SpaceX's Starship makes orbit

Elon Musk's rocket company achieved a key milestone in its Starship development program this week

I remember attending the reveal of the original Starship ‘prototype’ in Boca Chica, Texas in 2019, when it was little more than a very shiny and very roughshod gigantic grain silo. The sheer scale of it was impressive, even if the fit and finish was not, but it was a long way away from space. Today, a third Starship test flight achieved a number of SpaceX’s advanced goals for the program, including getting to space and making it to orbit.

Onward to Mars?

Not quite yet — but a smooth launch, booster separation, booster re-entry and extended Starship flight actually in space means that SpaceX is much closer than it’s ever been to delivering on a number of its founder’s bolder promises, including reaching Mars, and also providing NASA with human transportation capabilities to the moon and its orbit.

This is the best evidence we’ve seen yet that SpaceX will make good on its mission and more ambitious goals, with the company acing a number of bonus objectives this time around, too, including opening and closing the payload doors in space (key for when it will eventually deploy customer satellites and other cargo) and a successful re-entry burn. It did end in a fireball, but at this stage, the spacecraft surviving intact would be pure gravy.

Why does any of this matter? Because Starship isn’t just a new generation of launch vehicle more or less in line with SpaceX’s existing Falcon and Falcon Heavy vehicles; it’s much more, since it’s intended to be fully reusable more or less like an airliner for space, instead of either single use like traditional rockets, or reusable with many, many caveats like the existing Falcon series.

Musk envisions Starship flying as often as multiple times daily in the future, in a fully reusable configuration for both the Super Heavy booster that powers its ascent out of Earth’s atmosphere, and the upper stage Starship itself that will be transport cargo and people to and from orbit, the moon, and eventually Mars.

Starship could also unlock a major paradigm shift in travel right here at home, too — Elon has talked about using it for point-to-point travel, between spaceports placed near major hubs globally. That would cut down travel times between basically any point in the world to any other point to within spitting distance of 30 minutes.

As with most of his timelines, Elon really undershot with his earlier predictions of when Starship would hit this milestone — but it’s starting to feel real, and the massive step change that could result if he pulls this off kinda does, too.