YoIt was one of the most striking technological events of the year. On October 13, Starship, the world’s largest and most powerful rocket, blasted off into space from a launch pad in Texas. Its main booster reached an altitude of more than 65 kilometers before it began hurtling back toward Earth at faster than the speed of sound.
An accident was averted when the rocket, built by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, restarted its engines and slowed until it hovered tantalizingly above the tower from which it had been launched just seven minutes earlier. Claws grabbed the giant launcher and held it firmly, ready for reconditioning and relaunching.
“This is a day for the engineering history books,” said SpaceX engineer Kate Tice.
The prestigious research magazine. Science was equally enthusiastic: “The feat heralds a new era of affordable heavy-lift rockets that could reduce the cost of doing science in space,” he announced last month when he gave an award to Starship’s October flight as one of his Progress of the year.
Musk’s company has already reduced the cost of putting cargo into orbit around the Earth by 10, the newspaper revealed. Once Starship, the most powerful launcher ever built and designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, is fully operational later this year, further reductions of similar magnitude can be expected, he added.
This opinion is shared by many space engineers who believe that Starship is ready to take a big leap with a schedule that will allow it to launch every two or three weeks. SpaceX engineers have learned how to recover and reuse its main booster stage and will do the same with its upper stage this year, they say.
A total of 25 flights are planned for next year, a surprisingly ambitious program. “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that the schedule they are working on 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 simple. Mission costs on the reusable launcher could fall from current levels and allow them to conduct research in space that they simply haven’t been able to afford. This point is crucial, he said Science in his editorial about Starship’s achievements.
Access to space has been too valuable to risk failure in the past, so components of NASA missions are tested over and over again, driving up costs, he noted. “But with routine Starship flights, scientists will be able to take more risks, build instruments with cheap off-the-shelf parts, and launch them frequently.”
Fleets of robotic explorers could be sent to Mars, not just individual vehicles, while flotillas of mirror segments could fly in formation to create giant self-assembled telescopes in space. These visions are exciting, although the success of Musk’s rockets has its downsides.
For starters, there’s a chance that Starship could ruin NASA’s own rocket system, the hugely expensive and problem-plagued 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 to the $10 million target 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 right-wing politics and his close association with Donald Trump. He has been an outspoken critic of US immigration policy, disdainful of many Democratic politicians, and has recently been given license by Trump to cut $500 billion 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 to do with his hopes of using the giant rocket to begin the eventual colonization of Mars. Last September, he promised that SpaceX would launch the first unmanned Starship missions to Mars within two years. If successful, these would be followed by manned flights within four years. Ultimately, Musk envisions there could be a colony of up to a million people living on Mars within 30 years, he said.
The billionaire’s controversial plan has earned him a lot of attention… and ridicule. Certainly, sending humans on a 140 million 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 that of the Earth in the sea. level – it is a challenge, to put it mildly.
Leaving Earth for Mars “would be like leaving a messy room so you can live in a toxic waste dump,” Kelly and Zach Weinersmith say in their book. A city on Mars: Can we colonize space? Should we colonize space? Have we really thought this through?, which won the 2024 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize.
It’s a view shared by Martin Rees, the astronomer royal, who also attacked Musk’s Mars proposals. “Never expect mass emigration from Earth,” he said. “It is a dangerous illusion to think that space offers an escape from the problems of Earth. We have to solve them here. Tackling climate change may seem daunting, but it’s a piece of cake compared to terraforming Mars. No place in our solar system offers an environment as forgiving as Antarctica, the bottom of the ocean, or the top of Everest.
“There is 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.