What Starship can, and can’t, doby Jeff Foust
|
| Companies and individuals are starting to think about how they can take advantage of that to perform missions not feasible or affordable today, although others are skeptical that Starship will be the vehicle that consumes the entire launch market. |
A success on this flight would being the company a step closer to finally reaching orbit with Starship. Its initial missions, once it can demonstrate it can reach orbit (even if it can’t yet make a precision landing back at Starbase) will be to demonstrate technologies needed for the lunar lander version of Starship and to deploy larger versions of the company’s Starlink satellites.
That will keep Starship busy for the next few years, but assuming SpaceX is successful in achieving its cost, performance, and cadence goals for Starship, much more capacity will be on the market towards the end of the decade. Companies and individuals are starting to think about how they can take advantage of that to perform missions not feasible or affordable today, although others are skeptical that Starship will be the vehicle that consumes the entire launch market.
Starships are for Venus and Mars
People have been thinking about how to use Starship for some time. Commercial space station developers, for example, see it as an effective means of launching large space station modules. Starlab Space, one such company, envisions launching its entire station on a single Starship. NASA is working on concepts for the future Habitable Worlds Observatory space telescope that could take full advantage of Starship (see “The lifecycle of space telescopes”, The Space Review, February 3, 2025).
As Starship edges closer to operational launches, more people are thinking about how to use the vehicle “Starship is around 150,000 kilograms, which is substantial,” Michael Paluszek, president of Princeton Satellite Systems, said of the vehicle’s payload capacity during a presentation earlier this month at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston. “So, what do we do with it?”
He outlined several options, like supporting space manufacturing of pharmaceuticals and semiconductors. “There may very well be an industry that is best done in low Earth orbit, but how do you get the equipment you need and the raw materials up there, and how do you get the products back?” he said, something that Starship’s large payload bay could enable.
Other applications were more speculative, like helium-3 mining on the Moon or even gas giants for fusion reactors that don’t exist yet. Starship could also enable large robotic missions that would otherwise require multiple launches. He recalled a NASA concept from more than two decades ago called the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter, a nuclear-powered mission that would have required by his estimate three launches. “What do you do when launch number two fails?” (See “Space science gets big at NASA”, The Space Review, July 7, 2003.)
Another speaker at the AAAS session discussed a similar concept. Iaroslav Iakubivskyi is a postdoc at MIT, working on Venus mission concepts and instrumentation. He is part of a group there working on a series of Venus missions, starting with a small entry probe now scheduled to launch next year by Rocket Lab to look for biosignatures in the upper atmosphere of Venus.
| “It’s a vision where the Mars architecture is rich in energy, water, food, and in crew time,” Lordos said of the Starship-enabled plan. “We will no longer be limited in how much mass we can send to Mars.” |
While that initial mission is small (originally designed to launch on Rocket Lab’s Electron small launch vehicle), the team has concepts for larger missions. A second mission would send a spacecraft to Venus in the early 2030s to place a balloon roughly five meters across and three meters tall in the atmosphere for additional studies.
The third, and by far most ambitious, mission would send an even larger balloon to Venus, one that would be 27 meters in diameter. It would collect atmosphere samples and place them in a rocket, weighing two tons, which would then launch out of the atmosphere to eventually return to Earth: a Venus atmospheric sample return mission.
The concept was studied under the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts, or NIAC, program in 2023, he said, with the idea of maturing the technologies needed for flying the mission in the 2040s.
“There’s a lot of challenges of how you would do that,” he said of the balloon in particular, “because you need a very high inflation rate to inflate, and a big rocket, suspended underneath it, to launch.”
That drives the mission to require a very large rocket. “We did multiple trade studies and SpaceX Starship emerged as the leading solution,” he said, given its payload and cost. Other vehicles required at least two launches, “and the risks involved in that just does not justify the need for that.”
SpaceX’s ultimate use for Starship, at least in the vision of founder Elon Musk, is to use the vehicle to establish a permanent home for humanity on Mars. But, while Musk has often talked about sending humans to Mars as soon as possible, he’s said little about what people would do once they get there and how they would live, beyond a few artists’ concepts released by SpaceX over the years.
Others, though, are working to fill that void. George Lordos, a research scientist at MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, noted that Starship’s performance enables expeditions much larger than what NASA has contemplated in its various Mars architectures, which have four or even fewer astronauts on the Martian surface.
“Each one of those four crew members will, by necessity, have to wear many different hats,” he said at the AAAS session. “At what point do all these hats become not just an inefficient way for humans to support science and exploration, but a safety risk?”
He advocated for larger crews that, while more expensive, could do far more science, citing the experience from Antarctica, provided there is a way not just to get them to Mars (and back) but also support them while they’re there.
A group at MIT developed a concept for a large Mars base called Pale Red Dot (the name is a long and somewhat convoluted acronym) that won a NASA student competition in 2023. It involved developing a set of modular habitats that could be linked together to create two “villages” hosting a combined 36 people.
In that architecture, Starship would be used to deliver the habitats, two on each vehicle. A system called a “starcrane” would lower them to “skateboards” on the surface that would then roll them into position. The habitats would have a rigid lower section and inflatable section to maximize their volume.
“The idea is that would build large villages connecting maybe 30 of those modules together per village,” he explained. “Every member of the crew would have their own small studio apartment.”
| “I don’t subscribe to the view that they destroy all launch all down the chain,” Beck said of vehicles like Starship, comparing it to an Airbus 380 and Electron to a private jet. |
Other modules could be specialized for various purposes. That included one module whose upper section would host a swimming pool. The section below would serve as a shelter in solar storms, using water as a radiation shield. That section “just so happens to be the Ten-Forward bar.”
“It’s a vision where the Mars architecture is rich in energy, water, food, and in crew time,” he said. “We will no longer be limited in how much mass we can send to Mars.”
Starship, smallsats, and space tugs
The combination of the large payload capacity, low per-kilogram cost, and high launch rate promised for Starship suggests that the vehicle could outperform any other launch vehicle out there, capturing missions that at least have a choice of launch vehicles (given that some missions will be captive to a specific vehicle or those from a specific country.) How do those other vehicles then compete?
Those concerns have, in recent years, trickled down to the opposite end of the spectrum from Starship, small launch vehicles. The rise of SpaceX’s rideshare missions on Falcon 9 rockets have taken away customers who might otherwise use small launchers, undermining their business cases. A Starship rideshare, perhaps augmented with orbital transfer vehicles, might further threaten the viability of small rockets.
While companies that operate small rockets have raised concerns about Starship in the past (see “Europe looks to end its launcher crisis”, The Space Review, May 6, 2024), companies were more upbeat about their prospects of competing against Starship at the Smallsat Symposium earlier this month in Silicon Valley.
“We’ve seen super-heavy launch vehicles arrive at the pad, which is super awesome, but I would remind everybody that they’re great for particular purposes, but they don’t solve every problem,” Peter Beck, CEO of Rocket Lab, said in a keynote address at the conference.
SpaceX rideshare missions, he argued, did not kill off all small launch vehicles, citing the growing demand his company has seen for Electron. “Fundamentally, there’s different requirements for different things,” he said, with small launchers tailored for spacecraft that need to go to specific orbits at specific times.
“I don’t subscribe to the view that they destroy all launch all down the chain,” he said of vehicles like Starship, comparing it to an Airbus 380 and Electron to a private jet. “They both have distinct purposes and needs, and one doesn’t replace the other.”
During a panel later in the day, executives from other small launcher companies agreed. “The size of the vehicle is also very important for rapid response,” said Stella Guillen, chief commercial officer of Isar Aerospace, a German company nearing the first launch of its Spectrum rocket. “I think the class where Spectrum is is very good for producing it fast and being able to turn it around and launch fast.”
| “That would be true if cheap launch existed, but there’s no such thing,” said van den Dries, arguing that SpaceX has kept increasing launch prices for Falcon 9 and could do the same for Starship. |
“Nobody knows what will happen, but I think one thing for sure is that SpaceX and Blue Origin will use their big rockets to deploy their own constellations,” said Marino Fragnito, chief commercial officer and launch services director at Avio, which produces the Vega C. “Part of the market will be auto-generated by themselves.” (Blue Origin has not announced plans for a satellite constellation of its own but has contracts to launch part of Amazon’s Project Kuiper constellation.)
“Our launcher, Vega C, we cover maybe 99% of satellites in LEO,” he said. Vega C has a capacity of about 3,300 kilograms to LEO and 2,300 kilograms to sun-synchronous orbits. “Why should we build a bigger rocket that is probably more expensive if we don’t capture any market share?”
Another skeptic about Starship’s influence is Teun van den Dries, co-founder and CEO of Karman+, a startup that announced last week it raised $20 million in seed funding. Karman+ is an asteroid mining company, with ambitions to go to carbonaceous asteroids and gather materials like hydrated clays there that can then be processed to extract water, using very-low-cost spacecraft.
That water could be used as fuel, except that most satellites don’t use water, or the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen that could be created from it, as fuel for on-orbit operations. In the near term, Karman+ plans to be its own customer for those materials using the water as fuel for its own spacecraft that can extend the lives of other satellites.
“The missions that we're seeing right now, especially for GEO operators looking at life extension, is this grappling architecture where you become effectively a jet pack bolted on to their spacecraft, doing station keeping for them,” he said in an interview. That’s an approach SpaceLogistics, a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman, is doing today to extend the lives of GEO communications satellites.
But couldn’t a Starship launch similar servicing spacecraft for another company, or even new GEO satellites, cheaper than the costs of mining asteroids for water to refuel the Karman+ spacecraft? Van den Dries disagreed.
“That would be true if cheap launch existed, but there’s no such thing,” he said, arguing that SpaceX has kept increasing launch prices for Falcon 9 and could do the same for Starship. Moreover, Starship requires refueling even for missions to GEO.
“We have an order of magnitude cost difference in our benefit because of the refueling architecture that is, in a GEO configuration impossible, to beat,” he said.
Another issue people raise about Starship is designing systems that are reliant on launching on that rocket and would be too big, or too expensive, to launch on other vehicles if Starship for some reason was not available.
Lordos said at the AAAS meeting that he was not concerned. “We are, one way or another, moving to a different age where mass is no longer a constraint,” he said. “Let’s say that Starship doesn't succeed. They have already prompted competition.”
He said that, in the case of the Pale Red Dot architecture, the habitat modules could be redesigned to fly on a different super-heavy rocket. “It’s not as great, but it will still work.”
Or, as he put it in his talk, “Go big or stay home.”
Note: we are now moderating comments. There will be a delay in posting comments and no guarantee that all submitted comments will be posted.