that SpaceX charges for Falcon 9, a vehicle that already disrupted the launch industry for being remarkably cheap. Some experts have cast doubt on Musk’s cost projections, even if SpaceX proves it can reuse Starship and fly it again within short timeframes.