SpaceX’s Starship megarocket could take off in 2025.
The 400-foot-tall (122-meter) Starship is the largest and strongest rocket ever built, and is designed to be completely and temporarily reusable. SpaceX believes this combination of strength and power is a breakthrough that will enable humanity to achieve many feats in spaceflight, including the colonization of Mars, a long-held dream of the company’s founder and CEO, Elon. Musk.
That vision may become clearer over the next 12 months or so, for Starship appears poised to make a big leap in 2025.
Starship has launched six times to date — twice in 2023 and four times in 2024.
The vehicle made good progress on those checkout flights, all conducted from SpaceX’s Starbase site in south Texas. Of the three most recent, for example, any of Starship’s parts (the Super Heavy booster and the 50m-tall upper-level spacecraft, called Starship or simply Ship) survived the adventure to the bottom in one piece. of the Earth. Training
Related: What’s next for SpaceX’s spacecraft after its sixth successful test flight?
And on Flight 5, unveiled Oct. 13, Starbase’s launch tower pulled the returning Super Heavy with its “wand” arms, demonstrating the recovery strategy SpaceX plans to use on any of the stages of the spacecraft’s operational missions.
Such tower catches could become a relatively common sight in 2025. SpaceX has applied to increase the number of permitted Starship liftoffs from Starbase fivefold in the coming year, to 25 — and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has given its preliminary blessing.
A draft environmental assessment released by the FAA in November approves not just the 25 Starship launches from Starbase but 50 tower catches at the site as well — 25 of Super Heavy and 25 of Ship. SpaceX also already has an FAA license for the Starship Flight 7 launch, which could occur in early to mid-January.
Such a surge would be huge for SpaceX, whose rocket-development strategy centers on flying, iterating and then flying again. And there’s no reason to think that goal is out of reach; after all, the company has launched more than 130 orbital missions in 2024, the vast majority of them with its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.
“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that the schedule they work by is unprecedented,” astrophysicist Ehud Behar, a professor at the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology, told Space.com.
And 25 Starship flights per year is far from the horizon goal; the company plans to continue ramping up the rate in 2026 and beyond.
“Elon would say next year he would love for us to do 25 missions a year, and in the next few years, 100,” Kathy Lueders, SpaceX’s general manager of Starbase operations, said in November at the SpaceX National Convention. Mexican Space Agency. Activity conference, according to Gizmodo “He said, ‘Kathy, I’d love to post it several times a day. ‘”
Not all of these future missions will fly from Starbase: SpaceX also plans to launch Starship from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, which already hosts liftoffs of the company’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.
SpaceX already has some customers lined up for Starship, chief among them NASA, which tapped the megarocket to be the first crewed lander for its Artemis program of moon exploration.
If all goes according to plan, Starship’s upper stage will put NASA astronauts down near the moon’s south pole on the Artemis 3 mission, which is currently slated to lift off in mid-2027.
That schedule has been delayed several times, most recently due to disruption in NASA’s Orion team capsule. (The Artemis 3 plan calls for astronauts to leave Earth aboard Orion, NASA’s Space Launch System rocket. In lunar orbit, Orion will encounter a modified upper stage spacecraft, which will carry astronauts to the surface of the moon. )
It’s unclear whether Artemis 3 will be airworthy in 2027, Behar said, given NASA’s budget constraints and the general difficulty of crewed missions, especially when they involve an entirely new spaceflight system. (How many successful uncrewed Starship flights will NASA need before putting its astronauts aboard the vehicle?)
But he’s confident that Starship will then be in a position to take on more prosaic roles in spaceflight.
“I think Starship, as a satellite launcher, is on the right track,” Behar said. “I don’t see why they wouldn’t respect the schedule. “
Related: NASA’s Artemis Program: Everything you need to know
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Starship will get even bigger and more powerful over time, according to SpaceX.
“With a few planned upgrades, Starship will have three times the thrust [at liftoff] of Saturn V at 10,000 metric tons of thrust, plus the added benefit of full reusability,” SpaceX manufacturing engineering manager Jessica Anderson said during the webcast of Starship’s sixth test flight, which occurred on Nov. 19.
“Starship 2 will be capable of carrying more than 100 tons to orbit, and Starship 3 will be able to lift more than 200 tons to orbit,” she added. “The amount of mass we’re able to launch per rocket is crucial to creating a self-sustaining city on Mars.”
Since Starship is completely reusable, the vehicle could deliver such powers for just $2 million to $3 million per flight, Musk said. This would be incredibly cheap; SpaceX is recently selling Falcon nine missions for around $67 million.
These planned spacecraft numbers may suit Mars colonization, but the megarocket may also end up wearing down many missions closer to home. SpaceX plans to build its entire Starlink broadband megaconstellation using Starship, and consumers will likely find ways to take advantage of the vehicle as well, Behar said.
“I think we’ve learned the lesson that, if technology is developed and affordable, there will be uses for it,” he said.
“For people, that area is a place; it’s actually not just one thing,” Behar added. “There are a lot of things that can be done in the area, from creating new fabrics to creating medicines. Right now, the threshold to get there is very expensive. “
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Michael Wall is a senior space editor at Space. com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight, and military space, but is known for dabbling in the field of space art. His book about the search for extraterrestrial life, “Out There,” was published on November 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph. D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in clinical writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest assignment is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.
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