Elon Musk’s Starship: The Unstoppable Force Redefining the Space Race!

It was among the most remarkable technological moments of the year. On 13 October, Starship, the planet’s largest and most potent rocket, ascended into space from a launch site in Texas. Its primary booster achieved an elevation of over 65km before it commenced its descent back to Earth at a speed exceeding the sound barrier.

A disaster was averted when the rocket – constructed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX firm – reignited its engines and decelerated until it tantalisingly hovered above the tower from which it had been launched just seven minutes earlier. Pincer claws secured the massive launcher, holding it firmly for refurbishment and re-launch.

“This is a day for the books of engineering history,” remarked SpaceX engineer Kate Tice.

The esteemed research journal Science shared the excitement: “The achievement signals a new era of cost-effective heavy-lift rockets that could drastically lower the costs of conducting scientific endeavors in space,” it proclaimed last month when it awarded Starship’s October flight as one of its Breakthroughs of the Year.

Musk’s organization has already diminished the expenses of sending cargo into Earth’s orbit by a factor of 10, the journal disclosed. Once Starship – designed to be completely and rapidly reusable and the most powerful launcher ever constructed – becomes fully operational later this year, additional cost reductions of a similar extent can be anticipated, it added.

This perspective is echoed by numerous space engineers who contend that Starship is about to achieve a significant breakthrough with a timetable that could allow it to conduct missions every two or three weeks. SpaceX engineers have figured out how to retrieve and reuse its primary booster stage and intend to replicate this process for its upper stage this year, they assert.

A total of 25 flights are projected for the upcoming year, an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking. “You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to realize that their operating schedule is unparalleled,” stated astrophysicist Ehud Behar, a professor at the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, to the website Space.com.

For researchers, the advantages of Starship are clear. The costs associated with missions using the reusable launcher could drastically decrease, enabling them to conduct research in space that they have not been able to finance. This aspect is critical, emphasized Science in its editorial regarding Starship’s accomplishments.

Accessing space has been too valuable to jeopardize by failure in the past, thus components for NASA missions are repeatedly tested, inflating costs, it highlighted. “However, with regular Starship flights, researchers will be empowered to take more risks, constructing instruments with inexpensive, readily available parts and launching them frequently.”

Numerous robotic rovers could be dispatched to Mars, rather than merely individual vehicles, while flotillas of mirror segments could be launched in formation to assemble enormous self-formed telescopes in space. Such ambitions are thrilling – though there are drawbacks to the success of Musk’s rocketry.

To begin with, there exists the possibility that Starship could jeopardize NASA’s own rocket system, the troubled, exorbitantly expensive Space Launch System (SLS) that the agency has been developing for decades. Its rockets are disposable, unlike the reusable Starship, while each SLS launch is forecasted to cost billions compared to the $10m goal that Musk aspires to for his system. Many scientists predict that Starship will render SLS obsolete within a couple of years.

The other significant issue for many scientists working with SpaceX is their struggle to accept Musk’s conservative political stance and his close ties to Donald Trump. He has critically addressed U.S. immigration policies, shown contempt for various Democratic politicians, and has recently received permission from Trump to cut $500bn from the U.S. federal budget.

In any case, Musk’s aspirations for Starship are more aligned with his ambitions of utilizing the colossal rocket to initiate the eventual colonization of Mars. Last September, he committed that SpaceX would launch its first uncrewed Starship missions to Mars within two years. If successful, those would be followed by crewed missions in four years. Ultimately, Musk envisions a colony of up to a million inhabitants on Mars within 30 years, he has stated.

The contentious billionaire’s proposal has garnered him significant attention – and mockery. Indeed, sending humans on the 140m-mile trek to the red planet, enduring hazardous bursts of cosmic radiation and developing methods to cultivate food in an environment devoid of water – and with an atmosphere that averages less than 1% of Earth’s pressure at sea level – is formidable, to say the least.

Departing Earth for Mars “would be akin to abandoning a cluttered room to reside in a hazardous waste site,” state Kelly and Zach Weinersmith in their publication, A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?, which secured the 2024 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book prize.

This viewpoint is echoed by Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, who has also criticized Musk’s proposals concerning Mars. “Do not expect mass migration from Earth,” he commented. “It is a perilous illusion to believe that space provides an escape from Earth’s dilemmas. We must resolve these issues here. Addressing climate change may appear overwhelming, but it’s a walk in the park compared to terraforming Mars. Nowhere in our solar system presents an environment as hospitable as that of the Antarctic, the ocean floor, or the summit of Everest.

“There exists no ‘Planet B’ for the typical risk-averse individual.”

From this viewpoint, Starship may have some influence on space science, although it is improbable that it will alter the trajectory of human history.