Why Starship?

On September 28, 2026, SpaceX’s Starship rocket was successfully launched into a low earth orbit (LEO), an orbit around Earth where the spacecraft usually has an altitude of more than 200km and less than 2000km with an orbital period of less than 128 minutes1, during its 14th test flight. That day while in orbit, Starship 41 deployed 26 V3 Starlink satellites before reentering the atmosphere. Later, it performed a soft water landing in the Pacific Ocean somewhere north of Hawaii. This test flight marked a major milestone following years of development over the past few years as it was the first time a starship was able to contribute to the payload launches of the starlink program (SpaceX’s “connect to wifi from space” project)2.

Ten years ago, SpaceX had already successfully developed the Falcon 9, a partially reusable launch vehicle fully capable of delivering medium-weight payloads into Low Earth Orbit. Falcon Heavy followed suit, enabling even heavier spacecraft to be launched into different orbits. However, instead of continuing to design the falcon rockets, SpaceX has spent the last few years developing Starship and has spent over $15 billion on this launch vehicle that has not yet been finalized after 14 test flights3. Despite these substantial costs, SpaceX continues to work on its design.

One of the reasons is that Starship is designed to provide better payload capacities, and therefore increase efficiency of payload delivery. A standard Falcon 9 launch can deliver approximately 18,500 kg of payload to low earth orbit. In comparison, Starship can deliver up to 100,000 kg to Low Earth Orbit. In terms of starlink satellites, something that SpaceX is launching on a large scale, Starship can launch up to 60 V3 starlink satellites in one launch at maximum configuration, while falcon 9 can only lift at most 30 lighter V2 starlink satellites. Converting this to internet capacity, Starship can provide the internet capacity worth more than 20 falcon 9 launches of Starlink satellites just in one launch4.

Secondly, Starship is much more cost-effective because it is fully reusable. In recent years, the affordability of sending payload to space has reached unprecedented levels compared to prices before. The space shuttles were the first ever partially reusable launch vehicles targeted at low earth orbit. However, because it had to be manned, it had a cost per kilogram of $54,000 when payload was launched into low earth orbit5. Cheaper unmanned rocket models at that time like Atlas (famous for delivering different Mars rovers such as curiosity and perseverance) had a cost of around $10,000 per kilogram to low earth orbit. However, the falcon iteration from SpaceX have both crashed the price of launching to low earth orbit. Falcon 9 for example lowered the cost to approximately $3,000 per kilogram depending on its configuration due to its reusability feature6. Reusabilities allow for repetition of launches, thus reducing the total cost. Before falcon came out, expending a booster in an unmanned rocket launch meant you had to build a brand new one. The highest number of times SpaceX has reused a booster was 37 times with booster B1067, while the entire falcon 9 fleet has tallied over 600 reuses in total7. Meaning, if the falcon 9 did not have a reusable booster, SpaceX would have built 600 extra falcon 9 boosters to launch these payloads, drastically increasing the price to orbit.

Starship addresses the problem of expensive launch costs by introducing the concept of full reusability. Although falcon class rockets have reusable lower stage boosters, its upper stage is not reusable. Both stages of the starship, however, the Super Heavy lower-stage booster and the Starship upper stage, can and are designed to be caught by the chopsticks, the two arms on the launch tower. Full reusability means nothing has to be replaced or rebuilt after launch, it just has to be refueled. The emergence of Starship turns rockets in the space industry from a single-use craft to a reusable space car. Eventually when Starship enters service, it would be able to achieve a price less than $1,000 per kilogram when launching to low earth orbit and SpaceX plans to bring that number to the two-digit figures in future iterations8.

Starship holds great significance for the future of spaceflight and rocket design. For example, in the Artemis mission where NASA plans to build a Moon colony, Starship HLS (Human Landing System) is the vessel chosen to land astronauts on the Moon and fly them back into low lunar orbit to re-dock with the mothership Orion9. In future missions planned by SpaceX where humans aim to colonize Mars, Starship’s reusability will also facilitate the missions by reducing the need for complex reassembling of rockets.