As Aerospace Security details, the most flown rocket since the 1960s are the various forms of Russia’s Soyuz. This is a medium size rocket that delivers payloads to space at a cost of about $18,000 per kilogram. Other workhorse rockets that have appeared over the following decades — the U.S. Atlas II and the European Ariane 44 — have been right in the same range when it came to cost.
There have been cheaper rides. China’s Long March 2E posts a bottom line of just under $10,000 / kg. India’s PSLV has averaged out around $8,500. However, some of these cheaper rockets have had problems, real or perceived, with either access to reliability. Even so, over the years commercial space has become cheaper. The average cost of a Delta IV (which is no longer available) was just over that $10K mark. India just launched a group of commercial satellites as part of a constellation that will compete with Starlink aboard an LSV3 rocket at a price of about $8K / KG. China’s internal cost on a Long March 3 is reportedly down to $4,500/kg, though it’s unlikely you can buy a ride at that price.
And then there’s SpaceX.
Because SpaceX is able to land and reuse the bottom stage of their Falcon 9 rocket, and at least some boosters from their Falcon Heavy, their cost is much, much lower. With 80 successful flights of the Falcon 9 in the bank, SpaceX can offer flights at a reported cost to orbit of just $2,600/kg. The Falcon Heavy cuts that to just $1,400/kg for those that need the capacity.
If you have a satellite to put in orbit, particularly a large satellite, not using SpaceX right now takes a lot of explaining. Just hating Musk is rarely seen by a corporate board as a good reason to swallow tens of millions in extra launch costs. This is why United Launch Alliance, once the biggest launch provider in the U.S., is reportedly up for sale.
That brings us to Starship.
Unlike the Falcon rockets, where the booster may be recovered but the upper stage is a one-off, the massive Starship—larger, and much more powerful than an Apollo-era Saturn V — is intended to be 100% reusable. Musk has declared that once it is up and running the cost to orbit via Starship will be $10/kg. Not $10K. Just $10. That’s because the cost of flying the rocket no longer includes the cost of the rocket. It’s just fuel, maintenance, and paying someone to run that backwards clock.
In terms of allowing almost anything in space—whether it’s a probe to the planets or a new telescope that dwarfs the James Webb, that’s a fantastic development. It opens up ideas that are literally impossible under the current cost to orbit regime. Customers are already lining up for Starship’s unprecedented capabilities. That includes NASA, which has made this a vital component of the Artemis III mission scheduled to go to the Moon in the next two years.
It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that Musk is wrong about that cost. Elon Musk has an infamous reputation for both underestimating costs and schedules, and that’s certainly at work here. It will take longer to get this thing up and running than he says (in fact, it already has). It will cost more. Operating it will be more expensive. SpaceX has to work all the considerable cost of development into the price of these flights. It will not be $10/kg.
But if it’s $100/kg, and that’s perfectly possible, it will still leave every other launch provider staring at costs that are orders of magnitude higher than SpaceX.
As Nature reports, 2022 was a record year for rocket launches with 180 successful flights to orbit. That’s 44 more than in 2021, which was also a record year. Sixty-one of those launches were by SpaceX. In those launches, it took more sheer tonnage to orbit that all the other flights combined. Thanks to its Starlink constellation, SpaceX now owns the majority of all active satellites in orbit.
This is an absolutely dominant company in the launch industry. So dominant that it’s hard to find an example in any other field where a single company has such competitive advantage. SpaceX is essentially competing against itself, and it looks to be moving on to a vast improvement before anyone comes close to reaching what it accomplished years ago.
Starship represents a radical rethinking of the whole idea of a rocket. It’s huge size is there in part because it seeks to get past limitations that require most rockets to be expensive precision machined devices made from the highest grades of aluminum and carbon fiber. Starship is made of stainless steel, welded together in hoops, in a process that’s only a slight refinement from the way water tanks are constructed. It’s cheap to build. It runs on methane, making it cheaper to fuel. And, if everything works, it all comes home. Making it almost infinitely cheaper to use.
Musk wants to build 1,000 of the things. Seriously. And at the rate they’re being assembled at the “Starbase” in Texas, that seems entirely possible. A second plant for manufacturing Starships is under construction in Florida. So is another launch tower expressly designed for this system, which is now almost complete at Kennedy Space Center.
How much SpaceX has invested in Starship is difficult to say. The individual boosters and ships are cheap enough that SpaceX has frequently built, then scrapped, whole ships as they’ve tested out ideas and moved through improvements in manufacturing. The Starship on the pad right now is a couple of mini-generations behind ones currently resting in the “high bay” and “mega bay” up the street, waiting for their turn.
If Starship works, SpaceX won’t just have an enormous competitive advantage, it will enjoy a monopoly that will be very, very difficult to challenge. It’s even difficult to see how it could be broken up to prevent this. To keep SpaceX from simply owning everything above the atmosphere, the government will almost have to step in and create a competitor. If they can.
However, there’s a word doing even more heavy lifting than a Starship booster at the start of that last paragraph. That word is “if.”
Unlike most rockets that have rolled out to the pad since the 1960s, Starship stands a decent chance of simply failing. Can the hull of the booster—so thin it that a fully stacked starship can’t stand on its own unless pressure is maintained in the internal tanks—withstand the forces of launch and punching through the atmosphere? Are the hexagonal tiles of the heat sheild enough to protect the upper stage from the violence and heat of reentry? Can the upper stage actually carry out that “belly flop” maneuver reliably, after managing the feet only a single time in test flights?
That’s all the easy stuff.
The real challenge comes with the fact that, unlike the Falcon, Starship has no legs. It can’t land on a concrete pad or on a waiting ship. The only way a Starship can be recovered is by flying back to the launch tower and hovering so precisely that the same metal “chopsticks” that raise the rocket onto the pad can reach out and catch it in mid-air.
SpaceX has never actually done this. No one has done this. SpaceX added this fancy maneuver to avoid the weight of landing gear on the two components of the ship, but … boy, that’s some tradeoff.
That final step probably won’t be tested during Starship’s first attempt to reach orbit. The plan right now is for the booster to ditch somewhere in the waters of the Gulf while the second stage completes a partial orbit before re entering north of Hawaii. Both components will reportedly attempt do do their hover in place, as they would when trying to be snagged by the pad, but they’ll do it over the ocean, well away from ships, land, and everything else.
In the past, Musk has intentionally downplayed the possibility of success for rockets like the Falcon Heavy, turning their successful flight into something of a miracle. This time, when Musk says there’s a good chance that the Starship might fail to reach orbit, or that that the second stage might fail on reentry, he’s doing that rarest of things — telling the truth.
But even if this orbital test fails, don’t think that’s the end of Starship. SpaceX has another ready to go almost as soon as this one leaves the pad. And one after that. And it’s building the one that comes after that. The investment they’ve put into creating the ground facilities to build and launch these space-faring monsters shows that they are absolutely convinced they can make it work.
If it does, the human race takes a huge leap into turning space from extraordinary to workaday. But Elon Musk will have his hand at the wheel, and no one seems to be planning what to do about that.
