The Economist February 19th 2022 71
Science & technologyRocketscienceAd astra, on the cheap
W
hen it comesto size and spectacle,
the peak of the Space Age passed in
1973, with the final flight of the Saturn v
rocket that had carried the Apollo astro
nauts to the moon. Taller than the Statue of
Liberty, the Saturn vcould lug 140 tonnes
into orbit. Its first flight, in 1967, provoked
Walter Cronkite, an American news anchor
reporting far from the pad, to exclaim: “My
God, our building’s shaking here!” as ceil
ing tiles fell around him. Half a century lat
er, nothing as powerful has reached orbit
since (see chart 1 on next page).
Not far from Boca Chica, a Texan hamlet
a couple of miles from the Mexican border,
SpaceX, a rocketry firm founded by Elon
Musk, is developing a machine that it
hopes will change that. Built from gleam
ing stainless steel, with its nose adorned
with fins and ten metres taller than even
the Saturn v, Starship looks like something
from the cover of a 1950s pulp sciencefic
tion magazine. Its planned payload of up to
150 tonnes means that five Starship flights
could put more stuff into space than the
rest of the world managed with 135 rocket
launches in 2021. Its upper stage contains
more pressurised volume than the Inter
national Space Station, which took a de
cade, dozens of launches and perhaps
$100bn to assemble.
But it is not just the size that matters.
When a Saturn vtook off to send men to
the Moon, the only bit of the 2,800 tonnes
of hardware which came back was a
cramped fivetonne capsule with three
men inside. Each new mission meant a
new Saturn v. With Starship, the idea is
that all the hardware will come back: the
massive booster stage almost immediate
ly, the second, orbital stage after fulfilling
whatever mission it had been sent on.
At a press event on February 10th to
show off an assembled rocket Mr Musk re
iterated his reasons for founding SpaceX:
to buy humanity an insurance policy
against existential risks by establishing a
colony on Mars. Starship is designed to
transport the million tonnes of supplies he
thinks is needed for that job—roughly 100
times more mass than has been launchedsince the start of the Space Age. To that end,
it is designed to be not only the biggest
rocket ever built, but also the cheapest. Ex
isting rockets cost tens to hundreds of mil
lions of dollars per launch (the Saturn v
may have cost over $1bn in today’s money).
Despite Starship’s size, SpaceX hopes to cut
that to the low millions.
Mars colonies, if they ever come, re
main a long way off. But Starship’s unprec
edented combination of size and frugality
could upend the economics of the space
business closer to Earth, too. An industry
used to shaving grams of mass and cram
ming complicated payloads into small car
go bays will see those restrictions lifted.
Some scientists are already imagining ex
travagant space missions that would make
full use of the rocket’s huge capacity. nasa
intends to use it to land astronauts on the
Moon; America’s soldiers are eyeing it up,
too. And Starship is vital to the future of
SpaceX itself, which was valued recently at
more than $100bn (see chart 2).
But first the rocket needs to fly. A series
of test flights of Starship’s upper stage
(which, in isolation, is rather confusingly
also called “Starship”) have ended in crash
landings and explosions. A successful
flight came on May 5th last year, when an
upper stage flew 10km into the air before
landing safely back on its pad. A full
fledged orbital test of the twostage form of
the rocket, with one Starship upper stage
sitting atop a Super Heavy booster, had
been due in January.
That orbital flight, though, needs ap
proval from regulators, who were delugedSpaceX hopes its monstrous, dirt-cheap Starship will revolutionise space travel→Alsointhissection
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